The Q400 aircraft flown by Porter Airlines out of the island airport may be producing more air pollution, and affecting more people than any other airport and any other aircraft in the country. These are the reasons:

• Aircraft emit four times the amount of carbon dioxide — the principal culprit behind global warming — per passenger kilometer traveled than private automobiles and ten times the amount emitted by diesel and electric trains.
  
  
• Short haul flights are the most polluting form of air travel. Most of the fuel is burned in getting the aircraft up to cruising altitudes and back down again.
  
  
• The Q400 aircraft flown by Porter Airlines is a turbo prop and marginally more economical on fuel than jets, but it can only fly short haul flights because the plane has a limited range.
  
  
• The Porter Q400 can only carry 70 passengers and most of the flights out of the island airport are only 30% full or less. This means more air pollution is created for every passenger kilometer flown by Porter aircraft than a jet with every seat filled with a passenger.
  
  
• The location of the island airport, adjacent to heavily populated neighbourhoods, means that thousands of people are affected by the air pollution produced by the aircraft.

There has to be a better way to transport people quickly and efficiently over short distances than by aircraft, and there is.

Europe is now criss-crossed by high speed train lines where trains travel at speeds up to 300 kilometers an hour. The record is 408 k/h. You can now travel from London to Paris by train, downtown to downtown, in 2 hours and 22 minutes. People travel by train between cities in Europe rather than by air. Some citizens groups, like Plane Stupid in Britain, advocate that short haul flights between cities be banned altogether and although it has not happened yet, more and more people are traveling by high speed train.

There is also an excellent Canadian solution. Bombardier, the same company that builds the Q400 aircraft and regional jets, is one of the leading designers and manufacturers of high speed trains. The company is a major competitor in Europe, where most of the high speed trains have being built, and recently Bombardier received a contract from China. Despite this, the company has not built one high speed train in Canada, their home country.

For decades in Canada there has been discussion about high speed trains along the Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Quebec City corridor and between the Alberta cities of Calgary and Edmonton, but as yet nothing has happened. The excuse that politicians use is that there is not enough population density in this country to make fast trains economical, but others deny the claim.

This is an excerpt from an article written by Dean Beeby published in The Toronto Star on October 15, 2007.

The benefits of high-speed rail service in the Toronto-Montreal corridor have been demonstrated repeatedly and it's time to stop studying the concept and make some decisions, says a new report for VIA Rail.

"The merits of high-speed passenger rail have been clearly established," says the report, obtained under the Access to Information Act.

"The question is not to ask whether it is worth government support, but rather where it stands with respect to competing mega-projects on the priority list of decision makers. More studies are of no use in this regard."

The August 14 report was prepared by a consulting engineer for VIA Rail's board of directors as they revisit the issue of a high-speed rail link connecting Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.

The document reviews seven major studies since 1984 that examined the feasibility of building the link at a cost ranging up to $11.1 billion. It also reports on a 2004 study looking at a similar link between Calgary and Edmonton, estimated to cost $3.4 billion.

The analysis, by Andre Gravelle of the firm UMA Engineering Ltd., notes that every Canadian study to date has concluded that significant government investment is required to build the infrastructure for high-speed rail, as has been the case in other such projects in Japan, France and elsewhere.

"These studies have also indicated that, like roads and airports, public investment is required to finance the construction of the required infrastructure."

But once the link between Montreal and Toronto is built, passenger volumes are forecast to be high enough to turn a profit for any firm operating the service.

Gravelle cites one 1991 study that indicated almost a third of high-speed rail passengers would be snatched from the airlines, and suggests the airline industry helped kill the proposal.

The last sentence explains why we do not have high speed trains in Canada. The airline industry has lobbied very hard against them because they fear they will lose a substantial part of their business.

Now, with the rising concern about global warming and air pollution, and with government surpluses, it is time that this political pressure stopped. If we are going to address the problems of pollution, we must end short haul flights and build high speed trains.

We have the company who can deliver the technology; we have the passengers who want to travel in a less polluting way; all we need is the political will to make this happen.