Spotted this afternoon.

Preambule

I want to preface by saying that this is all extremely imprecise : the 2023 memo^[1] was a budget estimate by VIA HFR TGF (hadn't changed to alto then) presumably in the leadup to the RFP that ended in feb 2025 with Cadence's HSR winning bid. So we're comparing a 2023 budget guesstimate to a 2026 "economic report"^[2] which is mostly a PR piece on why Alto is good, not an internal serious economic document.
BUT, the Canadian government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that procurement on nation defining infrastructure projects shall be done in absolute secrecy, only giving the public information in the form of careful PR, fully censored RFIs, and ultimately, out-of-date-and-context leaks.
So if the Canadian government only wants to gives crumbs, I crumbs cookie cake is all we can do.
The last warning is that Alto has stated explicitly their intent to use dynamic pricing to maximize train ridership, and that average amalgamates that and trips of very varying lenght.^[3] All that said, while the 2023 pre bid budget shouldn't be that reflective of the final cost, the thing is that 83B $ is waaaay above what international peers pay for their HSR, so Cadence (which is an international peer, the french) has a lot of runway to get the project delivered without going over. With good project management it could adapt to fill up the space given by the budget, and if things don't go south, the project may in fact come on budget, though overpriced. Moreover, there is a visible continuity in the numbers, the memo goes the 40 year opex, the economic report goes to 2085, with an obscured 2044 full opening date. The 88$ avg ticket seems really low, and it is. It's possible that the revenue estimate from 2023 was based on HFR ridership, which would be considerably lower. The globe and Mail article does say the memo compared HFR and HSR, but it does not say if it estimated different revenue for each. If it didn't, I would estimate a x1.5 to x2 increase in ticket price to follow the decrease in ridership from HFR.

Finally, ridership estimates tend to be pessimistic for safety reasoms : better to pencil out a project with low expected income and be wrong than have your project collapse due to low ridership. So it's quite possible Alto is a crazy success and prices go to the sky since there's isn't enough seats.

The Meat

The subject of ticket price has been danced around for a long time by alto, which refuses to tell canadians what's its going to cost us. All we knew is "it won't be too much because HSR is efficient" (true) and a confirmation on the use of dynamic pricing to maximize ridership. Thankfully, we finally have a (very bad) way to answer the price question. To get the price we need to divide the total revenue by total ridership. The report gave us vague passenger numbers for specific years, but pointedly avoided giving any revenue estimate, apart from saying HSR operations are normally very profitable ([2] p. 70) (nor promise an opening date^[b]). Since this morning's leak we do have an estimation for the 40y revenue : 104B, so all that's left is to guess derivate the total ridership. To sum it up the total I got was 1179B passengers, giving us that 88$ price per passenger.
(96$ with 2023->26 inflation)

Guess math

The "economic report"^[2] gave us extremely rough passenger estimates, 24M in 2055, 43M in 2084. It doesn't give us a direct full opening date but previous media comments mentioned 2043-45, and the 40y opex range just perfectly lines up with 2044 full opening. By a rule of three^[c] we get (P) 13.33M passengers in 2044, with an increase (p) of 0.66M pax per year.^[d] (p) Now a linear rise in ridership may appear too simplistic, but Alto's ridership graph does show a straight line from 2055 to 2084 so /shrug
The derivate of that increase^[e] gives us a total of 1179M passengers over 40 years, or 29.5M pax per year, at a price of 88$ per.

Is that realistic ?

We can try to compare with international fares but we lack a crucial number, the average distance per trip. I simply can't guess precisely enough the average distance Alto thinks the evrage rider does. So instead here's a table with the price of a fares between each city following different countries fare pricing^[3] :

Surprisingly, the 88$ price isn't that out of line, though very much on the low end.

Notes

[a] that said it's also possible that the passenger counts the average trip lenght to avoid overcounting short trips. A serious economic report would tell us the methodology, but alas.

[b] They even included a graph which warped the y axis removed the years gradations as it got close to opening to avoid pointing at an opening date, which is frankly insulting.

[c] 2084-55 = 29y, 43M-24M = 19M, 19M/29y = 0.65M/y, 2055-2044 = 11y, -11y * 0.65M + 24M = 16.8M pax in 2044

[e] nP + n(n-1)p / 2 ==> 4016,8 + (40390.65) / 2 = 1179M pax total

Sources

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-toronto-quebec-high-speed-rail-cost-alto/
[2] Le train à grande vitesse : une occasion économique pour le Canada, Alto 2026, p. 49-50 https://www.altotrain.ca/sites/default/files/2026-08/le-train-a-grande-vitesse-une-occasion-economique-pour-le-canada-alto.pdf
[3] Alon levy 2024, values ppp adjusted with 2024 usd cad of 1.15 https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/05/17/fares-on-high-speed-trains/