It would be useful if you could drive your car onto the rail and it carried you and your car at 300 mph.
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).
Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
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Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#12It would be useful if you could drive your car onto the rail and it carried you and your car at 300 mph.
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).
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#13Amtrak 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…
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?
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#14It would be useful if you could drive your car onto the rail and it carried you and your car at 300 mph.
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#15Extremely 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.
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#16Amtrak 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…
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?
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#17I 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.
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you know there are nice and fast trains in Europe outside of the Paris region?
Which carry all those people mentioned, around? Europe is crazily, densely populated.
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#19It would be useful if you could drive your car onto the rail and it carried you and your car at 300 mph.
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).
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
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.