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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

#151

Post by andbberger »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #112
quailfarmer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 c…

> 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

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

#152

Post by freitzkriesler2 »

sfpotter wrote: post #3

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…

Amtrak needs to own its own rails and it have to share them with freight.

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

#153

Post by hifromLA »

bombcar wrote: post #56
hiram112 wrote: post #17

They allocated $150M according to the article. 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.

California's spent something like $9 billion and they hadn't a single mile of track by 2022. Maybe we should do a crawl/walk/run instead of jumping directly to HSR.

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.

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

#154

Post by forrestthewoods »

andbberger wrote: post #151
forrestthewoods wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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 a…

High-speed rail isn’t really for daily commuters. Shinkansen tickets are quite expensive. We’re talking $100 each way.

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.

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

#155

Post by denimnerd42 »

irrational wrote: post #120
throwaway-blaze wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why does there need to be a balance? Wyoming is considered the most Republican state. Do people there talk about there needing to be more balance?

what people? no one lives there

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

#156

Post by justrealist »

jeffbee wrote: post #141
bombcar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California's spent something like $9 billion and they hadn't a single mile of track by 2022. Maybe we should do a crawl/walk/run instead of jumping directly to HSR.

“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.

> and there’s a machine that can poop out HSR tracks at 1km/hour.

Uh... not in the US, there isn't.

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

#157

Post by _ah »

This is dumb.

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.

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

#158

Post by afavour »

peyton wrote: post #73
UtopiaPunk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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?

> Can’t they just pay for priority?

With what money? Oh, the extra money they could be allocated by… Congress?

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

#159

Post by denimnerd42 »

ojbyrne wrote: post #128
hx8 wrote: post #66

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 h…

My favorite name collision is Ontario, CA (city, state) and Ontario, CA (province, country).

I had a friend from Ontario tell me she was going to school in London. That was confusing initially.

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

#160

Post by govg »

Exoristos wrote: post #103
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…

The answer is much simpler. U.S. cities are too far apart for rail to be practical here.

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.
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