CPCS quantifies the tourism upside of Canada’s high-speed rail corridor
When Alto needed to answer a foundational question about Canada’s proposed high-speed rail network, it turned to CPCS, a Canadian-founded global infrastructure advisory firm with over 30 years of experience advising governments and private sector clients on major infrastructure decisions.
Prepared for Alto, the report Tourism in the Alto Corridor: Current Conditions and Potential Impacts, by CPCS in association with HDR, quantifies how high-speed rail (HSR) along the Toronto–Québec City corridor could reshape travel behavior, redirect visitor flows, and unlock new economic activity along the country’s most-traveled corridor.
Biggest takeaways:
- Economic outcomes depend strongly on the level of corridor-wide policy coordination and destination readiness.
- Under a medium policy coordination scenario, Canada’s tourism industry along the corridor could generate approximately $1 billion in additional annual gross domestic product (GDP) and support more than 11,500 jobs.
Why Alto came to CPCS
For a project of this scale, Alto needed an independent, third-party assessment of the tourism and economic impact of its proposed high-speed rail project.
That mandate played to CPCS’s core strength: combining transportation economics, global benchmarking, and corridor-level impact analysis to translate infrastructure decisions into measurable economic outcomes.
The CPCS approach: from baseline to economic impact
Rather than starting from estimates, the CPCS team started from reality.
The team built a baseline profile of tourism in six census metropolitan areas (CMAs) along the corridor — Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa-Gatineau, Montréal, Trois-Rivières, and Québec City —drawing on Statistics Canada’s National Travel Survey and Visitor Travel Survey.
From there, CPCS layered in:
- International case study evidence from mature HSR markets, adapted to the Alto corridor, to inform three illustrative scenarios.
- New travel behaviours under each scenario including shifts in day trips, length of overnight stays, visitor volumes, and daily spending.
- New tourism spending impacts as a result of new travel patterns.
- Scenario modelling of GDP and job impacts using Statistics Canada Input-Output Multipliers.
What CPCS found: a corridor that already attracts significant portion of Canada’s domestic and international tourists
The Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa-Gatineau, Montréal, Trois-Rivières, and Québec City CMAs:
- Attract more than 20% of domestic visitors
- Attract over 40% of international tourists
- Generate more than $31 billion in annual visitor spending
Total population, total employment, and number of businesses associated with the tourism industry in CMAs along the Alto corridor.
A market structurally constrained by the car
Despite that scale, 85% to 98% of domestic tourism trips in the corridor are made by personal vehicle. To support a growing tourism sector, rail can move much larger numbers of people, faster, and with a lower environmental footprint.
Primary trip mode – Domestic visitors
A multi-billion opportunity, under the right conditions
With a highly coordinated tourism and transportation offer, the corridor can improve its attractivity as a tourism destination, reaping the economic benefits from higher per-trip visitor spending, driven by longer stays and multi-city itineraries.
Under a low coordination with limited complementary tourism offers, most economic gains would accrue to major urban centres where HSR could support:
- ~$177 million in additional annual GDP
- More than 2,000 new jobs
Under a medium coordination scenario between rail operations and tourism stakeholders and adequate last-mile connections, CPCS estimates the corridor could generate:
- ~$1 billion in additional annual GDP
- More than 11,500 new jobs
Under a high coordination scenario, benefits would be shared across the corridor and help tap into out of corridor travellers and encourage longer stays, contributing an additional
- ~$3.9 billion in additional annual GDP
- More than 43,000 new jobs
Additional annual tourism spending under policy scenarios with Alto service
Infrastructure as a platform for economic transformation
For CPCS, the Alto study is part of a broader body of work shaping how Canada thinks about major infrastructure. Not as isolated assets, but as platforms that connect markets, redistribute economic activity, and enable system-level change.
As Alto noted in its own communications: “Towns along the route can tap into the influx of tourism by connecting to the train through inter-modality, making it easier for people to keep traveling beyond the main hubs.”
Why this matters for Canadian decision-makers
HSR could unlock significant benefits for Canada’s tourism sector beyond major cities, but targeted policy action is needed to tap into secondary markets. Coordinated action can help distribute benefits across the cities served by Alto; limited coordination may constrain overall gains and reinforce concentration in a handful of urban centres. The CPCS study gives decision-makers something they’ve previously lacked: a defensible, data-driven view of what coordinated investment could unlock.
For governments, the implications are strategic:
- Tourism policy and transportation policy need to be coordinated, not parallel.
- Regional and municipal tourism organizations are critical multipliers, not afterthoughts.
- The economic case for HSR extends well beyond mobility into competitiveness and regional development.
About the study
“Tourism in the Alto Corridor: Current Conditions and Potential Impacts” was prepared by CPCS for Alto and released in June 2026. It combines baseline tourism analysis, international benchmarking, and scenario modelling to estimate the order-of-magnitude economic impacts of high-speed rail on Canada’s Toronto–Québec City corridor.
Download full report: https://www.altotrain.ca/sites/default/files/2026-06/202606-alto-tourism-impacts_en.pdf
About CPCS
CPCS is an independent, employee-owned management consulting firm specializing in transportation, energy, and infrastructure. Founded in Canada in 1996, CPCS brings over 30 years of experience advising public and private sector clients across the full lifecycle of infrastructure from strategy and policy to delivery and operations.
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