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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

#231

Post by forrestthewoods »

andbberger wrote: post #196
forrestthewoods wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> pricing is a policy choice

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.

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

#232

Post by littlestymaar »

pxmpxm wrote: post #213
littlestymaar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a bike instead of a car and you'll be there. (Ideally you can even have your bike be foldable for maximum convenience)

Single, childless 20 year old's ideas. You will get zero traction with this mentality.

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.

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

#233

Post by eightysixfour »

psunavy03 wrote: post #168
carabiner wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.…

It is one of the lowest tax burdened places in the whole country.

Seattle elected a right wing DA because the Dems ran a too progressive candidate, the mayor is a middle-of-the-road dem…

I think maybe you take the loud voices in Cap Hill and extrapolate a bit too much.

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

#234

Post by kdmccormick »

peyton wrote: post #197
afavour wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can’t they just pay for priority? With what money? Oh, the extra money they could be allocated by… Congress?

Amtrak sells tickets.

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...?

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

#235

Post by dclowd9901 »

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.

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

#236

Post by kdmccormick »

chrisweekly wrote: post #230
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…

"the first day the train derailed" !! that's astonishing.

"the first day [that] the train derailed"

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

#237

Post by ghaff »

paulcole wrote: post #217
NegativeLatency wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#238

Post by jcranmer »

dredmorbius wrote: post #207
euroderf wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 ma…

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.

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

#239

Post by LeanderK »

ghaff wrote: post #142
rob74 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#240

Post by ghaff »

bombcar wrote: post #224
ghaff wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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