Jet fuel costs have nearly doubled since the US and Israel attacked Iran in February. This is obviously straining the overall economics of air travel, but the most impacted segment is the one that has always been tenuous: short-haul flights.
As I understand it, airlines generally prefer flights that are at least 2 hours long. Takeoff and landing consume the most fuel, and add a lot of wear and tear on a plane's equipment, so you want a long enough flight to amortize these costs. This is why for the 10 years spanning 2016 to 2026, US flights spanning less than 250 miles declined by 11% — the largest drop of any route length.
Now, in some cases, these short-haul flights are simply necessary loss leaders. For example, the flight from Milwaukee to Chicago is comically short. It's only about 70 miles, translating into an actual cruising time of around 20 minutes. But it's an important route for connecting passengers and the overall hub-and-spoke airline model.
This also makes it slightly harder for rail to effectively compete, because you need to solve for two clear passenger demands (again, assuming they're connecting): (1) people leaving Milwaukee will want to check their bags at the point of departure and (2) they don't want to arrive downtown, they want to arrive at the airport for their connecting flight.
That said, both of these wants are solvable. Hong Kong, for instance, allows in-town check-in where passengers drop their bags downtown before boarding the airport train. This is particularly convenient if you have to check out of your hotel and need to rid yourself of your luggage until you arrive at your final destination.
Very cool, so what's my point?
I mention all this because if short-haul flights are the flight segment that airlines don't love to operate, then it only strengthens the opportunity for high-speed rail to fill this gap in the market and become a seamless component of overall global mobility.
Here in Canada, the obvious opportunity is the Toronto-Montreal corridor. This is arguably the single best opportunity in North America when you consider its geography, construction viability (lots of undeveloped land to lay new track), and ability to replace short-haul flights. The broader Windsor-Quebec City corridor is also, as we know, the densest part of Canada with roughly 50% of our entire population.
But the overall opportunity is twofold: it will service origin-destination travel and it will connect Toronto and Montreal as global airport hubs. In fact, this is one of the stated reasons for why Air Canada joined the high-speed Alto project as a core consortium partner:
Connections with other modes of transport, such as rail or bus, are part of the solutions the company is already developing to offer the most relevant mobility option, responding in a sustainable way to the specific needs of each of its customers. In the longer term, the contribution of its expertise to the Cadence team will enable the airline to contribute to the harmonious integration of a future intercity rail network with existing airport hubs in the Quebec-Windsor corridor, for the benefit of all travellers.
Here's a specific example. Montreal largely serves as Canada's direct gateway to France's secondary cities, Francophone Africa, and the Mediterranean. So if you live in Toronto and want to fly to Marseille or Algiers or Mallorca, you are going to connect in Montreal (or connect across the Atlantic somewhere in Europe).
The multi-modal train option would include an in-town baggage check at Union Station in Toronto, a 3-hour train ride to Montreal, a seamless rail connection from Gare Centrale to YUL (with the REM airport train set to open in 2027), and then your flight to Europe or Africa.
The overall travel time should be comparable, except in the high-speed rail option you'd have more uninterrupted time to work, watch a movie, or sleep. And now that Air Canada gets to rid itself of its less profitable (or unprofitable?) short-haul flights, it should have the margin to aggressively market these tickets.
If this customer experience is designed properly — with one booking, competitive fares, clean transfers, and convenient baggage handling — it will quickly dominate the market. We know this because it's already working in Europe.
Now that we are expecting our first child, it appears to me like everyone around us is also having babies. This is almost certainly some kind of frequency bias at work, because I know that the fertility rate in Canada is officially ultra-low (the technical term) and falling globally. According to a recent Financial Times article by John Burn-Murdoch, two-thirds of the world's countries are now averaging a fertility rate below the replacement rate of 2.1. And in 66 countries, including Canada, the number is now closer to one than to two.
The obvious explanation for these falling rates is economic. Children are expensive and require a lot of work, which can make things difficult if you don't have a sufficient amount of money and/or time. This is why there's a strong inverse correlation between birth rates in the developed world and the developing world. Generally speaking, as a country develops, its birth rate drops.
One very specific reason for this appears to be the cost of housing. Indeed, studies have found causal links between rising housing costs and declining fertility rates. And this could be one of the reasons why there's often a spread between what women report as being their ideal number of children and the actual number they have. Perhaps they wanted more, but they didn't have that extra bedroom in the home.
On top of all this, there's a growing realization that there's another powerful force at work here: social media. Young people are increasingly spending their free time on their phones, forgoing in-person social gatherings and therefore missing out on opportunities to find people who would like to have sex with them. A compelling dataset for this hypothesis is the fact that while the number of children per mother seems to have stabilized in many countries, the overarching problem is that fewer women are becoming mothers in the first place.
Another dimension to social media is that it distorts our perception of the world. In the same FT article, demographer Lyman Stone is quoted as saying: "If you spend lots of time socialising with your peers in the real world, your standards [for a potential partner] are anchored in the real world. If you spend your time on Instagram, your standards are anchored to an artificial sense of what is normal.”
The world is increasingly viewing social media as this generation's smoking. However, it's unreasonable to think that smartphones and social media will ever go away. If you're trying to market anything today, that's where the eyeballs are. But I do think all of this only strengthens the case for us to build more walkable, urban, and inclusive neighbourhoods; cities where it's possible to walk to a corner store and bump into a neighbour along the way. Not only is human interaction nice, but it has been shown to increase social trust within communities.
In my view, car-oriented communities and self-driving cars that people will sit in for hours only exacerbate the problems of loneliness and social isolation. Cities are ultimately markets. They are labour markets and, yes, they are dating markets. The best cities reduce the friction around people doing business, trading goods and services, having fun, and meeting people. And it sounds like we could use more of that, not less, right now.
Cover photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash
Charts by John Burn-Murdoch via the Financial Times
This weekend I went on a long bike ride across the city with my friend Ev (who, by the way, just recently got married. Congratulations again to you both!). This was not a ride to pump my feeble Strava stats, but a ride to see and explore our wonderful city. And once again I was reminded that one of the easiest ways to fall in love with Toronto is to get on a bike and ride across it. Biking offers the best of both worlds: it's both fast and efficient, and it's granular. You can easily slow-ride through smaller spaces or quickly get off and walk them.
If I'm ever in the mood to elicit a shitstorm of negative reactions, all I have to do is go on Twitter and tweet something pithy about how much I love Toronto. I don't know why so many people seem to react like this, but I genuinely feel this way about our city. City-building is a slow process, but a spring ride after a cold winter will reveal to you all of the projects we've been working on quietly in the background: new streets, new mid-block connections, new public spaces, new businesses, and beautiful architecture.
Of course, not all of it is exceptional. At one point, Ev and I came across two newly constructed courtyards in the middle of large developments that will remain unnamed. One was beautiful and held the promise of businesses and F&B lining its edges, while the other was empty and grim looking. We then turned to each other and said: "Isn't it amazing how different these not-so-different courtyards are?"
But objectively, there's so much that we are getting right. New streets are now subdividing formerly large, unwalkable blocks. Existing neighbourhoods are growing, adding sustained urban vibrancy. New megaparks, like Biidaasige Park in the Port Lands, have already become fantastic, well-used spaces, setting the stage for new urban neighbourhoods to crop up all along their edges. And many of our new buildings are, quite frankly, gorgeous.
Most importantly, though, people are using these spaces — a lot. They're filling sidewalks, hanging out on patios, and cycling on new bike lanes. It's easy to focus on the things that Toronto isn't or doesn't have, just like it's personally easy to focus on what you may not be or have. Bringing positivity doesn't mean ignoring the challenges that our city is facing, but being grateful for everything we are achieving is a great way to reframe our perspectives toward an abundance mindset.
If you're looking for an easy way to do that, try getting on a bike on a beautiful sunny day.