Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road

[tomh009]

In particular, for the most recent year shown, for some reason 2008, 12 years ago, so I don’t know what happened to the last 12 years’ data, but note these numbers:

Total trade: 22,287
Rail: 3,805
Road: 13,503

What is going on here? You might be able to convince me that it’s harder than it looks to put stuff going from, say, Waterloo to Toronto on a train rather than on the 401. But it is absolutely inconceivable that it makes sense from a broad perspective to move stuff from Mexico, through the United States, to Canada, on a truck. That’s absurd. Clearly, road transport is massively subsidized, because those importers and exporters are not choosing roads because they just hate trains: they’re choosing the most cost effective for their operations.

For automotive, which is a huge chunk of the trade, it's almost certainly JIT, which is quite hard to do (in North America) by rail today.

For other things, it depends also on rail cost (multiple rail lines involved), the speed of delivery (ditto), the available capacity, and the available rail connections. The rail network coverage in North America really is quite pathetic.