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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

#261

Post by gabesk »

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.

Not just the first day, but the very first run. They cheaped out and didn't build a bypass for a 30 MPH curve on an otherwise 80 MPH run. Which, while embarrassing enough, shouldn't have resulted in an accident even if the conductor missed the signage as they did, but wasn't because the railways successfully lobbied to delay rolling out Positive Train Control for a few more years. The entire event was just a perfect illustration of the disastrous state of passenger train transit in this country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Washington_train_derailme...

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

#262

Post by SllX »

Balero wrote: post #211
SllX wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can cut some of those out then if you think they don’t make sense. It was a quick and dirty example I came up with from my minimal knowledge of Oregon/Washington geography (not nothing but not exceptional) and tracing a route through Apple Maps. Anyone with better knowledge of the local geography can take a second pass and come up with something more reasonable. You do want some local service at some in-fill stat…

Yeah absolutely! A local service that works well alongside a high speed intercity one would be greta, though may be better to build after the main route (don't want some small stations slowing down the main route build). For the East/West corridor slower speed trains at the same stations allowing transfers would be preferable (cheaper and quicker to build, with minimal speed impact) to high speed rail.

Ah, express and local service are terms of art used by at least Caltrain that I may or may not be wrongly assuming is more widespread (although another commenter below mentioned it’s used by the Shinkansen services in Japan as well which I think I knew but forgot). They have their “baby bullet” service which amounts to: these set of trains in particular skip a bunch of stations along the way, and the local service just serves all of them.

You can run them on the same tracks with the same stock. You have e.g. the 9:00 express train depart from Portland serving a subset of the stations between it and Seattle and maybe the 9:15 departs and serves all of them followed by another express at 9:45. Each stop shouldn’t add more than 2 or 3 minutes between terminuses, if the service stops for a generous amount of time at each one.

And then yeah, you have your regional transportation agencies to serving the metro areas along the way more comprehensively.

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

#263

Post by mgarfias »

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…

I want to know how they’re going to keep the homeless off the tracks.

I ride Amtrak to Portland 3d/wk and the amount of weird stuff happening along the tracks is staggering.

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

#264

Post by a2xd94 »

23B1 wrote: post #138
a2xd94 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are tax dollars supposed to help prevent the need for commutes? By subsidizing remote work? I truly cannot follow the logic, curious to hear what you mean. Public transport has been proven time and time again by numerous studies to be one of the best investments of tax money around. Just take a look at the absolute mess of a traffic situation that basically the entire Los Angeles metro area experiences, a direct…

There's a hundred different ways to disincentivize commutes – without subsidies either: simple tax incentives.

I'm still unclear on how that could be accomplished. Its pretty obvious that most companies larger than startups are unwilling to fully embrace remote work and need to make themselves feel good about the money they invest into their leases/real estate and so force their employees into at least 2/3 days in office.

Are you proposing that the government just give money to businesses so long as they keep their workers at home? This would have a pretty big impact on peripheral businesses near office parks (coffee shops, restaurants, etc). SF is the perfect example - the city's tax revenue is down big time from pre-COVID and continuing to worsen, primarily because of the work-from-home trend.

BTW - I'm NOT advocating for return to office, at least not for software engineers.

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

#265

Post by starkparker »

quailfarmer wrote: post #89
forrestthewoods wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Tokyo-Nagano leg of Hokuriku Shinkansen has at least seven stops over about 140 miles of rail, an average of less than 25 miles per stop; it still makes the trip in an average of 1 hour 40 minutes vs 3 hours or more by car, and it replaced a conventional rail line that took 2 hours 50 minutes to go from Ueno (one stop closer from the Shinkansen's Tokyo station) to Nagano.

Even the 320-mile Tokyo-Osaka Nozomi Shinkansen, the fastest Shinkansen train that makes the fewest stops and has the longest average distance between stops of any Shinkansen, makes at least four stops between, averages fewer than 120 miles between stops, and has two sibling lines that make more stops on the route.

Portland to Seattle is 145 miles by air and 178 miles by Amtrak. Seattle to Vancouver is about 120 by air and 155 miles by Amtrak. An equivalent Portland-Vancouver Shinkansen that didn't have any stops other than Seattle would have the fewest service stops of any Shinkansen line, and the most distance between stops by at least 25 miles/stop.

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

#266

Post by laurex »

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.

From the number of flights offered, I think it’s much more common than you might think. My guess is that part of the reason has to to with Seattle’s very very bad traffic. I once spent 4 hours traveling less than 15 miles on a drive heading south from the city center, and I don’t think that’s even super anomalous.

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

#267

Post by andbberger »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #231
andbberger wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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're not exactly making a good faith argument here [0] but sure i'll play ball

i'll ignore the infrastructure costs, it's free to drive on I-5 after all. an N700S costs about $50M and holds 1300 people. amortized over 30 years, you're looking at say $3M/year including a very generous maintenance budget. i'll throw in another $0.5M/year for misc personnel costs (driver, station staff).

even if you ran only a single weekday peak hour round trip per trainset with tickets priced at $20 one way, revenue would be about $13M/year. so you could charge $10 for tickets, follow american "best practices" of running only peak service and idling your expensive rolling stock for the rest of the day and still make ends meet.

in reality, the infra would be built following best practices to bring the runtime between portland and seattle to just under an hour[1]. this facilitates an hourly takt. running short turns between portland and seattle each trainset would make 5-8 round trips a day, which even with low occupancy factors is still tremendously profitable.

[0] see the other comment where you say that "transit dorks" never talk about how much things cost. "transit dorks" are _obsessed_ with how much things cost. alon levy, who is by all accounts one of the more influential voices in internet transit world these days has a multi year project in collaboration with several other transit activists to find out exactly why transit projects are expensive as they are in the US. not to mention dozens of blog posts analyzing individual projects. Clem Tillier has a site going back 15 years where he publishes very detailed analysis on the bay area portion of the california high speed rail project, its cost overruns and policy driven technical failings. that "transit dorks" don't care about cost is a conclusion you could draw if you only follow reductive normies like alan fisher, but if you uncritically accepted that such sophomoric reddit tier dialogue was the state of the art in transit twitter - well, one would have to really question how much critical thought you've put into your stance on car dependency and EVs.

[1] a route following I-5 is 260km so this is a reasonable assumption.

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

#268

Post by jaggederest »

lukas099 wrote: post #250
jaggederest wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's why I said "a substantial portion". About 25% of OR/WA don't live within an hour of the corridor. I live in Oregon, along the I-5 corridor. I've been looking at the feasibility of HSR for years. The math does not yet make sense. If the population was doubled, it would be a no-brainer.

How long until the population doubles? How much harder would it be to build HSR on a route with double the density?

Hopefully never, and not much more than currently

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

#269

Post by foota »

bluGill wrote: post #205
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...

Amtrak doesn't need priority, they need to run their trains on time. That means not running old worn out,.under maintained trains. They nees to leave on time, every time. That also means fining the freights when they have the track blocked so they cannot get access in their allocated time which was planed months ago.

They don't have the legal authority to fine them.
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