Why I’m still skeptical about ALTO’s HSR project

A reality check and a plea for transparency.

In its budget, the Canadian government announced that it is targeting 2030 to put the shovels in the ground on the Alto HSR project between Toronto and Québec. I’m skeptical.

My skepticism isn’t about all previous failed attempts. In the past, we famously only reached the business case stage (but this time we are truly moving into a funded development phase. My doubt isn’t solely because of the globally unusual 3P formula under which the project is being developed, which results from a very weak public sector’s capacity for public works. The main reason I’m expressing my skepticism now, especially regarding the tentative 2030 construction start date, is that I don’t see Alto taking the necessary planning and public engagement steps that I’ve seen in countries that have developed HSR so far.

When building infrastructure, pure engineering is the easy part. Truly. With adequate resources and a clear scope, skilled design professionals can produce detailed engineering documents ready for procurement or construction within months. When I worked as an architect, we could develop a very preliminary design for a building in just a couple of weeks, sometimes even less. Our interactions with other design specialists, such as MEP and structural engineers, were always smooth and straightforward. The time-consuming and challenging part was not about pure design, but about finding an acceptable compromise with the broader “stakeholders.” First, the client, who sometimes has no clear understanding of the scope, is internally conflicted (if only I could tell you about that terrible bickering couple…), or refuses to understand or acknowledge the trade-offs of specific design choices. Then there’s the even more time-consuming process of dealing with third parties, particularly the permitting authorities (cry “Sovrintendenza” out loud if you want to scare an Italian architect). Our lack of time to do actual design was never the bottleneck. Building consensus around a shared solution among all these parties through our technically informed mediation is what 90% of our job was about.

Now, multiply this exponentially to get a sense of what designing an HSR line entails. It requires a massive effort to onboard stakeholders and build lasting consensus. The client isn’t just an undecided individual or a bickering couple, but an entire client-system, to borrow Giandomenico Majone’s phrase — a client-system as complex as a country, represented through its Government and Parliament, influenced by public opinion, which is not always fully aware of the trade-offs involved in building such infrastructure. Then, you’ll need to bring on board the powerful Daimyos of Canada—the CNs, the CPs, the Hydros, and the Provincial Governments—as well as less influential groups like downtown business interests, municipal governments, and First Nations. They may all have vastly different ideas about what constitutes the “best project” and how to balance priorities during planning and design. And, of course, there are the local people — especially those whose daily lives will be negatively impacted by this large-scale infrastructure. They are likely to oppose the fact that Alto will need to cut trees near their homes, close railway crossings they’ve used forever, demolish neighbours’ houses, spoil views with overhead wires or towering noise barriers, and endure years of construction noise. The media will amplify these voices in their narratives, once the project shifts from the feel-good images of smiling or reflective people looking out of a zipping high-speed train’s window (“https://www.altotrain.ca/en/public-engagement”) into the harsh reality of infrastructure built with geometry, physics, steel, concrete, gravel, and all the other unpleasantness of the material world.

This landscaped bike path is mere meters from the tracks of the St-Jérôme line, one of the potential corridors for HSR from Québec into Montréal. If converted from a primitive railway to modern HSR standards, it will look completely different. And many people won’t like it.

To build consensus around a preferred design solution from among the almost infinite possibilities, you will have to tell stakeholders, including the broader public, exactly what you’d like to do. Where the noise barriers are going to be. Which roads are you going to close. Which houses you are going to demolish. Which communities you are going to disrupt and how you plan to mitigate for it. It doesn’t need to be a CAHSR-style endless EIR process that empowers the most obnoxious NIMBYs or rent-extraction from bad-faith third parties. Still, you need something like the French Public Debate, the Italian Conference of Services, or the State-Region Conference, or any other disclosure and discussion process. Alto is a generational project for Canada. It will shape the growth and urbanism of eastern Canada for the next century. Everyone will want to have a say in how it’s done. It’s inevitable and necessary. There is no way to make key design decisions with such a significant impact on so many different actors without a statutory process for sharing information, developing working hypotheses, and discussing them openly with relevant stakeholders and the broader public. You cannot achieve consensus through the sole force of Public Relations and nice corporate brochures with smiling people and zero actual content. “Selling” infrastructure is highly political; it isn’t marketing. And the bigger the infrastructure, the higher the political stakes are.

Circling back, I remain skeptical about the current deadline because reaching a broadly shared design solution is complex, lengthy, and often conflictual, as countless examples show, such as the derailment of the Turin-Lyon HS line planning under intense public opposition in 2006, which delayed the project by at least a decade. However, it’s an unavoidable process that must occur openly. The secretive project management style typical of Canada does not suit this kind of high-profile, high-impact infrastructure. If the federal government believes it can manage the construction of an HSR as it does a remote pipeline—with limited stakeholders and out of the public eye—then I have a bridge to sell them. Canada’s federal government isn’t accustomed to undertaking large-scale public works on this scale, not in modern times or in urban areas. I’m not sure they fully understand the complexity of what they’re undertaking or how challenging it will be to build a coalition capable of ensuring the project’s longevity beyond a single legislative term. Hopefully, they realize that transparency, rather than polished messaging, is more effective for building that coalition if they want Alto to be seen as a genuine, well-thought-out project ready for prime time rather than a mere corporate website with vague facts.