October 13, 2011

Column | Korky Koroluk

Architects propose high speed rail in Great Lakes region

Two big, important ideas intersected last week at the global green-building conference in Toronto. Neither was new, although I’d never seen them bundled together.

One was for a high-speed rail system linking metro areas in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River region. The other was for a bi-national agreement treating that same huge area as an economic unit.

Several years ago, the Brookings Institution, began working on the idea of creating a single economic unit out of the eight states and two provinces bordering the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, and it published several papers on the subject. Even then, the idea wasn’t new; it had been suggested several times since the end of the Second World War, although it never gained any political traction.

High-speed rail, of course, has often been suggested for the corridor between Quebec City and Windsor, but no one has shown the political will to make it a reality.

High-speed rail (HSR) was also an important part of the vision President Barack Obama brought to office, and, indeed, there have been bits and pieces of HSR begun, but the big idea has foundered on the rocks of a toxic political climate in which politicians seem unable to agree even upon the time of day.

Now a U.S. architectural firm, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, of Chicago, has come up with an HSR proposal that helps flesh out the idea of a trans-border super region.

The proposal calls for the two countries to “re-imagine” the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence area as a shared space in which they would work together to protect, not only the waterways, but to ease traffic congestion, promote tourism, and to use an HSR system as the catalyst to develop new economic ventures. As one Skidmore, Owings executive said, the Great Lakes isn’t “a collection of lakes that divides two countries; it is a collection of lakes that should unite the two countries.”

Canadians have been part of the idea’s evolution. The Mowat Centre at the University of Toronto, has been co-operating with the Bookings people as the study moved ahead. They have, for example, talked to about 250 businesses, governments and community leaders, and the results of those talks are being presented this week at a meeting in Detroit.

Josh Hjartson, the policy director at the Mowat Centre, noted in a recent article that the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence area is home to more than 105 million people. As a whole, he wrote, the region generated $4.6 trillion in economic output in 2009, making it one of the largest economies in the world More than $4 billion worth of goods and services cross the U.S.-Canada border every day, with $365 million of that at the Windsor-Detroit crossing. The area accounts for almost 75 per cent of Canadian manufacturing output and a third of total U.S. manufacturing. Twenty of the top 100 research universities in the world are located in the area.

An HSR system would provide an important part of the area’s shared infrastructure. As envisaged by Skidmore, Owens, it would provide a fast link from Quebec City, through Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, to Detroit and Chicago, with onward connections to west, south and southeast. It would also link Toronto and New York through Hamilton and Buffalo, and Chicago and New York through Toledo and Cleveland.

So there you have it: Two big ideas, which, taken together could have immense economic benefits that would provide stimulus for the entire North American economy, and, by extension, the world economy.

Skidmore, Owings executive Philip Enquist has suggested that it is time to imagine that the borders in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence area don’t exist. Perhaps he’s right.

It’s something that deserves careful thought and encouragement.

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com

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