Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

Adding to this, there's a pretty interesting paradox of transportation infrastructure as relates to land values, and a characteristic I've noticed of many high-speed rail systems.

The creation of transportation infrastructure can convert land from low-value (as reflected by market prices) to high, and this has very often occurred. The US Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, was seen by many as a boondoggle, and indeed traveled through all but completely unpopulated (by European settlers) lands. But development quickly followed.

One settlement bypassed by the railroad was Denver, Colorado. That city raised funds to create a spur line to the Transcontinental Railroad in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and in the decade following that line's completion, Denver's population exploded tenfold, from 5,000 to over 50,000 inhabitants.

Many commuter streetcar and heavy rail lines were created as, or in partnership with, real estate developments, and profits from land speculation were often a very substantial portion of overall profits from such operations.

The flip side is that once land values have increased, establishing new rights of way becomes extraordinarily expensive. Which means that backfilling high-speed rail into an extant prosperous region is insanely expensive, not only in direct land acquisition costs but in the costs of passing legislation and litigating various objections to such projects.

Of the major high-speed rail projects created since 1950, at least three, Japan's Shinkansen, France's TGV, and China's CRH, all seem to me to have benefitted either from being developed in a post-war period of depressed property values (Japan & France) or emerged as a greenfield development through regions in which property values had not yet appreciated ... and in which private property ownership isn't a well-developed institution in the first place (China).

The very slowly-progressing process of high speed rail in California is in many ways due to both the high land valuations of that state and a political environment in which legal objections to such projects are easy to mount. The easiest places to proceed with the project are in the relatively depopulated and low-land-value Central Valley. Geography also plays a role in constraining potential routes, most especially within the San Francisco Bay Area (and especially especially along the San Francisco Peninsula, some of the highest-valued land in the world), and in crossing the Tehachapi mountains at the southern end of the Central Valley, through which there are very few viable routes. These create choke points by which interests opposed to, or simply looking to benefit disproportionately from, the project can focus obstruction efforts, and they have.

In darker moments, I reflect that it might be opportune to wait for a major San Andreas Fault movement to press forward with rail plans, whilst opposition is both defunded and occupied with other concerns.

The document referenced in the link specifically advises to not set up stops between but to build transit from stops to the major stations.

Spreading the density out from the major stations along the route is exactly what sprawl is. I’m not sure I understand how it can be any other way. By making the urban cores more attractive and able to access other urban cores you encourage density growth in and around that core. Encouraging growth along the corridor encourages lower density construction over more land area. That’s what sprawl is.

Finally why does it not make sense to only stop in the most dense cores of the region? The whole point of high speed rail is to be high speed. Each stop slows the train. Spur transit brings people from around the region to the transit hub. Most of the economic activity happens in and around these urban cores and most transit across the corridor is between the cores. Building services to commuter communities certainly relieves density pressure on the cores, but that only really helps people who would live in the urban core but for whatever reason can’t afford or doesn’t want to live there. Their commute pattern is from their suburban sprawl commuter community to their proximate core. Spur regional transit can handle that if it’s a priority. (See seattle light rail plans)

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.