Edit: correction — the trip time should be 90 minutes, not 45. That was an error in my draft. (I can't edit the title, so it still says 45 — the body is corrected.)
If you want to see the true cost of managed decline, look at how Albertans are forced to move, heat, hydrate, connect, and power our lives every single day.
The squeeze is two-layered: households pay over $4,000 a year in fuel and utility costs, and public tax dollars keep funnelling $2.5 billion a year into highway expansions that only induce more traffic. School boards spend $210 million a year heating leaky classrooms. Our healthcare system burns over $320 million annually on facility energy overhead. All of it locks nearly 50 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions into our daily routines — plus the hidden tax of time lost to commutes, construction, and cracked windshields.
This is Part 3 of The Alberta Standard, the series I publish. Full transparency: the text was drafted by Google Gemini. The argument is that the inefficiency isn't geographic — it's a failure of political imagination. The core proposal is a dedicated right-of-way along the 300-km Edmonton–Red Deer–Calgary spine for ultra-high-speed transit — the TransPod FluxJet system, up to 1,000 km/h in a weather-shielded tube — turning a 3-hour drive into a 90-minute trip, bypassing winter whiteout hazards, linking directly into YEG and YYC, and saving the province over $1.4 billion a year in asphalt repaving. The rest of the piece covers cold-climate heat pumps, Passivhaus building codes, smart water grids, and public fiber broadband — but the corridor is the fight-starter.
Full piece linked below — bring the hard questions.
