31–40 of 311 posts
It would be useful if you could drive your car onto the rail and it carried you and your car at 300 mph.
I am not sure it is useful to transport 2000 kg of metal occupying a half of a rail car, just to move 80kg meatbag for a distance of 173 miles.
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.
It would be useful if you could drive your car onto the rail and it carried you and your car at 300 mph.
Use a bike instead of a car and you'll be there. (Ideally you can even have your bike be foldable for maximum convenience)
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.
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).
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.”
Earlier 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.
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.
and it looks like they have 7 high speed lines coming from Paris. Seems the PNW could afford 1.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance
https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Amtrak-has-priority-o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
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.