In 1950, a passenger rail trip from Toronto to Vancouver, through the “majestic Canadian Rockies in daylight,” would take 83 hours and 45 minutes.
That’s according to an official timetable released by CN Rail, which, along with CP Rail, used to operate both passenger and freight trains across the country.
Today, someone who books the same trip on “The Canadian” — the flagship train operated by Via Rail — will see an estimated travel time of 97 hours and 15 minutes.
So in 70 years, as trips by planes and cars have gotten faster, the world-famous transcontinental rail trip on Canadian railroads — a trip featured on Canada’s $10 bill — has become 14 hours slower.
If you go back further in time, the scheduled trip from Toronto to Vancouver is about nine hours slower today than it was under CP Rail some 100 years ago.
And that’s if you’re lucky.
The reality — according to frequent rail travellers, employees and even Via Rail itself — is that the on-time performance of The Canadian has gotten so “terrible” that Via can no longer offer viable transportation options for residents in many regions of Canada.
These regions include major cities with Via Rail stations such as Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton and Vancouver.
WATCH: Via Rail says delays on its Western Canadian trains are an international ’embarrassment.’ Megan Robinson reports.
Excessive delays have left some Via Rail trains as many as 43 hours — nearly two days — behind schedule, with passengers immobilized on tracks for extended periods.
“So on one of the last trips I took, I just expected a 12-hour delay. That was just normal,” said David Androvich, a Manitoba-based airplane pilot who enjoys taking trips on The Canadian when he has time off.
CN owns most of the tracks used by Via Rail. This forces Via to negotiate access and schedules for its passenger trains and compete with freight trains that carry valuable merchandise.
Androvich said he tolerates the tardiness because he loves the experience aboard the transcontinental service. But he has observed that delays are becoming progressively worse.
Via Rail estimated that more than 90 per cent of trains on the transcontinental Canadian route were late in 2017, and about 70 per cent were late in the following year.
By 2019, Via Rail was warning passengers who booked trips online to expect delays on The Canadian and avoid making any time-sensitive plans on the day of their scheduled arrival, blaming traffic from freight trains for causing delays.
“The situation is a serious embarrassment for Canada’s reputation and the Canada brand, in North America and abroad,” the Crown corporation wrote in a planning report released in 2019.
“Travellers return home with the lasting impression [of] wondering how a G7 nation cannot operate its trains on time.”
The unreliable performance, combined with the elimination of a number of regional routes, has taken a toll on Via Rail’s ridership in recent decades as millions of Canadians have stopped taking the train. Over the past decade alone, Via estimates ridership decreased on The Canadian by about 10 per cent.
The delays also reflect “poorly on Canadian tourism itself,” as many passengers post abysmal online reviews about their experiences, said the report.
“I will never use this ‘service’ again,” said one of three highly critical online reviews, quoted in the Via Rail report.
“If there is an alternative, I’d suggest you consider it. It’s amazing that a first world country can have such totally unreliable trains.”
Another review described Via as a “nightmare of a railway” and added that ticket agents at the station can only “apologize and say it happens all the time.”
WATCH: How did Via Rail’s on-time performance get so bad?
The delays also cost taxpayers money.
In its latest corporate planning report from 2019, Via Rail said that revenues on The Canadian in 2018 decreased by about six per cent and spending increased by about six per cent due to the excessive delays that caused additional overtime costs and reduced ridership.
All of this increases the company’s deficit, which is ultimately absorbed by the Canadian government, Via Rail’s owner.
Meanwhile, annual ridership on all of Via Rail’s intercity trains has dropped from a peak of over eight million passengers, in 1981, to about 4.5 million, in recent years, according to the Crown corporation’s annual reports. Via Rail has warned in its reports that these trends could trigger further route cancellations and make the problem worse.
Via Rail recently eliminated two of its six weekly transcontinental Canadian trips between Toronto and Vancouver in 2018. In the same year, it added nine hours of padding onto the schedule of the remaining Canadian trips in order to improve their chances of being on time.
Via said in its 2019 corporate planning report that CN executives were the ones who proposed cancelling some of the weekly Toronto-Vancouver trips during a May 2018 meeting.
However, a few months later, Via said that CN officials agreed to a compromise that would maintain a return trip between Edmonton and Vancouver, while eliminating one weekly departure and arrival of The Canadian in Toronto.
Despite making these changes to accommodate CN, Via Rail said in its last annual report from 2018 that it was still facing “significant delays” on The Canadian.
Via Rail also said in its 2018 planning report that CN Rail freight traffic was responsible for 85 per cent of the delays on The Canadian since the private railway company owns most of the tracks and often requires the passenger trains to stand still on the tracks when freight trains — carrying cargo such as oil, grain, timber and other shipments — need to pass.
Travellers walk through the corridors of Union Station in Toronto, on Feb. 12, 2020, near the gate for Via Rail’s ‘The Canadian.’
Kurt Brownridge/Global News
Via and CN both declined interview requests, but told Global News in emails that they’ve been working to resolve their scheduling conflicts.
CN Rail, which was a former Crown corporation that benefitted from billions of dollars in subsidies, said it has recently invested billions of its own money over the past few years to improve and expand its infrastructure in western Canada. CN said that these investments would reduce some congestion and improve schedules for all of its customers, including Via Rail.
Delays on passenger railways aren’t just restricted to Canada. Conflicts between passenger and freight trains also affect many U.S. travellers.
In a recent report card, U.S. passenger rail company Amtrak gave CN a ‘D’ grade, second worst among railways that caused delays in 2018. But Amtrak said that CN’s performance has improved in recent months.
CN Rail told Global News that it balances the needs of passenger rail clients such as Via Rail and Amtrak with all of its other customers, who ship more than $250 billion in merchandise per year.
“CN works closely with Via to provide quality service and Via’s on-time performance on the busiest Quebec to Windsor corridor is consistent and pretty solid,” CN spokesman Alexandre Boulé told Global News in an email.
“We continue to discuss with Via adjustments for The Canadian to address operating challenges. Performance on this service is improving.”
Via Rail warns people who book trips online not to plan any transportation connections on the day of their scheduled arrival on The Canadian.
Screenshot from Via Rail website
Via Rail told Global News in an email that traffic has increased on railways because the Canadian economy has been doing well.
“This, amongst other factors, often has an impact on our on-time performance, which has oscillated between 66 and 73 per cent in the past three years,” said Via Rail spokesman Karl-Philip Marchand Giguere, referring to all of Via Rail’s routes, including its busiest corridor between Quebec City and Windsor.
He also noted that Via Rail’s on-time performance is over 97 per cent on the tracks that it owns, all portions within the corridor in Ontario and Quebec.
“As the track owner, CN will naturally favour its trains,” the Crown corporation wrote in its 2018 planning report. “As noted earlier, unlike elsewhere, passenger trains in Canada do not have operational priority. CN can essentially veto or unilaterally alter any request to improve passenger travel times and frequencies.”
As a result, Via Rail said CN has the power to charge more, to limit frequencies, to control travel times, to dictate schedules and deny any liability for causing delays.
This makes it harder for Via Rail to coax motorists to leave their cars behind and take the train, the Crown corporation added.
“Currently there are no repercussions for the host railway for such poor performance,” Via Rail wrote in the planning report. “As this issue will not likely be resolved through negotiations, Transport Canada must consider intervening and provide assistance in delivering an equitable arrangement.”
The Canadian, Via Rail’s flagship train, departs from Union Station in Toronto on Feb. 12, 2020.
Kurt Brownridge/Global News
Some sustainable transportation advocates have proposed new passenger rail legislation that would make it easier to punish freight railways for causing delays, giving passenger trains more control over their schedules and on-time performance.
Transport Minister Marc Garneau also declined an interview about this topic. But his department said in a statement that Via already has the tools to resolve conflicts with CN and that there’s no need for better legislation.
When asked about the government’s statements about not needing new legislation, Via Rail said it adapts to Transport Canada’s rules and recommendations.
“We can confirm that this specific legislation was discussed but not adopted,” Via Rail’s spokesman told Global News.
“We are, however, in constant communication with our government partners and do discuss our recommendations when relevant. As our shareholder, Transport Canada is also aware of our strategic discussions with current and potential partners.”
Via Rail has also warned that the poor performance on The Canadian serves as a “canary in the coal mine” for what is likely to happen on its busier routes, in Ontario and Quebec, if nothing is done.
Fabien Bisson, a longtime services manager who first started working for Via Rail in 1985, said he retired in 2020 because he was fed up with having to apologize to passengers about excessive delays on The Canadian — a route he worked on hundreds of times.
“I could have worked another 10 years, but I could not sustain [having to repeat] ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ constantly,” said Bisson, 55. “How do you go about this?”
Retired Via Rail services manager Fabien Bisson, featured here in his Winnipeg home on Feb. 10, 2020, used to entertain train passengers on board with his guitar.
Josh Arason/Global News
He said the only thing the Via Rail employees could offer passengers who were delayed on The Canadian was a meal, but no reimbursements or rebates.
Androvich, the pilot from Manitoba, said he once boarded a train that was eight hours behind schedule, and arrived at its destination in Edmonton 16 hours late. He said it forced him to rebook some travel plans and a car rental at his destination, costing him hundreds of dollars.
“I can understand a breakdown. I can understand irregularities. But for us to be held up on the tracks like that, given zero priority, you felt like you were being shuffled around like cattle basically,” he said, blaming freight train operators for causing the delays.
WATCH: Airplane pilot David Androvich speaks about lengthy delays he experienced as a passenger on Via Rail’s The Canadian.
Deteriorating infrastructure has also plagued Via Rail’s service in other regions, causing cancellations of routes on Vancouver Island as well as in Eastern Canada, with no signs of any new federal investments to restore service.
In its corporate reports, Via Rail has suggested that it wants to propose new regional trips between Atlantic Canadian cities such as Halifax and Moncton, but it’s unable to proceed without additional federal funding and improved access to railway infrastructure.
In 2018, Via Rail said in a report that it spent millions of dollars on track repairs in Atlantic Canada, following a 2014 agreement with CN about infrastructure work that was supposed to reduce trip times by 30 minutes. The improved trip times didn’t materialize, Via Rail said in the report.
The company has also warned of a threat to service on a route called The Ocean, between Montreal and Halifax, where Via relies on a loop near a container terminal in the Atlantic Canadian city to turn its trains around before returning westbound.
The federal government leases the land to Halterm, which has an agreement with Via Rail that allows it to use the tracks. The company has agreed to extend the access until November 2020, following mediation involving Transport Canada, Via said in its 2019 corporate planning report. But the Crown corporation has not yet announced any long-term solution that would allow it to continue its passenger rail service to Halifax.
University of Toronto engineering professor Shoshanna Saxe speaks to Global News about passenger trains and sustainable transportation.
Trevor Owens/Global News
Despite all of the challenges and risks Via has been highlighting, it has one proposal in the works that could dramatically change passenger rail service in Canada and provide an example to follow in other regions.
The plan calls for an estimated $4.4 billion to buy new tracks between Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City to improve the frequency and punctuality of service on Via Rail’s busiest routes.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has not yet given final approval to this “High-Frequency Rail” plan. But in a mandate letter, the prime minister asked Transport Minister Marc Garneau to work with Via Rail on the project as well as on improving access and affordability of trips to Canada’s national parks.
Transport Canada told Global News that it is assessing a range of options through initial discussions with Via Rail and Parks Canada, but that it does not yet have a timeline for implementation.
Some experts say proposals such as these are essential for promoting passenger rail as a means of transportation that slashes greenhouse gas pollution and moves Canada toward the carbon-neutral future in 2050 that Trudeau has promised.
“Many of us are interested in the environment, but when you’re pressed by other things, [such as when] you have needs you need to meet, you have something due for work, it’s hard to put the environment first,” said Shoshanna Saxe, an assistant professor of civil and mining engineering at the University of Toronto.
“So, if we want people to travel by train, it needs to be the easiest, cheapest, fastest option.”
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
