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Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

southseattleemerald.com

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Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#81

Post by jcranmer »

melling wrote: post #35
jaggederest wrote: post #4

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.

You probably don’t realize this, but you’re just perpetuating misinformation that’s been debunked repeatedly for decades.

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.

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#83

Post by jcranmer »

gruez wrote: post #74
jmyeet wrote: post #67

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…

>1. Privatization has been an absolute disaster for the rail industry. Privatization implies it was previously nationalized. Was that ever the case?

Technically, yes--the railroads were temporarily nationalized during WWI.

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#84

Post by scarab92 »

UtopiaPunk wrote: post #39
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Amtrak-has-priority-o...

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.

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#85

Post by jaggederest »

melling wrote: post #35
jaggederest wrote: post #4

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.

You probably don’t realize this, but you’re just perpetuating misinformation that’s been debunked repeatedly for decades.

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.

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#87

Post by salamiboy »

"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."

Good luck, it's Seattle

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#88

Post by marssaxman »

upon_drumhead wrote: post #12
frankus wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#89

Post by quailfarmer »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #71
fnordpiglet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#90

Post by jaggederest »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #18
b112 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which carry all those people mentioned, around? Europe is crazily, densely populated.

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.
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