Amtrak Cascade has trains that can do 125 mph but are throttled to 78 mph because of low quality tracks, as I understand it. Amtrak also recently just started running many more trains per day between Seattle and Portland. High speed rail is great, but maybe a good starting point would just be… fixing the tracks. Get 3 1/2 hours from SEA to PDX down closer to 2…
It's much more tempting to announce a new project with a ribbon cutting ceremony. The topic often comes up in Toronto, often as it relates to our transit system:
/glory/money/s In the US public transportation primarily operated as system to transfer public money to large engineering firms, subcontractors and politicians. Any transportation utility is incidental. Cost over-runs are the rule and have no consequences (More money for everybody!). The US has the highest cost per mile because no involved parties benefit from making it practical and cost effective. Self driving cars are probably our best chance to break up this system and reinvent public transportation.
I think the tracks are the most expensive part though, no?
Although I'm not sure if you mean the physical tracks are in poor condition or the layout. If it's the layout, that's not much easier to fix than building a HSR. They may not even be able to fix the railroad company owned tracks?
It is the layout. They had a nice bypass set up, but the first day the train derailed and it has just recently re-opened.
Sharing track with freight is a PITA: the freight trains don't care about going fast (so no really straight tracks) and they often have priority especially if the cascade is running off schedule, causing even more delays.
Not sure where they are going to build new straight-enough HSR track unless they employ lots of viaducts like china does.
Sharing the tracks is a huge problem that’s just becoming worse. Railroad’s have taken the strategy of running trains so long that they no longer sit in sidings. That means that it is now impossible for many freight trains to pull into a siding allowing other trains to pass. While Amtrak is supposed to have the right of way it’s often impossible for a freight train to do so. Additionally, railroads have shown no interest in lengthening siding or really any capital investment at all.
If you’d like to learn more about this and other issues with the way the US does railroads I’d recommend this podcast. It’s probably the least efficient way you could intake the information but I enjoyed it.
> While Amtrak is supposed to have the right of way it’s often impossible for a freight train to [pull in to a siding]
Sounds like the system is working as designed for the shipping companies - they no longer have to pull aside, wait for Amtrak to pass them by, and resume. Much less downtime with a bonus of having the too-long trains carry more freight per employee!
Well There's Your Problem is somehow most gloriously inefficient way to gain engineering information and yet somehow also the exact opposite. Rarely a regretted minute, even when you're, say, 40 minutes into Cold War geopolitics as a prelude to a tunnel fire.
Legally, Amtrak is supposed to have priority, and freight trains are required to pull off. But freight trains usually get priority because that's what the railway wants, and Amtrak doesn't have the political muscle to do much. But it's illegal.
I highly doubt Amtrak will suddenly run on time if enough people write Congress like their video suggests. The delays are egregious. Can’t they just pay for priority?
Demanding that a passenger railway be self-funding while also trying to massively increase its scope is... not a path for success. Unless I'm wrong you know of any continent-scale railways that bootstrapped themselves into success recently...?
A possible strategy is to use money from ticket sales to pay for priority, boosting on-time performance which increases the competitiveness of their product.
And for a large portion of their routes are already overpriced and less convenient than almost any other means of travel (except for a handful of actually reasonably-priced routes.
A local route on Amtrak costs almost $100 for a one way ticket traveling <200mi
A bus ticket for the same route is $30. The bus takes an hour longer.
I want amtrak to thrive, but they need to attract customers, not drive more away with higher prices.
Amtrak doesn't need priority, they need to run their trains on time. That means not running old worn out,.under maintained trains. They nees to leave on time, every time.
That also means fining the freights when they have the track blocked so they cannot get access in their allocated time which was planed months ago.
Amtrak are freeloading on privately built and maintained railways.
If they want better track alignments, or prioritisation over other users, they should come to a commercial agreement with the infrastructure owners like anyone else. Alternatively, they can build their own infrastructure.
Railroads in the US run through land donated by the government, on tracks given to the railroads by the government, supported with funds from the government. Despite all that aid, the government has had to step in with additional funding to ensure they don't go bankrupt many times, especially in the 1920s, 1930s, 1970s, 2000s, and during COVID.
Fulfilling their legal obligations to Amtrak is the least they could do. It's worth noting that the corridors where Amtrak did build dedicated track have the fewest delays and the best safety in the network.
I think you’ve misunderstood the arrangement. They were not granted the land where the rails were laid alone. They were granted vast amounts of additional real estate, and the value of that land could have maintained the railways in perpetuity. However, similarly vast fortunes were extracted from the railways instead, and the generational wealth created during these events in the 1800s has proved more durable than the commercial viability of the rails that the country had intended to support.
I gleened it from conservative economist Kevin Phillips' book Wealth & Democracy. I assume it's bog standard economic world building. Nothing I've read since has contradicted Phillips. (I'm noob, not some kind of economist. Though I did get to chat with Phillips one time and I felt like I understood his answers.)
What mental model do you prefer?
Or maybe you object to the implications ("logic") of this model. That notions like property, wealth, and government are social constructs. Just shared fictions which hopefully make the world a little bit more predictable (legible), without too much extra effort, so we can all muddle thru our daily lives.
I think the Homestead Act is a good example for explaining my objection.
First of all, I believe the government is the agent and servant of the people, not the other way around. Any government land is also owned by the people because the people own the government. The Homestead Act was a simple way of Distributing this land to to be held directly by the people instead of managing it on their behalf.
When considering the giving away of land, the government loses property. What the government gains is the hope or chance that people will do something productive with it. Even if those people only benefit themselves and retain the profits, they are increasing the economy and total wealth/value of the country. This is the repayment, and those individuals dont "owe" the government anything.
What I especially object to is the idea of retrospectively applied debt, often long after the fact.
You see this a lot in discussion of government grants for science and tech research.
The government creates and awards research grants to encourage development because the public would be better off if the medicine or whatever exists opposed to not exist, even if it is being sold for a profit.
However, when something does get invented and sold, some people then think the public is owed a debt. This isn't true. The government provided funding because it wanted the thing to exist. Once it exists, the government's objective and any obligation has already been met.
By analogy, imagine two neighbors. Neighbor A pays for the other (Neighbor B) to paint their house out of self interest, because it will make the neighborhood look better and raise their own property value. The neighbor B has fulfilled their obligation and any debt by painting the house. It is both logically and morally bankrupt for Neighbor A to come back at a later day and claim the other is in their debt, after they already got what they initially wanted and bargained for.
This comes back to the idea of the government as the "source" of all wealth, deserving repayment.
Like I said before, the government is important, and even essential for economic development.
Being essential is different than being the "source" or deserving repayment. A government built road is essential for me to get to work, however that doesn't mean the government is the source of all the work I did, or entitled to a share of my salary, provided I already paid my share for the road.
Not just the first day, but the very first run. They cheaped out and didn't build a bypass for a 30 MPH curve on an otherwise 80 MPH run. Which, while embarrassing enough, shouldn't have resulted in an accident even if the conductor missed the signage as they did, but wasn't because the railways successfully lobbied to delay rolling out Positive Train Control for a few more years. The entire event was just a perfect illustration of the disastrous state of passenger train transit in this country.
HSR can use the same rails (standard gauge) if they are in a good state (i.e. fine in most of the rest of the world, not in the USA which is far behind on rail safety). Big differences are turning radii (HSR obviously wont go around sharp corners easily) and station distance (HSR will want stops ~50-100km apart, older railways its often more like 1-5). That generally means a new route rather than using an existing one.
HSR really wants total seperation, zero crossings, no shared traffic. That is what ultimately allows safe high speed travel.
Otherwise you are slowing down everywhere and can only run as fast as other trains on the line, unless you also impact their services by having them pull off.
If the track is built to HSR in the first place. You can't have crossings on HSR track because someone who carefully looks both ways before crossing will be kill by a train they didn't see.
Even then while it is possible it doesn't work well, as HSR will catch up to whatever else is on the track and then must slow down.. the cost to build HSR track is so high (even at world leading low prices) that you have to run several trains per hour on those tracks to pay for it, and so there isn't free space for lower speed trains in between.
Nobody makes a switch that can be crossed at high speeds so the slower train cannot just get out of the way no matter how much you might wish for that to wosk.
Construction is expensive, and purchasing right of way in populated areas is ridiculously expensive. Short tracks are more expensive because you want to do inconvenient things in order to keep them short (like tunneling and building bridges) instead of taking the path of least resistance. You need all of these things for a good high speel rail, but you need a lot of it to even improve the existing rail. There's some compromises you could make to improve the existing system, but there's not much desire for it I think since it'd still largely be a many billion dollar long term project. I think the opinion is that it's not worth spending all that unless it's transformative (i.e., the marginal benefit of a 2 hour vs 3 and a half hour train ride is small compared to the benefit of a 3 and a half hr ride to a 1 hour ride since at that point you have realistic commutes and such).
1 hr Seattle to Portland probably doesn’t even really make it commuting distance because very few people are going to live and work close enough to the endpoints to keep things to 90 minutes total. Boston to NYC is 4 hours or so and that’s useful for a lot of purposes although that’s admittedly in part because driving and parking in Manhattan is so awful. (I could drive from my house to Manhattan faster but I hardly ever do.)
I don't think commuting should be the main focus - if you want HSR to make sense ecologically, it should replace existing car and airplane trips, not enable people to make longer commutes.
I’m not from the area but does anyone actually fly from SEA to PDX assuming they have a car? It’s not like SeaTac is even that close to Seattle. And depending on where you live and destination plans it’s hard for me to imagine trading a less than 3 hour drive for a train trip.
From the number of flights offered, I think it’s much more common than you might think. My guess is that part of the reason has to to with Seattle’s very very bad traffic. I once spent 4 hours traveling less than 15 miles on a drive heading south from the city center, and I don’t think that’s even super anomalous.
I can't relate to this at all. I would trade driving for a train trip if the total duration is somewhat comparable (or even a little bit longer), especially if I would have to make the trip regularly.
I don't think flying is convenient but taking a HSR-train is.
It depends on a lot of factors. Where do you live relative to the train station? How annoying is the drive? Do you want/need a car on the other end? New York checks two of those boxes for me. (Getting to the train is out of the way.) But a lot of places that could be train trips I’d want a car once I got there.
One of these days people are going to understand that "what makes most ecological sense" is allowing people to live their normal lives as they're accustomed to live them, without beating them over the head and telling them they're bad people.
The average American lifestyle (cars included) is what it is . . . so decarbonize that and stop expecting everyone to live like Brooklynites or Europeans.
In a WFH or occasional-office-visit basis, that's more tractable as the trip wouldn't be made on a daily basis.
Though another option is to both densify development near stations and to create a well-functioning feeder transit system to service areas further out. If those can operate at, say, 35 mph / 55 kph average speed, and assuming a 5 minute walkable commute to the work endpoint (jobs are easier to cluster near stations than housing), and with well-timed transfers, then the feed-in distance could be up to about 15 miles / 23 km from the actual HSR station.
Note that average speed is usually about half of top speed, so these would be relatively high-speed commuter-rail systems. Note that the typical average speed of an urban bus, say, is about 5-15 mph (8-24 kph).
Manhattan is sort of a special case and I can tell you from personal experience that 90 minutes is pretty bad even if a lot of it is spent on a train. I commuted into Boston a few days a week when it was about 90 minutes door to door and IMO it was not sustainable. If I go into my downtown office now which I do rarely it’s 2 hours.
That some people are forced into super-commutes now and then doesn’t make it a really sustainable most days situation. So you’re up by 6am or earlier and you’re not getting home until 8pm or later depending on your work hours.
Adding to this, there's a pretty interesting paradox of transportation infrastructure as relates to land values, and a characteristic I've noticed of many high-speed rail systems.
The creation of transportation infrastructure can convert land from low-value (as reflected by market prices) to high, and this has very often occurred. The US Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, was seen by many as a boondoggle, and indeed traveled through all but completely unpopulated (by European settlers) lands. But development quickly followed.
One settlement bypassed by the railroad was Denver, Colorado. That city raised funds to create a spur line to the Transcontinental Railroad in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and in the decade following that line's completion, Denver's population exploded tenfold, from 5,000 to over 50,000 inhabitants.
Many commuter streetcar and heavy rail lines were created as, or in partnership with, real estate developments, and profits from land speculation were often a very substantial portion of overall profits from such operations.
The flip side is that once land values have increased, establishing new rights of way becomes extraordinarily expensive. Which means that backfilling high-speed rail into an extant prosperous region is insanely expensive, not only in direct land acquisition costs but in the costs of passing legislation and litigating various objections to such projects.
Of the major high-speed rail projects created since 1950, at least three, Japan's Shinkansen, France's TGV, and China's CRH, all seem to me to have benefitted either from being developed in a post-war period of depressed property values (Japan & France) or emerged as a greenfield development through regions in which property values had not yet appreciated ... and in which private property ownership isn't a well-developed institution in the first place (China).
The very slowly-progressing process of high speed rail in California is in many ways due to both the high land valuations of that state and a political environment in which legal objections to such projects are easy to mount. The easiest places to proceed with the project are in the relatively depopulated and low-land-value Central Valley. Geography also plays a role in constraining potential routes, most especially within the San Francisco Bay Area (and especially especially along the San Francisco Peninsula, some of the highest-valued land in the world), and in crossing the Tehachapi mountains at the southern end of the Central Valley, through which there are very few viable routes. These create choke points by which interests opposed to, or simply looking to benefit disproportionately from, the project can focus obstruction efforts, and they have.
In darker moments, I reflect that it might be opportune to wait for a major San Andreas Fault movement to press forward with rail plans, whilst opposition is both defunded and occupied with other concerns.
I have read elsewhere that there are ways for rail development to capture some of the increase in land value, in order to offset the cost of the development. I do not have any pointers though.
A common example is railroads in Japan, which own the land around the station and either run or profitably lease buildings and services on them, with stations in densely populated areas doubling as shopping centers, hotels etc
In the US, railroads were granted sections of land (1 square mile) alongside tracks.
I believe this was every other section, for each mile of track laid. One site I'm finding says that this extended 20 miles to either side of the track:
Approximately 16 percent of Nebraska’s total land mass was given to various railroad companies, either by the federal government or by the state. Along the lines of the state’s two major railroads, the Union Pacific and the Burlington, every other square mile of land (called a "section") went to the railroads. This checkerboard of land extended back twenty miles on both sides of the track. So, the railroads owned a total of twenty sections of land for each mile of road constructed.
There are some holdings that are still retained (or were until relatively recently). The UCSF extension along the San Francisco bayfront is on land that had belonged to the Santa Fe Railroad, for example.
How US High Speed Rail projects are utilising this approach I don't know. Much of the valuable land is, of course, presently owned.
I believe this was initially specified under the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act, and may have been later amended:
Section 3 [of the Act] granted an additional 10 square miles (26 km²) of public land for every mile of grade except where railroads ran through cities or crossed rivers. The method of apportioning these additional land grants was specified in the Act as being in the form of "five alternate sections per mile on each side of said railroad, on the line thereof, and within the limits of ten miles on each side" which thus provided the companies with a total of 6,400 acres (2,600 ha) for each mile of their railroad.
The standard land grant pattern for railroads was a checkerboard pattern, which makes it hard to depict accurately on a map. The source I have doesn't give an exact number of Nebraska that was actually granted in land grant to railroads, but 16% is right in the ballpark of what I'd estimate from interpolation from other states.
However, it's also worth noting that land grants were only doled out in US history in an extremely limited time period--from the 1850s to the 1870s. The majority of railroads were not in fact built with land grants.
I was aware of the "checkerboard" land-grant allocation, but not how deep (perpendicular distance from RoW) it went.
I also wasn't aware of how brief the land-grant subsidy era was. Though it would be interesting to see a track-mileage development timeline or animation showing how trackage developed over time.
My general understanding is that track mileage exploded quite quickly, often with competing railroads establishing duplicate connections especially on highly-attractive routes, with the winner then absorbing (or simply competing to death) the loser(s). There is also a distinction between major (national or regional) Class I railroads, and short-line (usually Class III) railroads, where a short-line often served only a single line or small set of lines within a small region.
Overall, US railroad trackage shrank for much of the 20th century as early, redundant, competitive trackage was abandoned. I'm not sure what recent trends have been.
The line is owned by BNSF and has quite a lot of BNSF and Union Pacific trains running on it daily, in addition to the Cascades services. No amount of improving the tracks will fix congestion, so moving to a separate line entirely for passenger service makes a ton of sense.
organization before electronics before concrete. some amount of infrastructure will fix congestion, how much depends on what precise timetable will be run. the swiss manage to run a huge amount of freight alongside many passenger trains because they did their homework and built infrastructure where it was needed.
in general, "precision scheduled railroading" has fucked passenger-freight interoperability in the states because the freight railroads are running trains too long to fit into any of the sidings, which forces amtrak into the pocket
It's just a lack of political will. If Congress wanted Amtrak to really have priority, then they'd strengthen laws which allow Amtrak to have priority and then Amtrak can go for suit. They don't though whereas freight railroad has a lot of friends in Congress and so freight wins while Amtrak loses.
Even just reliability, I regularly make this drive for visiting family and it would be preferable to be able to kick back and relax instead of driving, but currently it’s just too snow and infrequent to be a viable option for me.
I never learned to drive and it turns out the Portland to Seattle train is a good option for getting between the two cities.
Everybody says they’d take the bus/train/whatever instead of driving if only this or that were true. If the train was faster and more frequent you’d find another reason not to take it. The stories we tell ourselves.
Approximately downtown to downtown without a car on either end is pretty much the ideal scenario and it applies to a tiny slice of the population. I mostly take the train to Manhattan even though it means driving in the wrong direction for about an hour only because the southern part of the drive into the city is so awful.
Exactly. I also do this drive every few months and still can’t believe driving is more efficient than taking the train. It’s the absolute perfect setup for a train too.
In the article they point out that for proper HSR you need segrated straight tracks.
Sure, for faster ordinary trains 100mph - 125 you need to improve tracks too, but a lot of that is also improving junctions implementing flyovers and extra track so that trains aren't delayed or stopped.
You don't even really need to get to 100-125 MPH to greatly improve travel times; usually the first step is just double tracking all the things; once that's in place you've shaved 20-30 minutes off a 3 hour trip.
> Preliminary information from the data recorder showed that, when the incident happened, the train was traveling at 78 mph (126 km/h),[4] nearly 50 mph (80 km/h) over the speed limit.
i am unfamiliar with the condition of the tracks on that corridor but in general the vast majority of lines in the US are limited to below 80mph due to the infamous FRA 79 mph rule which mandates in cab signaling to exceed 80mph.
with the near ubiquity of positive train control now following the FRA's unfunded mandate (another brilliant piece of policy from the boys in blue) this rule should no longer apply. but due to reasons unknown to me (bureaucratic mire?) trains on many corridors are still limited.
there are also some grade crossing related speed restrictions
the FRA and its cronies should be hurled into the sun
Otherwise known as "decision making through exhaustion" where everyone tries to stop progress as much as possible until the other people get so sick of arguing with you that they give up and you get your way.
The Seattle region might be the part of the country least capable of building infrastructure. I'll believe they'll get high speed rail when I see it.
lol California would disagree. I am amazed at how much is being built here. I wouldn't be surprised if Seattle is the fastest building urban metro area in the US. I still think WA has a libertarian streak (hence no income tax) that moves things along.
WA does but Seattle does not. Worse, the one big city / region we have completely swamps the rest of the state politically so our "leaders" only ever get leftier and don't have a moderating influence from the other side.
It's worse in OR to the south (Portland)...it's so out of balance there that 11 rural counties voted to secede and join their eastern neighbor Idaho.
Because in both cases, there comes a point where the majority should not be able to trample on the minority, be they PacNW Republicans/conservatives or Wyoming Democrats/liberals.
Having 50.01 percent of the vote in either direction should get you strong influence with boundaries, not carte blanche to do whatever you want. The American system is deliberately designed so progressively bigger changes to the status quo require progressively bigger majorities, and certain options are completely off the table.
And this is for good reason. If you and I vehemently disagree, we should still be able to live as neighbors as long as neither of us is trying to violate the other's rights or force our views on the other.
california does indeed have it's own special brand of Process
it is truly amazing that san francisco, which would be one of the largest cities in the world if its growth weren't checked by its idiotic politics, remains the underdeveloped relative backwater that it is
and of course the high speed rail project, probably the most important transport megaproject in US history (by virtue of the influence its legacy it will have on the rest of the country), has been so spectacularly mismanaged through a combination of corruption and the California Process such that if i ever does reach the termini, political compromises made during its design will cripple both HSR and caltrain's operations and increase the journey time to no longer be competitive with airlines. in all likelihood the legacy will be the palatial viaducts built in literal cornfields that serve no purpose other than to enrich contractors (see: hanford viaduct)
Are you kidding me? Washington's "libertarian streak" is long-dead and buried.
Whether you think it's a good thing or a bad thing, at this point, Seattle is basically San Francisco's insecure younger sibling and Washington is basically California Lite. As an example, since you brought up income tax, there is now a state capital gains tax, which the state Supreme Court cleverly danced around and called an "excise tax." Again, whether you think it's a good thing or a bad thing, Washington is every bit as much a single-party deep blue state as California now, and it's marching lockstep in the same direction as every other single-party deep blue state.
Yawn. So maybe we'll have a connection to Spokane in another 80 years and a connection to the Tri-Cities by 2123. Let me know when it gets to my house.
I know perhaps I shouldn't be this negative, but... let's use Germany as an example, as it is roughly comparable to Washington and Oregon. Its residents now have a 49 Euro ticket anywhere in the country, useable on multiple forms of transit. We don't even have buses, trains, etc connecting our major cities. Don't even get me started on other social issues like health care, child care, etc. And as long as Eastern Washington continues to send Republicans only to Olympia, ain't a damn thing going to change for us over here. At least we are finally getting some decent internet - decades after most cities in Europe had comparably fast / cheap internet. Maybe someday we'll have more than one functioning mobile provider.
Six years ago, my coworker said he'd never see BART reach Santa Clara County in his lifetime. That changed in either 2017 (with Warm Springs opening) or 2020 (with Milpitas and Berryessa opening). He was surprised, too.
The reason that we don’t have those things is the rabid partisanship and graft, eg you ignoring the Homeless Industrial Complex and Sound Transit being black holes of tax money that deliver negative (homeless) or mediocre (transit) results for huge sums.
Obviously a lot of people object to writing checks that are perennially siphoned off by white collar crooks — but yes, the problem is those people from that town.
They’re just rubes who don’t understand your obvious greatness and should feel privileged to pay for your graft!
I do want to point out that unlike Germany, where the population centers are relatively spread out over the area, in WA and OR, the vast majority of the population lives in a fairly narrow band largely following I5. The density of the Portland - Seattle - Vancouver corridor is a little less dire. Eastern WA and OR are relatively sparsely populated, so HSR to those areas is almost a non-starter.
Yeah fine, I fully believe in the Vancouver->Vancouver (cough) train line.
The justification for it, however, is not "WA is just like Germany".
First of all, it's gone to be a relatively single-line system, paralleling I-5, which is quite unlike Germany,
Second, even with the full west-of-cascades population, you're still not even remotely close to the population of Germany. You not even really that close to the population along any of the busiest lines within Germany,.
> The justification for it, however, is not "WA is just like Germany".
Of course not, they're not the same. But we are still talking about a region of about 8-10 million people. It's also a region that has grown by 2 or so million people in a decade. Washington alone has had a pretty steady 14-20% growth per decade since the 60's. Oregon is fairly close in its decadal growth as well. So by the 2030's we might be talking more like 12-13 million people in the region.
That's plenty sufficient density to start investigating if an HSR is economically feasible and advisable.
(Edit: Just for self elucidation, I looked at the number of people that live in the Hamburg - Frankfurt corridor, since that's about the same distance as Portland to Vancouver, BC. Just going off the 'megaregions' that are crossed, its about 20 or so million, give or take a couple. That's only 2x the density of the cascadia region. Berlin - Essen also seems to be about the same distance, and also about 20 million people.)
> Yeah fine, I fully believe in the Vancouver->Vancouver (cough) train line.
At that point, just extend it. Put a bridge over the river and have a train terminal somewhere near PDX. The further continuation into Salem and Eugene is a little iffy, that I will concede, but Vancouver WA to Portland is practically spitting distance.
Sure I mostly agree. And the (cough) after V->V was a silly way for me to say "I mean PDX, of course").
However, I will also note that factors are 2 are far larger than the ones that often make or break social or economic plans. So saying "that's only 2x the density of Cascadia" is not necessarily very encouraging.
State population density simply doesn't matter. City population and distance between cities matters. Nobody realistically expects train lines to enable transportation to every square mile of the state.
You are correct. Most of Washington state is empty. Few people live in the Cascades or the eastern plains.
Most of the population of Washington and Portland Metro live inside a long rectangle with an area of 10-15000 square miles. Call it 400 people per square mile. Or probably 15000 people per mile of track which likely is a better number.
eye roll I knew there would be some pedantic that would come along with this and I should have self edited to make it clear I was talking about square miles - which is why I included BOTH WA and OR which is especially relevant given that the article dreams about connecting not only WA and OR but also BC. Pop doesn't matter and neither does density for this subject. Every pissant village in Europe has a bus route, street car, or milk run train that will connect you to wider transit options. My only way to get to Seattle is a 12 hour (!!) Greyhound, a 4.5 hour car ride, or a $200 plane ticket.
it deals heavily with the California "Bullet Train" and why it's such a shitshow.
I read (or skimmed) their 80-page report. They seem to have learned the lessons of other megaprojects, but I'd call this more of a realistic meta-plan than a plan:
> The reasons for this dismal record of performance are not inherent in the technology or the environment, they are mainly due to human behavior. It is possible to build a megaproject under budget and on time. However, the ways in which people behave in the planning, development, and delivery of megaprojects, and the choices that result, render that outcome unlikely.
There are political reasons that turn projects like this into disasters. I don't know how you avoid them, except maybe by facing them upfront.
Man, whenever all this train talk comes up, I get this impression that Americans really know their shit when it comes to trains. All these plans and documentations, speeds, infrastructure details, hundreds of comments, expertise - you’d think it’s all the other way around.
I live in Poland, and all I know is that it all just works here (more or less).
Trains aren't a good fit for the US outside the northeast corridor. We have a fantastic interstate highway system for medium distances and for longer trips flying is cheaper and faster.
Yeah, I think I can say we were/are intensely jealous of that interstate infrastructure. And yet you don’t see the same amount of people poring over all the minutae details that you see with trains - just funny how that works isn’t it?
I can't see that being enough to even break ground on a single mile of track.
If California boondoggle is any indication, it will be enough to staff an army of middle managers, bureaucrats, and environmental impact and DEI staff for a year, and, of course, pay out some political kickbacks.
You can today in the Central Valley look at large construction sites and structures, some of which are finished. Go 100 miles up the alignment, and see construction and structures there too. None of those sites have laid track yet, but there’s hundred of miles of trackway under development.
It's understandable, and necessary, but it's also amusing that the CA HSR project has made (and opened) many miles of roads and bridges for cars and yet doesn't have any trains to run.
Of course, if they had started with a ten mile section of track in some place easy to drop in tracks then everyone'd make fun of it for only having two stations ten miles apart or something.
Yeah but they’re actually making progress. The project has plenty to criticize but it’s way more of a punching bag than it needs to be. The hard part is land acquisition, lawsuits, grade separations, etc. once you have that tracks are a piece of cake.
CA also is walking with basic train service. The Pacific Surfliner (3rd most used Amtrak route) and the San Joaquin (5th most used Amtrak route). Literally the 2 most used Amtrak routes outside of the northeast.
At least LOSSAN is slowly improving the Surfliner; I wish more of the focus had been on doing something like that (it's in phase 2 or 3 to completely doubletrack it from LA -> SAN but that's technically separate and Del Mar may prevent it nearly forever).
“Single mile of track” is one of the dumbest memes ever. Yes, they lay the tracks last, because that is by far the easiest part of the project and there’s a machine that can poop out HSR tracks at 1km/hour.
Sigh. Though there are definitely automated track laying machines in the US, some pieces might not meet the needs of the project and may want other machines. You can of course ship them.
Did you think CAHSR was going to lay the track by hand?
There are now only 3 decent sized concentrations of people in that corridor, but maybe building something like this would allow a whole new 1MM person metro to develop, e.g. around Olympia or in the Skagit Valley
I sincerely hope not. Sprawl is the anti pattern maximizing human impact. The skagit valley in particular is beautiful - the last it needs is a suburban megaplex.
Huh. That’s the opposite of sprawl. It’s having dense points along the route. It doesn’t make any sense to have high-speed rail that only stops in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. For it to even possibly make sense there needs more to be more points along the way. And those points need to be very dense by transit. Aka the opposite of sprawl.
The document referenced in the link specifically advises to not set up stops between but to build transit from stops to the major stations.
Spreading the density out from the major stations along the route is exactly what sprawl is. I’m not sure I understand how it can be any other way. By making the urban cores more attractive and able to access other urban cores you encourage density growth in and around that core. Encouraging growth along the corridor encourages lower density construction over more land area. That’s what sprawl is.
Finally why does it not make sense to only stop in the most dense cores of the region? The whole point of high speed rail is to be high speed. Each stop slows the train. Spur transit brings people from around the region to the transit hub. Most of the economic activity happens in and around these urban cores and most transit across the corridor is between the cores. Building services to commuter communities certainly relieves density pressure on the cores, but that only really helps people who would live in the urban core but for whatever reason can’t afford or doesn’t want to live there. Their commute pattern is from their suburban sprawl commuter community to their proximate core. Spur regional transit can handle that if it’s a priority. (See seattle light rail plans)
I don’t think that’s a given. If you’re constantly stopping/accelerating, average speed is much lower. The rail from downtown Seattle to the airport has a comical number of stops that barely see any traffic.
The optimal system to connect a large number of places is a car. The optimal system to connect a small number of places efficiently is a train.
The Tokyo-Nagano leg of Hokuriku Shinkansen has at least seven stops over about 140 miles of rail, an average of less than 25 miles per stop; it still makes the trip in an average of 1 hour 40 minutes vs 3 hours or more by car, and it replaced a conventional rail line that took 2 hours 50 minutes to go from Ueno (one stop closer from the Shinkansen's Tokyo station) to Nagano.
Even the 320-mile Tokyo-Osaka Nozomi Shinkansen, the fastest Shinkansen train that makes the fewest stops and has the longest average distance between stops of any Shinkansen, makes at least four stops between, averages fewer than 120 miles between stops, and has two sibling lines that make more stops on the route.
Portland to Seattle is 145 miles by air and 178 miles by Amtrak. Seattle to Vancouver is about 120 by air and 155 miles by Amtrak. An equivalent Portland-Vancouver Shinkansen that didn't have any stops other than Seattle would have the fewest service stops of any Shinkansen line, and the most distance between stops by at least 25 miles/stop.
For some definition of small. Which I suspect is larger than “180 miles apart”.
I quite frankly just don’t see the value is connecting Portland and Seattle by high speed rail. Who gives a shit? Spend billions of dollars so that hundreds, perhaps even a whole thousand, of people can take a weekend trip that is slightly faster than a 3 hour drive?
I’d rather see Renton and Kenmore/Bothell quintuple in density and get connected by a nice, fast loop.
Seattle to SeaTac probably has about the right number of stops. Well, a few too many, but should be more than zero. Those stops just need to have something at them. We built a minimal amount of transit and then failed to upzone the neighborhood.
> I quite frankly just don’t see the value is connecting Portland and Seattle by high speed rail. Who gives a shit? Spend billions of dollars so that hundreds, perhaps even a whole thousand, of people can take a weekend trip that is slightly faster than a 3 hour drive
dramatically faster. travel time between portland and seattle along a realistic route is on the order of 90m with a few stops and 60m non-stop. about as long as my commute from SF to palo alto. at those distances a high speed rail connection is transformative, it would turn portland and seattle into one large metro area. portland and seattle are ideally situated in terms of population and distance for high speed rail.
but if you don't see the point in investing in high speed rail in general, I would suggest that you take a look at the latest news on the arctic sea ice and review what your state is spending on highways every year
> I don’t see trains having a huge advantage over a clean grid and EV fleet. And the latter is much easier and faster to build.
The latter requires building millions of individual cars, each with large expensive lithium batteries, plus the road network and upkeep of that. Then building green energy, solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, plus storage!
The other includes building some train tracks and trains.
The planning system must be utterly dysfunctional, and the government incompetent when it comes to large projects, or tender for them, for the first to be anywhere near easier than the latter.
We already have road networks and power grids. They need upgrades, but moving to clean electricity generation makes sense regardless of what we use for transportation. And sure, millions of cars need to be built, but they'll be built anyway. If not EV's, then traditional ICE vehicles. And those are built by various private companies and sold directly to individuals. Comparing the difficulty of an existing industry to continue doing what it's already doing to a giant public infrastructure project just doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
EVs still emit brake particulate matter, generate roadway noise, put pressure on roadway infrastructure (either for maintenance or expansion), and still tie up the driver's time in transit. Rail does none of those things. It's a matter of political will in the US, and most Americans tend to be fine wasting lots of time driving.
New York City has the best public transit in the US… and the longest commute times. Average commute time in Tokyo (58 minutes) is twice as long as Seattle (27.5 minutes). It’s not the same problem as induced demand, but the net effect is similar.
Ultra dense, transit rich cities are more expensive and have longer commute times. There’s no free lunch.
The problem in NYC [1] is that 21.4% of people have > 60 min commutes, which probably is the same problem with Tokyo and many US cities: COL is really high so commuters come in from long distances to commute. Fukuoka has a 30 min average commute time, closer to Seattle. Moreover the real important thing when it comes to commute time is that driving requires active participation. Sure you can listen to whatever music you like and sip your favorite drink in the car, but every minute spent driving a car is time spent using your attention. People are willing to put up with longer transit commutes because those commutes are passive.
> There’s no free lunch.
I mean, are we seriously comparing the capital, operational, and environmental costs of a train with tens of thousands of BEV cars and the charging infrastructure required to make this work? There's also the permanent kneecapping of throughput in an auto-oriented corridor. The long tail of BEV adoption will be quite long. The only reason this is even a discussion point is because building transit is politically unpopular and US governments can't really build anything anymore on time or under budget.
When I spent 10 years in Nyc everything is at least 45 minutes away no matter where you are. The walks between stations can be long, wait times are long, travel times slow. If you live far out on a local line it can be longer for sure. But even going downtown from UES is a 45 minute affair. I rarely left my neighborhood other than for work because I had to plan 2 hours of round trip travel. That sucks up most of a day.
I'm not sure what to say, your lifestyle in NYC sounds nothing like the lifestyles of any of my friends who live in the area, even those who live in Hoboken or Jersey City.
> I mean, are we seriously comparing the capital, operational, and environmental costs of a train with tens of thousands of BEV cars and the charging infrastructure required to make this work?
Not really. Because transit dorks never fucking talk about how much anything costs. It’s quite frustrating.
I’ll take a 30 minute driving commute over a 45 minute transit commute every day of the week. YMMV.
aha, this must be critical urbanism's orange website alt
there is no inherent reason why high speed rail isn't suited to commuting, pricing is a policy choice. and i too can name random prices, i paid 25€ to get from paris to geneva on a TGV a couple of weeks ago. total carbon emissions for that trip: 2kg
other commenters have rightfully bashed you over the head for your pro-car comments. let me pile on. in embodied carbon alone, this is a ludicrous prospect. cars also fare dramatically worse in terms of specific energy. and in mortality rate, and comfort, and ...
This is an exceedingly silly statement. The money printer stopped going brrr. Things cost money.
The cost of building high-speed rail is very high. Letting a relatively small number of people
commute is, imho, low value.
Toss out some napkin math numbers if you’d disagree. I’d love to see your cost/value analysis. Feel free to complain about how much money we spend subsidizing highways if you want, but only if you include numbers and value for rail.
you're not exactly making a good faith argument here [0] but sure i'll play ball
i'll ignore the infrastructure costs, it's free to drive on I-5 after all. an N700S costs about $50M and holds 1300 people. amortized over 30 years, you're looking at say $3M/year including a very generous maintenance budget. i'll throw in another $0.5M/year for misc personnel costs (driver, station staff).
even if you ran only a single weekday peak hour round trip per trainset with tickets priced at $20 one way, revenue would be about $13M/year. so you could charge $10 for tickets, follow american "best practices" of running only peak service and idling your expensive rolling stock for the rest of the day and still make ends meet.
in reality, the infra would be built following best practices to bring the runtime between portland and seattle to just under an hour[1]. this facilitates an hourly takt. running short turns between portland and seattle each trainset would make 5-8 round trips a day, which even with low occupancy factors is still tremendously profitable.
[0] see the other comment where you say that "transit dorks" never talk about how much things cost. "transit dorks" are _obsessed_ with how much things cost. alon levy, who is by all accounts one of the more influential voices in internet transit world these days has a multi year project in collaboration with several other transit activists to find out exactly why transit projects are expensive as they are in the US. not to mention dozens of blog posts analyzing individual projects. Clem Tillier has a site going back 15 years where he publishes very detailed analysis on the bay area portion of the california high speed rail project, its cost overruns and policy driven technical failings. that "transit dorks" don't care about cost is a conclusion you could draw if you only follow reductive normies like alan fisher, but if you uncritically accepted that such sophomoric reddit tier dialogue was the state of the art in transit twitter - well, one would have to really question how much critical thought you've put into your stance on car dependency and EVs.
[1] a route following I-5 is 260km so this is a reasonable assumption.
> i'll ignore the infrastructure costs, it's free to drive on I-5 after all.
Ugh. Like I said. =\
We aren’t building a new city with no initial infrastructure. This isn’t Sim City. And we aren’t rebuilding after getting firebombed and flattened in WW2. What we do have is an actually pretty good interstate highway system that was built in the 50s by eradicating minority neighborhoods and rampant use of eminent domain.
The only relevant question “given where we are today, what makes sense”. How much does it cost to go from where we are to a rich and robust train system?
So, we have a bunch of highways that require maintenance/growth and a bunch of train track that needs to be built. If you want to move budget from highway maintenance to train track construction and maintenance that’s totally cool. But you can’t just handwave it away.
I’ve read all the articles about why America sucks at building rail and what the per mile cost is.
So. Napkin math. How much to build, operate, and maintain a high-speed rail system in the PNW. Full system costs. Face value. With zero complaining or snark about how much we spend on cars/highways today.
There's been quite a lot of building around Northgate, Othello and Columbia City. I'm surprised there hasn't been more upzoning at Rainier Beach, though - maybe displacement concerns on the part of planners
An advantage of building on farms or other greenfield land is that you can start off with dense, walkable planning rather than car-oriented suburban expanse.
I’ve been reading about high-speed rail in the PNW for my 20 years in Seattle and I’ve yet to see a budget. And I’ve definitely yet to see how that budget is justified.
I don’t see how it can possibly make sense. The cost divided by ridership can’t be a friendly number. I live in Seattle and I don’t think high-speed rail to Portland/Vancouver is a particularly interesting thing.
I’m not at all a fan of 90 minute commute times. Yeah sure you can read your phone or whatever. But it’s soul crushing. Remote work is far superior to long-ass commute times powered by high speed rail.
When you realize that we are just barely caught up with what Forward Thrust was supposed to bring us when voters rejected that in the 1970s (like before I was born...) it's hard to imagine any of us will benefit in our lifetimes from any significant I-5 corridor high-speed improvements. The legislature really needs to be considering the housing benefits of improved transit, not only along I-5, but also for those who might live in say Ellensburg, Yakima, Spokane, who could conceivably be just an hour or two by rail away from their office in Seattle. Maybe not as every day commuters, but certainly in a blended work model.
Sometimes I wish transit development was... Less community oriented and more build it and they will come. It's frustrating watching them waffle back and forth while things stall.
I like the piece because it's research-based. I did a study of a rail plan based on "Local incorporated cities get together and divide up the political pie, thereby leaving out essential entities that weren't municipalities, and then hired a consultant to pick the best rail locations for each city that had already been granted a rail station based on political jockeying."
Suffice it to say, political jockeying did not exactly pick optimal sites for the county in question.
> If a rail is built successfully, there will be an extraordinary increase in transportation abilities — saving commuters time while reducing environmental harm.
This high-speed rail is intended for people getting between home and workplace on a daily basis?
Edit: I'm not asking whether it can be used for daily commutes, but is daily commutes the reason for building this? Or what is the reason?
I have several friends that commute from Portland to seattle via bus or Vancouver to seattle via car or occasionally seaplane taxi. I’m sure they would really appreciate a high speed rail infrastructure particularly if it exits at a transportation hub as they propose.
I've had to do Boston to NYC a lot lately. I wish it was faster but frankly not really sure how much value is added by going faster.
US cities are still fairly spread out so for someone to be able to feasibly commute on it they'd have to be a short distance (both their house and workplace) to the train station. My unsophisticated take is that it seems like better local transpo would have an easier time of finding enough people.
Obviously these aren't mutually exclusive, but the number of people that would take advantage of true HSR that wouldnt take advantage of slower rail seems small.
It’s low-quality journalism. The actual report says that HSR competes with metro-to-metro air travel, and explicitly contrasts it to commuter rail. It says that when managed poorly,—for example, trying to serve too many communities—HSR ends up as an expensive version of commuter rail, which is a failure.
If the train have an average speed of >200mph it's likely to be a <55minute ride. It's not uncommon for people to have similar timed Amtrak rides in the North East as part of their commute. You can use a laptop to work on the train.
If you were to pick a dozen likely stops on this train, you'll likely end up with a name collision. Vancouver, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia. It's fun to think about how they would handle this. Would they use the full names in all documentation. Would they give one of the locations a nickname, such as "Southern Washington" or "British Columbia".
I also wonder what would be the largest mishap that could happen because of the name collision. Imagine going to the wrong country because of some minor miscommunication!
Amtrak Cascades literally has this problem today. Idiots like myself occasionally buy the wrong ticket and end up having to bus home instead. Took a floatplane to BC planning to take the train back, whoops the ticket is for Vancouver, WA.
The Ontario’s are funny. I often get something shipped and think it’s close at hand for southern Ontario, only to be disappointed when I realize it’s in California and it’ll be a few days before it even hits the border.
Saint John NB and St John’s NL is one I find endlessly funny. On paper it should not be a collision, and even out loud it really isn’t one, yet I know multiple people who have independently flown to the wrong one.
If you book flights to Sydney on Concur, you are given a choice between two places called "Sydney NS". One NS is Nova Scotia, Canada, the other is New South Wales, Australia, and they're about as far away as is possible on this globe.
I moved to Canada, and whenever I tell a Canadian my sister lives in London, I basically always have to add "in the U.K." just as they ask about London, ON.
For a region with relatively low population and big mountains, this is surprising. Sure, Florida built Brightline, but Miami plus Orlando alone equals the population of Portland + Seattle + Vancouver... on flat ground, with few changes to an existing rail corridor, over a shorter distance, and most importantly, it's all in the same country, in the same state even.
On the other hand, if it can work in PacNo, that's a call-out to all of the laggard corridors that have it so much easier: Atlanta-Charlotte, Washington-Richmond, etc.
Vancouver to Seattle would be doable. It’s the Portland to Vancouver part that would be hard. There were plans to rebuild the interstate bridge to allow more lanes, include pedestrian/bike crossing, and train crossing. It got so bogged down in disagreements that it was eventually scrapped. I’m not holding my breath on allowing a high speed rail crossing between Portland and Vancouver. Fortunately the rail yard in Vancouver is just on the other side of the Columbia.
Let me see if I can get this straight. $150 million for 200 miles of high speed rail track, trains and stations. Even in Taiwan, where it has existed for a minute, it’s $80 million PER MILE.
This, though, perfectly illustrates how Oregon likes to spend money: wasting it on projects that could never even possibly get off the ground based on the tiny commitment it’s willing to give.
In a high-density environment (hey there Japan!) HSR makes tons of sense. In a much lower-density area, moving people isn't the biggest problem, it's moving stuff.
Next time you take a long-distance flight in the USA, look out the window and ponder how dang big AND EMPTY the country is. People can be transported quickly by air, but for cargo you want energy efficiency per kg (not speed). For most of the USA, it's completely rational to build a slow, efficient cargo rail network. The overhead of airports makes sense for human transport given the distances involved. This is different from Europe/Japan where the overhead of air travel matters proportionally more given the short distances between destinations.
It gets worse. The value of a (human) rail network grows as its density grows. Germany is awesome because the rail network connects a bunch of different cities. Even if the Seattle+Portland route makes sense in isolation, that's basically the entire network right there. Maybe add Vancouver? There's no other population center even close... just 3 cities in a line on the coast. There's absolutely no multiplier effect on the new HSR links. They'd be better served by building a small dedicated airport at either end and running frequent commuter planes back and forth all day.
I don't think anyone is proposing building high-speed rail in empty places like Wyoming.
Most Americans don't live in those vast empty areas. There are large parts of the US that are as densely populated as Western Europe. HSR would make sense on the Eastern Seaboard, in the Midwest, California, the Texas triangle, and the Pacific Northwest. There are plenty of city pairs in the US with a few million people, separated by a few hundred miles, which is ideal for HSR.
Eugene -> Albany -> Salem -> Woodburn -> Wilsonville -> Tigard -> Portland -> Vancouver WA -> Woodland -> Long View -> Castle Rock ->Centralia -> Grand Mound -> Olympia -> Lacey -> DuPont -> Tacoma -> Federal Way -> Seattle-Tacoma International Airport -> Burien -> White Center -> Seattle -> Shoreline -> Lynnwood -> Everett.
You could keep going, but that gives you the spine of the populated places between Seattle and Portland and a little past them too covering basically the Willamette Valley in Oregon. You could extend through Mount Vernon and Bellingham up to British Columbia. You could run an East-West line connecting Forest Grove and Gresham through Hillsboro, Beaverton and Portland.
I know Seattle and Portland are the big ones, but the value to people in passenger rail is the whole rail network, not just two points. That said, I’m not going to defend the economics of high speed rail in America either, I’m a bit soured on it, just thought your characterization was unfair that Portland and Seattle were the only two points that mattered when you’ve got most of metropolitan Oregon and Washington around them.
That route at the top would make any high speed rail pointless. You would never get up to a speed to make it worth while. All to stop at places like Castle Rock population 2500. Going down to Eugene and Salem would make sense, but with the intent that they places would aim to grow in size considerably.
Places like Gresham to Forest grove are better for the Portland tram network, they are just part of the one metro area, they are not different metro areas like Seattle and Portland.
You can cut some of those out then if you think they don’t make sense. It was a quick and dirty example I came up with from my minimal knowledge of Oregon/Washington geography (not nothing but not exceptional) and tracing a route through Apple Maps. Anyone with better knowledge of the local geography can take a second pass and come up with something more reasonable.
You do want some local service at some in-fill stations though between the major destinations, even run express and local service, but as long as you can park your car at a station, having a station that the more suburban/rural parts slightly off the beaten trackway can go to still makes it accessible to more people in the State.
Yeah absolutely! A local service that works well alongside a high speed intercity one would be greta, though may be better to build after the main route (don't want some small stations slowing down the main route build).
For the East/West corridor slower speed trains at the same stations allowing transfers would be preferable (cheaper and quicker to build, with minimal speed impact) to high speed rail.
Ah, express and local service are terms of art used by at least Caltrain that I may or may not be wrongly assuming is more widespread (although another commenter below mentioned it’s used by the Shinkansen services in Japan as well which I think I knew but forgot). They have their “baby bullet” service which amounts to: these set of trains in particular skip a bunch of stations along the way, and the local service just serves all of them.
You can run them on the same tracks with the same stock. You have e.g. the 9:00 express train depart from Portland serving a subset of the stations between it and Seattle and maybe the 9:15 departs and serves all of them followed by another express at 9:45. Each stop shouldn’t add more than 2 or 3 minutes between terminuses, if the service stops for a generous amount of time at each one.
And then yeah, you have your regional transportation agencies to serving the metro areas along the way more comprehensively.
Shanghai to Beijing has a high speed line and no cities nearly as big as either of them between the two. Not to mention China's HSR network covers a number of cities over large distances. I think that'd be the better comparison to the US, no? Large geography with pockets of higher population?
The rail situation in the US is woeful and it's important to understand why:
1. Privatization has been an absolute disaster for the rail industry. Privatization has simply become a way to privatize profits and socialize losses. The advent of Precision Scheduled Railroading ("PSR") [1]. It not only decreases safety but leads to massive delays for passenger trains who can't pass the longer trains that PSR results in;
2. A car-centric culture that originated after WW2 that ultimately came from excluding poor people, particularly people of color. There is a strong cultural bias against any form of public transportation because many view it as raising taxes even though road infrastructure is heavily subsidized; and
3. Further to (2), there are some billionaires who capitalize on this attitude and fan the flames by fighting against any form of public transportation and passenger rail (eg [2][3]); and
4. The US suffered from a first mover advantage. From the mid-19th century, the US built a massive aamount of rail infrastructure. This was designed for far slower trains. You can't just put high speed trains on the same track. China in comparison didn't have that problem; and
5. The pre-eminence of private property in the US makes building anything like this difficult and expensive. Yes, there's eminent domain but local and county authorities can hold things up for years. If you look into the California HIgh Speed Rail project, you see a lot of concessions have been made with the route and stations in relatively low population centers just to get planning permission, which increases the route length and the LA and SF travel time.
Large parts of the US are ideal for high-speed rail.
The Eastern Seaboard is basically perfectly laid out for high-speed rail (Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - Baltimore - DC). The Midwest has tons of ideal city pairs, such as Chicago - Detroit or Chicago - St. Louis. Even a line between Chicago and NYC would be practical (3.5 hours downtown to downtown with modern HSR).
The main problems for HSR in the US are: extremely car-centric development, highly individualistic politics, incapability of pulling off large public projects.
That is true in a broad sense, but there are certainly many city pairs / areas where cities are within few hundred miles of each other. For example, there are flights from SF to San Jose, there are flights from Chicago to Madison, there are flights from Chicago to St Louis and so on. All city pairs where a HSR would be faster / same time duration as a plane end to end.
Spain is the place to look if you want to build HSR. They have built a lot of it for much cheaper than any other country. Japan has the most used HSR trains, but that is about population density, not that they do anything in particular right.
I'd drop the Netherlands for Turkey, and France for south Korea in a heartbeat if I was in charge. Probably Taiwan for Italy as well.
The above is about building. Once it is built Japan and France have a lot to teach the world about operations.
> The proliferation of high-speed rail creates many opportunities for case studies. Cases in this report represent systems developed in areas with institutional and geographic attributes comparable to the Pacific Northwest. While this objective for research did not preclude study of the Chinese, Japanese, and full European networks, it did lead to the selection of the following cases:
> International
> • The corridor linking Paris, France to Amsterdam in the Netherlands
> • The high-speed rail systems of Spain
> • Taiwan high-speed rail, linking Taipei to Kaohsiung
> United States
> • California, linking San Francisco and Sacramento to Los Angeles and San Diego
> • Texas, from Dallas to Houston
> • Florida, linking Tampa to Orlando and Miami
p. 45:
> The rail corridor linking France, Belgium, and the Netherlands is similar in scale and scope to the project contemplated for the Cascadia corridor in the Pacific Northwest, and includes two national border crossings. The high-speed rail systems of Spain were developed after a market of suppliers had developed endogenously within France, Germany, and Japan, allowing for methods of procurement of international expertise that more likely resemble opportunities today in the U.S. The Taiwan high-speed rail project is a public-private partnership that received bids from consortia representing firms from the U.S. as well as Japan, France, and Germany, for the partial private financing of a project that incorporates real estate development of station areas into its revenue stream.
The rest of the report uses existing research about Japan's Shinkansen rather than conducting new interviews on it. Parts of chapter 2 detail some of the factors distancing Japan's system from a PNW system, such as how Japan's real-estate development and urban rail planning were mostly coterminous, creating systems that were conducive to connecting with high-speed rail, while in the U.S. history went mostly in the opposite direction.
In a subsection titled "Researchers caution against direct comparisons of proposed U.S. high speed lines with existing systems in other countries", pps. 22–23:
> This means that Japan has benefitted from a Century of transit-oriented land use development, in ways that strain comparison with conditions for rail development in the U.S. European high-speed rail lines were designed for metro-to-metro service atop existing and robust national rail networks, which served as meaningful platforms for public transportation agencies to grow and develop services. ... In Japan and China, for example, high-speed rail development began at a time when the air travel market was not as well-developed as it is today in the U.S. Compared to the U.S., there were also greater financial disincentives to owning and operating cars in Japan, China, and Europe, which likely influenced the pace and relative success of rail travel in those parts of the world (Deakin and Pérez Henríquez, 2017; Cervero, 1998).
I wish we had trains just like Japan and Europe have, but we don't have geography or population density like Japan or Europe has.
We have surmountable problems in regulation that drive up our costs to 6x per mile what it costs other countries but the problem is the revenue per ticket mile. Hard to match the city and population density.
There's plenty of high density in certain corridors of North America. Vancouver -> Seattle -> Portland, potentially extending down to California. Geography is not an excuse. Japan and China have horrible geography too.
"Along with community engagement, limiting political sway is important. The study shows that if political representatives convince planners to route through different locations — deviating from the design — cities could end up with an expensive commuter rail system instead of a competitive high-speed rail."
As a PNW native: no thanks. I'd much rather we spend tax dollars on ways to prevent the need for commutes – especially ones that require highway travel.
How are tax dollars supposed to help prevent the need for commutes? By subsidizing remote work? I truly cannot follow the logic, curious to hear what you mean.
Public transport has been proven time and time again by numerous studies to be one of the best investments of tax money around. Just take a look at the absolute mess of a traffic situation that basically the entire Los Angeles metro area experiences, a direct result of no useful public transport system.
I'm still unclear on how that could be accomplished. Its pretty obvious that most companies larger than startups are unwilling to fully embrace remote work and need to make themselves feel good about the money they invest into their leases/real estate and so force their employees into at least 2/3 days in office.
Are you proposing that the government just give money to businesses so long as they keep their workers at home? This would have a pretty big impact on peripheral businesses near office parks (coffee shops, restaurants, etc). SF is the perfect example - the city's tax revenue is down big time from pre-COVID and continuing to worsen, primarily because of the work-from-home trend.
BTW - I'm NOT advocating for return to office, at least not for software engineers.
I understand the difference, and chose my words intentionally. What evidence do you have that the purpose of the high speed rail project is primarily for commuting to and from work? I’d be willing to wager that the actual report (which I haven’t read) probably names a variety of reasons for high speed rail in the PNW, of which commuting is one of many.
Setting your passive aggressive pedantry aside, you haven’t answered the question: how would you like the government to prevent commuting in the PNW? And—now that we’re focusing on just one form of travel—how much do you expect that will reduce the demand for travel, and how will that reduction change the desirability of high-speed rail?
Did you RTFA? The cited UW report is entirely about commuters.
If you want to visit granny in Portland, take a car no problem. If a Seattle exec needs to meet with his dev team in Olympia once a week, make it a zoom.
The word “commuter” appears 19 times, always in the context of “local commuter rail,” in contrast to the high speed rail the report discusses.
High speed rail is very clearly described as a metro-to-metro solution, in competition with air travel. Commuting is not the stated purpose. The stated purpose is to “overcome long-term problems of affordable housing, traffic congestion, and greenhouse gas emissions.”
They clearly did read it. And the actual report, which is the thing that really matters.
You clearly have not, on the other hand. Nor do you have the most basic understanding of the purpose of HSR, which you wouldn’t even need to read the report to know.
It’s ok to say “I’m wrong”, you know.
> Let me ask you a different question, since you brought up air travel; what sort of ticket/buyer do you think accounts for the bulk of domestic airlines' revenues?
It sure isn’t commuting if that’s what you’re getting at.
You asked for most revenue, not most profit. Ticket volume directly correlates, especially when one source accounts for 80% of the volume.
But I’m sure you have sources for your moved goalposts, right? Please, show me how commutes are the most profitable. Or most revenue. Or literally anything where they are considered “most” when it comes to air or HSR.
Once again, it’s ok to say you’re wrong about something. Doubling down by constantly moving the goalposts is probably the most idiotic way to make your point.
Asking for a source is not being upset, but way to bring an ad hominem into it along with the moved goalposts. You’re just going for all the fallacies aren’t you?
I guess it’s easier for you to move goal posts and make claims than it is to back them up when pushed to do so.
You literally have not provided a single thing to back anything you’ve said up and are pretending like somehow I’m the unreasonable person.
Next time, just be consistent in your claims and back your shit up. It’s really not that hard.
Do you have a source yet? Or are you just going to ad hominem and move the goal posts again with “the larger point”?
> Let me ask you a different question, since you brought up air travel; what sort of ticket/buyer do you think accounts for the bulk of domestic airlines' revenues?
You implied commuters are the major source of revenue for flights. I have asked you for a source four times now for this claim. You have consistently refused to do so.
Provide the source or stop wasting all our time with these theatrics.
It's useful because the rail doesn't go to your exact destination. You will need to drive there. It is expensive to have a separate car in both cities instead of just taking a single car with you.
If we're talking about high speed rail into Seattle, then you have pretty solid public transit options from the city center to where you would most likely be traveling to.
That depends a lot on how the cities on either end are designed, in particular how easy it is to get around without a car in each. Also, car rentals exist.
People find a similar thing (with boats rather than trains) quite useful for smaller distances (see the Washington state ferry system), so it is not obvious that it would not be useful with trains.
It's possible other corridors could be identified that could run something like that, though it probably needs to be about 800-900 miles to make it "worth" it time wise - shorter and it's simpler to just drive.
It’s mostly the Northeast Corridor from Boston to DC where Amtrak makes the majority of its profits though—which it then mostly loses in the rest of the country.
The auto train to Florida is sort of a special case. That’s not people traveling for a long weekend or even a week. It’s historically been people going south for the winter. Not sure it’s profitable though don’t see recent numbers.
If they really run that train every single day year round, and it almost always sells out, it can't just be people going south and back, or the winter trains would be empty.
I think it's just a common trip and the train is cheap/convenient enough.
I stand corrected. I thought it was a less frequent thing. Assume a lot of families do the theme parks that you really need a car for but they don’t want to do the long drive from the mid-Atlantic. Don’t know if it makes money though.
If done right the stations will be in locations where having a car is more of a liability than a convenience (i.e. downtowns with lots of traffic and expensive parking).
Yeah see this is the problem - urbanist aesthetics demanding everyone live a very particular lifestyle, which includes a lot more than just urban living hamstringing projects.
Respectfully, suburban guys want to use urban cores rent free. If people with cars actually paid anything close to market rates for the precious real estate they take up with their cars, then most of them would just walk/bike/bus in the city. Car drivers have the government on their side, so they get heavily subsidized real estate (roads, parking).
I don't think this treatment is very equal or fair. Keep your house and your car (SUV?), but pay real tolls and real parking fees.
The US managed to build cities and suburbs fine before car drivers got government priority.
Similarly, however - urban cores want suburban business without having to deal with the low tax revenue of actual bedrooms. The city of Chicago is instructive, the city is (very slightly) subsidized by suburban consumers and tax revenue. The big trick here is making suburbs without allowing the endless continuation of exurbs
With no street parking, ambulances pass right through.
Also, you don't allow through-traffic of cars.
The only vehicular traffic are taxis (supply limited with licenses), delivery vehicles, emergency vehicles, and those rare people willing to pay $60 to drive into the city to pick up a box or furniture.
I live in a big city like this. Ambulances pass through just fine. The only traffic jams are tolled highways in/out of the city. And those highways are capped at 4 lanes wide with demand moderated with tolls.
If you do a return-on-asset, where asset=sqft of space in a city, you really want to kick out car drivers b/c they are the most space intensive with least return (economic boost/tax revenue). They are like moochers in cafes that buy the cheapest coffee and sit for 5 hours.
> urbanist aesthetics demanding everyone live a very particular lifestyle, which includes a lot more than just urban living hamstringing projects.
You’re literally just describing how most of the population lives and has lived for the past 1000 years. Your “urbanist aesthetics” predate the invention of cars.
The small towns and farmsteads of history look a lot more like suburbs than modern high-rises. Even in large cities, every house would have significant garden to meet everyday needs.
A very small percentage of the population lived in "urban" cities, with houses back-to-back. Rome was an anomaly in that regard, made possible by significant farmsteads held by the nobility outside the city and grain bribes paid out by them.
There’s a little problem with that. You want people who live close but not directly near one of the stations to also drive and park and take it. So you do need stations continently outside of the super dense metro area.
You don't need a high-speed rail station for that; you just need one of the park-n-ride lots at a light-rail station. You drive to the transit network, then use the local train to reach the regional train.
One of the obvious problems with this, at least in the California metros, is going to be that these stations are watering holes for people who engage in car breakins.
Interesting. I haven't heard of that as a significant problem with the existing Sound Transit park-n-rides; I wonder if that is a regional difference, or whether it is a function of system size.
And Whittington says the designers must also ensure the rail remains dedicated to its high-speed route and that people have the ability to get to the rail through other means of public transportation. “There are going to be a lot of communities you want to serve,” Whittington said, “but you want to find a way to bring those communities to the routes as opposed to bringing the route to the communities.”
I'm 35 with two kids, too bad for your ageist argument.
And you don't even need a special kind of bike to carry two kids on a single bike: you can put both a front and back mounted seats on litterally any bike, even foldable ones!
If the infrastructures are adapted, even carrying 4 children on a single bike isn't too big of a deal, especially with e-bikes (you can either use a cargo bike or a trailer and two seats).
Do confuse your lack of imagination for an inherent impossiblity.
Extremely unlikely. The population density just isn't there. There are 12m people in Washington and Oregon combined, a substantial portion of whom are not on the I-5 corridor. The corridor in general is about 800km long. Compare to ~70m within 500 km of Paris.
Yes. I've ridden on many of them. I'm a huge HSR proponent. I just don't think it works for Eugene to Vancouver. If we had double the population it would be a no-brainer.
The math is very clear. Below about 25,000 people per linear kilometer of lines, they require massive subsidies and never really pay off. Eugene to Vancouver BC is <12,000 people per linear kilometer. Honestly I would love to be wrong.
To play devil's advocate, induced demand is a good thing - more people getting to go where they want to go. I'm all in favor of HSR but you have to balance the viewpoint - roads are a good thing, in general, they just should be a (much smaller) part of the mix instead of the only answer. Most freight should move by boat and rail, most passengers should move by rail and bus, and roads should be mostly for adhoc trips and deliveries rather than daily commutes.
It'd be a shame if makers of self-driving cars stuck to actual cars and single trips.
Something in between that and buses might be very efficient and practical, especially for things like work commutes, visits to the supermarket and the like. Having say 6 or 8 seats and picking up multiple parties who are heading in the same direction or going to roughly the same destination. It would likely be quicker than waiting for a single trip car and definitely cheaper. Additionally it would likely reduce the number of autonomous vehicles on the road and use less resources.
Erm. Waymo exists already. It's not perfect, but it works. You can get a ride in an actual human-free taxi in SF.
Extending Waymo to handle ALL possible situations autonomously (you put in "New York" in the address field and the car drives you there from Seattle) is probably a too big ask, but working within a pre-mapped area on semi-fixed routes seems plausible.
What Waymo et al have now probably is sufficient for a "public transport" role, given the fixed service area and high density enabling investment in mapping infrastructure with manual fixes and local heuristics.
Induced demand is a sign of success: it allows more people to move comfortably between points, and it increases the overall economic activity by inducing more trips.
The only reasonable part of that argument is that lane expansion doesn't increase the average _speed_. And this is indeed true. Instead of lane expansion we ideally should just increase the interconnectivity by building new roads.
In the case of the Puget Sound, I-605 that would bypass I-405 bottleneck is sorely needed.
Perhaps you'll be shocked to hear that countries like Sweden have HSR despite not being particularly densely populated? It's absurd how much money is poured into roads and yet never attracts the same criticism.
The areas in Sweden with railroads are more populated than the Van/Sea/Pdx corridor, by about 1.8x, more if you drop a couple outlying small towns that don't make sense in themselves to connect except for network completeness reasons. Also, railways in Sweden are more middle-speed trains these days, running 200km/h as far as I am aware. These people are proposing 300km/h+ which requires a significantly higher level of track investment - you can't just use standard sleepers and bolted rails.
Yes, that's why I said "a substantial portion". About 25% of OR/WA don't live within an hour of the corridor. I live in Oregon, along the I-5 corridor. I've been looking at the feasibility of HSR for years. The math does not yet make sense. If the population was doubled, it would be a no-brainer.
Normally, I'd agree with you, but the Portland-Seattle HSR corridor is around the low end of viable HSR corridors. You're connecting the 17th, 27th, and 28th largest cities in US+Canada, with no realistic prospects to connect anything else approaching a major city--the next largest city is Boise, but that's 350mi away as the crow flies (and mountains means it's quite further in practice), and smaller than even places like Fresno/Bakersfield, which people complain about CAHSR considering to visit. Oh, and one of those three cities is on the other side of an international border, which tends to dampen ridership a fair amount.
By contrast, all the other standard HSR candidates anchor regions that involve at least one, and for all but the Midwest two, cities in the top 10, with many more in the top 50.
I mean I've been doing the math and looking at ridership, transportation and population density mapping in hopes of justifying it for about two of those decades.
Show me a similar area with fewer than 12,000 people per linear kilometer that has HSR and I will be impressed and take notes. I don't know of anywhere on earth that has fast trains and that few people.
Population density of entire states/provinces is completely irrelevant. I trust you're aware that ~ 2/3rds of BC's population, for example, lives in a tiny strip of land (Lower Mainland).
There are 10 million people in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver metro areas, and the distance between the three is about 500 km. That would be more than enough density for high speed train in any part of the world. Spain's major population centres are a lot more geographically spread out.
I'm not sure I'd start with high speed rail in this corridor. The focus should be on high-frequency, high-reliability fast trains that may not hit the true HSR speeds, but at e.g. 200 kmh would be plenty fast enough for now. But the argument that "the population density isn't there" for HSR is absurd.
I love trains but the discussions on HN have a quality of a cargo cult, anyone who even slightly slides off tracks is punished. It exhibits similar characteristics found in climate change movement or other progressive agenda. No room for nuanced discussion, only extreme conformism.
It actually has a reverse effect on me. Why is this thing pushed through without debate? It might gather more support if you allow criticism.
