This week VIA Rail has been making its mark on the world stage. On September 22, at the 2014 Canadian Rail Summit, Marc Beaulieu, Regional General Manager, East and Chief of Transportation, and Denis Pinsonneault, Chief Customer Experience & Operating Officer spoke about our safety management system as well as some new technology being introduced at VIA Rail to better communicate train status with our passengers. Meanwhile, as part of the United Nations’ Climate Summit 2014, I participated in a conference about sustainable travel organized by the International Union of Railways (UIC). Although VIA Rail represented the smallest passenger rail company on the panel, our achievements were recognized for their practical relevance and real impacts.
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Yves Desjardins-Siciliano, just to the right of the speaker, sits on a panel discussion at the UIC conference on sustainable travel.
On the global market, VIA Rail plays a small, but important, role. We are Canada’s only national passenger rail carrier, a Crown corporation, and a proud provider of environmentally-friendly travel. Our designation as a “green travel” choice is not simply a logo on our trains, it’s a badge of honour we work at earning every day in everything we do.
Over the past few years, thanks to the $1 billion investment by the Government of Canada, we have overhauled our locomotives and re-organized our fleet to improve efficiency. We are deploying in-house built and patented technology to assist our locomotive engineers in managing our fuel consumption. We have met or exceeded the rail industry, the Canadian and the global commitments to GHG emission reductions ahead of schedule. In real terms, we have reduced our overall fuel consumption (and consequently our GHG emissions) by 20% since 2009… and we continue to look for ways to reduce our carbon footprint.
However, sustainability is not defined by reducing one’s carbon footprint. True sustainable mobility must be considered a primary source of economic and social development for our communities and our country. Providing smarter ways to move people and making rail travel accessible and affordable will get more people to leave their cars at home and take the train. In themselves, they will provide prosperity and the resulting reduction of GHG emissions will be their positive by-product.
Our goal at VIA Rail is to make the train your best travel option; by listening to our customers and improving our service, by re-evaluating and improving our train schedules and by linking to other transport companies to create a seamless travel experience. Facilitating sustainable mobility is about getting people to use public transport.
As the Mayor of Bogota famously said:
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”
All of us at VIA Rail and we trust, our regular passengers, share this view.
