I get what you're saying, in effect a chicken and egg paradox with cars vs public transit. I think that's a fair argument when it comes to commuter transit, but ultimately the horses have already left the barn. The vast majority of the country is now set up for car dependency (except in about 4 cities), and considering the climate it's going to be almost impossible to compel our fat aging population to stand in -20 degree weather waiting for a bus or train to get groceries unless you're 25 years old and have an abundance of time and energy.
To your other point, the hub and spoke trigonometry doesn't apply to Canada, the population's not laid out in that way. It's already for the most part a linear layout produced by a set of parallel competing rail lines running a couple hundred km from the US border. The rail was the factor that made the majority of the country's settlements. In America or other countries I think your point is absolutely fair though, because there's actually vertical girth to the nation that makes an actual hub and spoke system feasible.
Ultimately though I just don't believe anyone would use a train to spend 15-20 hours to get from Toronto to Calgary on high speed rail. Or even 4-6 hours to get from Vancouver to Calgary (likely not possible anyway considering the terrain). They're going to fly.
And almost no one is going to take a train from Regina to Winnipeg when they absolutely need a car at their destination to do anything anyway. Even the proposition of connecting Calgary to Edmonton is massively ridiculed because people understand how exceptionally light-weight your trip must be to forgo a vehicle at either end for the sake of saving maybe an hour by taking a train. It just seems silly considering the realities.
Mass transit sounds utopian but is mostly nonsensical to Canadians who live outside of the few big cities and understand how goofy it would be to put thought into it. Toronto and Ottawa and Montreal don't represent the rest of the country, but unfortunately their voices steer policy in ways that don't serve the rest of the country very well.
Buses are a thing of the past in Canada, they're far too slow and the countryside is too spread out to make feasible routes. They also used to cost almost as much as a plane ticket and take 10x the time. When intercity lines outside dense population centers DID exist they were pretty much empty all the time, hence their extinction.
High speed rail could only serve major centers across the country. Other than the Toronto to Montreal corridor, population centers along the rail lines are too far apart. For example the distance between Toronto Ontario and Kenora Ontario is roughly 1500+km, so a high speed rail trip would still take 6-8 hours between them at best. The train would be mostly empty too because there's just not a lot of people going between non-major cities. It's not like just because a rail line appears between places people are going to start going between those places all that much more. There's just no way the operation costs for high speed rail would be covered by fares from a handful of people.
Air transportation is only good for longer trips between two major centers in Canada. If you're going to/from
smaller regional centers for most of Canada the commercial airports don't even exist, and if they do the flights are infrequent and the costs to fly in/out of them are absurd and the flights might even take far longer than just driving. For example to fly between Kelowna BC and Kamloops BC, a 150km drive, costs $300-$500+ for the ticket and takes about 5 hours (not including travel to/from the airport, check-in time + waiting at the gate + waiting for luggage) due to a stop in distant Vancouver. It's just not feasible to airlines to have short direct routes, so they don't. But again you're not going to find airports with commercial flights for about 90% of the towns in the country because the towns are small and don't have airports (except if they don't have roads to connect them like in the north).
To summarize, unless you don't go anywhere or you're only going between Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal by train or flying between distant cities or in a remote village, you're likely going to want to use a car otherwise the alternatives can be absurd.
I was writing code for a Raspberry Pico and a beginner at it. The Pico is hooked up to a little display with no documentation other than a few horrible convoluted and broken-english examples with hundred line functions, and I had no idea what to do to just display some things on this little screen.
So I simply dumped the code examples into ChatGPT and said "Given these examples that display text and boxes on a screen, can we write a simpler interface and straightforward small functions for the display code?"
And it was done.
This wasn't code I wanted to mess with, I really just wanted to build my application rather than spend any time messing with the code to interact with this proprietary display. It was fantastic!
I've been in the web development industry for roughly 17 years and loved most of it until Agile took over.
Now everything is reduced to ticking off tasks and almost zero room for creativity. Meetings after meetings. Overcomplicated development workflows, or really just everything is overcomplicated. Twenty people to do the job of two, checkups, check-ins, checkouts, checkboxes. Gratuitous positivity makes any genuine gratitude hollow and meaningless.
I've taken the last two years off aside from a little bit of contracting to pay the bills and serves to remind me of how awful it's become. The only times I'm happy is when I can work on weekends or holidays and no one will be pinging me haha.
To your other point, the hub and spoke trigonometry doesn't apply to Canada, the population's not laid out in that way. It's already for the most part a linear layout produced by a set of parallel competing rail lines running a couple hundred km from the US border. The rail was the factor that made the majority of the country's settlements. In America or other countries I think your point is absolutely fair though, because there's actually vertical girth to the nation that makes an actual hub and spoke system feasible.
Ultimately though I just don't believe anyone would use a train to spend 15-20 hours to get from Toronto to Calgary on high speed rail. Or even 4-6 hours to get from Vancouver to Calgary (likely not possible anyway considering the terrain). They're going to fly.
And almost no one is going to take a train from Regina to Winnipeg when they absolutely need a car at their destination to do anything anyway. Even the proposition of connecting Calgary to Edmonton is massively ridiculed because people understand how exceptionally light-weight your trip must be to forgo a vehicle at either end for the sake of saving maybe an hour by taking a train. It just seems silly considering the realities.