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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

#141

Post by jeffbee »

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.

“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.

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

#142

Post by ghaff »

rob74 wrote: post #130
ghaff wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 hr Seattle to Portland probably doesn’t even really make it commuting distance because very few people are going to live and work close enough to the endpoints to keep things to 90 minutes total. Boston to NYC is 4 hours or so and that’s useful for a lot of purposes although that’s admittedly in part because driving and parking in Manhattan is so awful. (I could drive from my house to Manhattan faster but I hardly…

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.

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

#143

Post by andbberger »

carabiner wrote: post #79
CSMastermind wrote: post #70

For those unaware allow me to present The Seattle Process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_process Otherwise known as "decision making through exhaustion" where everyone tries to stop progress as much as possible until the other people get so sick of arguing with you that they give up and you get your way. The Seattle region might be the part of the country least capable of building infrastructure. I'll believe…

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.

california does indeed have it's own special brand of Process

it is truly amazing that san francisco, which would be one of the largest cities in the world if its growth weren't checked by its idiotic politics, remains the underdeveloped relative backwater that it is

and of course the high speed rail project, probably the most important transport megaproject in US history (by virtue of the influence its legacy it will have on the rest of the country), has been so spectacularly mismanaged through a combination of corruption and the California Process such that if i ever does reach the termini, political compromises made during its design will cripple both HSR and caltrain's operations and increase the journey time to no longer be competitive with airlines. in all likelihood the legacy will be the palatial viaducts built in literal cornfields that serve no purpose other than to enrich contractors (see: hanford viaduct)

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

#144

Post by andbberger »

kposehn wrote: post #22
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…

The line is owned by BNSF and has quite a lot of BNSF and Union Pacific trains running on it daily, in addition to the Cascades services. No amount of improving the tracks will fix congestion, so moving to a separate line entirely for passenger service makes a ton of sense.

organization before electronics before concrete. some amount of infrastructure will fix congestion, how much depends on what precise timetable will be run. the swiss manage to run a huge amount of freight alongside many passenger trains because they did their homework and built infrastructure where it was needed.

in general, "precision scheduled railroading" has fucked passenger-freight interoperability in the states because the freight railroads are running trains too long to fit into any of the sidings, which forces amtrak into the pocket

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

#145

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #123
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany: population: 84,270,625 area: 357,592 km^2 density: 232/km^2 WA: population: 7,785,786 area: 184,827 km^2 density: 39.6/km^2 In almost no way are they comparable. 1/10th the population, 1/2 the area, 1/8th the density.

eye roll I knew there would be some pedantic that would come along with this and I should have self edited to make it clear I was talking about square miles - which is why I included BOTH WA and OR which is especially relevant given that the article dreams about connecting not only WA and OR but also BC. Pop doesn't matter and neither does density for this subject. Every pissant village in Europe has a bus route, str…

I just cycled from Santa Fe to Seattle. I lived in Seattle from 89-97. I know what the state is like.

Lots of good reasons to justify train system expansion (even ... explosion), but not "it's just like Germany".

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

#146

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #114
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany: population: 84,270,625 area: 357,592 km^2 density: 232/km^2 WA: population: 7,785,786 area: 184,827 km^2 density: 39.6/km^2 In almost no way are they comparable. 1/10th the population, 1/2 the area, 1/8th the density.

State population density simply doesn't matter. City population and distance between cities matters. Nobody realistically expects train lines to enable transportation to every square mile of the state.

Well, Germany sort of does ....

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

#147

Post by amrocha »

jboydyhacker wrote: post #97

I wish we had trains just like Japan and Europe have, but we don't have geography or population density like Japan or Europe has. We have surmountable problems in regulation that drive up our costs to 6x per mile what it costs other countries but the problem is the revenue per ticket mile. Hard to match the city and population density.

There's plenty of high density in certain corridors of North America. Vancouver -> Seattle -> Portland, potentially extending down to California. Geography is not an excuse. Japan and China have horrible geography too.

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

#148

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #107
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany: population: 84,270,625 area: 357,592 km^2 density: 232/km^2 WA: population: 7,785,786 area: 184,827 km^2 density: 39.6/km^2 In almost no way are they comparable. 1/10th the population, 1/2 the area, 1/8th the density.

I do want to point out that unlike Germany, where the population centers are relatively spread out over the area, in WA and OR, the vast majority of the population lives in a fairly narrow band largely following I5. The density of the Portland - Seattle - Vancouver corridor is a little less dire. Eastern WA and OR are relatively sparsely populated, so HSR to those areas is almost a non-starter.

Yeah fine, I fully believe in the Vancouver->Vancouver (cough) train line.

The justification for it, however, is not "WA is just like Germany".

First of all, it's gone to be a relatively single-line system, paralleling I-5, which is quite unlike Germany,

Second, even with the full west-of-cascades population, you're still not even remotely close to the population of Germany. You not even really that close to the population along any of the busiest lines within Germany,.

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

#149

Post by beembeem »

irrational wrote: post #113

Vancouver to Seattle would be doable. It’s the Portland to Vancouver part that would be hard. There were plans to rebuild the interstate bridge to allow more lanes, include pedestrian/bike crossing, and train crossing. It got so bogged down in disagreements that it was eventually scrapped. I’m not holding my breath on allowing a high speed rail crossing between Portland and Vancouver. Fortunately the rail yard in Van…

Aha, to clarify for others - Vancouver WA is what you're referring to, not BC.
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