The train from Paris to Marseille takes just over 3 hours:
To drive this same distance, it would take just over 8 hours:
So unless you had a very specific reason, I don't know why you'd ever want to drive this route. I certainly hate long drives and would avoid this at all costs.
On a related note, the Canadian government announced this week that it will actually be moving forward with a high-speed train linking Québec City to Toronto, stopping in Peterborough, Ottawa, Montréal, Trois-Rivières, and Laval. And unlike previous announcements, it will actually go pretty fast -- upwards of 300 km/h, which is comparable to what the TGV does on the above route.
There are three consortia currently competing for this contract, but apparently the federal government has already chosen a winning bidder. An announcement is expected next month. At the same time, the project office owns all of the bids, and so there's a chance that elements from each of them could be used in the final project.
According to official messaging, the design alone is expected to take some 4 to 5 years, which is an eternity and way too long. But at least we seem to be moving forward. This rail link is a no brainer. It will compress the geography of an importantly bilingual corridor with nearly 20 million people -- about half the population of Canada! It's our megalopolis.
Now we just need to move forward with urgency and with an unwavering commitment to creating the best high-speed rail service in the world. Let's not accept mediocrity. And let's not cancel it once we've already sunk millions into it. That would be a terrible outcome for such an obviously important nation-building project.
LFG.
Well here are some interesting figures (via MIT Technology Review):
In the past two decades, about 400 million people moved into China's cities -- so more than the entire population of the United States
By 2035, about 70% of China's entire population is expected to be urban (up from 60% today and up from 30% two decades ago)
To accommodate this scale of growth, China's national urban development approach has shifted to something that now revolves around city clusters, or megalopolises (term coined by French geographer Jean Gottmann back in the 1950s to describe the Boston-Washington corridor in the Northeastern US)
By 2035, there are expected to be five major city clusters (see above)
One of the reasons for this is to improve cooperation across the various clusters -- less competition and less redundancy
But it's also about creating smaller more manageable cities -- is this what one needs to do after a certain scale, go polycentric?
To service these clusters, China is rolling out a network of 16 new high-speed rail lines
By 2035, China expects to have 200,000 kilometers of rail, with a third of it being high-speed -- assuming this happens, China will be home to 60% of the world's high-speed rail coverage
Current cost estimates for the construction of this network comes out to about US$150 million per kilometer
1-2-3 Rule: The plan is that everyone should be able to get around a city within 1 hour; a city cluster within 2 hours; and travel between the country's clusters inside of 3 hours
China is building.
During the recent election here in Toronto, mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat raised the idea of this city region, maybe, becoming its own province. It wasn’t the first time this idea has been floated, but it once again didn’t stick.
Earlier this week, Richard Florida spoke at the Urban Land Institute’s Toronto symposium and he brought up a similar issue: Toronto is a ‘city state’ and needs to start acting like it. Here is an excerpt from a recent Star article about his talk:
He also noted that in terms of total economic output, the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] — he included the Golden Horseshoe — is responsible for about “$700 billion” (U.S) in economic output.
“Which means our … region is equivalent to that of Sweden. So we are a city state, a mega region.”
He later added: “we are a powerful global city with lots of assets to build on,” he said.
But he went on to say that despite all of these successes there’s a “sense that something is amiss, something is wrong.”
I have long supported the notion that city regions need to see and think of themselves as one united and contiguous economic landscape. In our case, it is not about, for instance, Hamilton vs. Toronto. This is about our entire region vs. New York or Singapore (a city-state) or the Pearl River Delta megalopolis.
The headlines coming out of Amazon’s recent announcement are clear: In Superstar Cities, the Rich Get Richer, and They Get Amazon. This is winner-take-all urbanism where you need to be a “superstar” in order to compete.