As a PNW native: no thanks. I'd much rather we spend tax dollars on ways to prevent the need for commutes – especially ones that require highway travel.
Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
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Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#92If 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…
Amtrak Cascades literally has this problem today. Idiots like myself occasionally buy the wrong ticket and end up having to bus home instead. Took a floatplane to BC planning to take the train back, whoops the ticket is for Vancouver, WA.
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#93Extremely unlikely. The population density just isn't there. There are 12m people in Washington and Oregon combined, a substantial portion of whom are not on the I-5 corridor. The corridor in general is about 800km long. Compare to ~70m within 500 km of Paris.
Did you know there are nice and fast trains in Europe outside of the Paris region?
The whole WA is just around 7 million people. Portland area is around 2.
Yet the distance between Seattle and Portland is the same as between Frankfurt and Munich.
There's simply not enough traffic to justify a train. Another lane on I-5 would help a lot more.
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#94For 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…
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Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#95As a PNW native: no thanks. I'd much rather we spend tax dollars on ways to prevent the need for commutes – especially ones that require highway travel.
What would prevent the need for travel between Portland, Seattle, and BC, and how would you like the government to make that happen?
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#96As a PNW native: no thanks. I'd much rather we spend tax dollars on ways to prevent the need for commutes – especially ones that require highway travel.
How exactly would you prevent the need to travel between cities? Vancouver-Seattle or Seattle-Portland isn't exactly a "commute".
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#97I 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.
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#98Yawn. So maybe we'll have a connection to Spokane in another 80 years and a connection to the Tri-Cities by 2123. Let me know when it gets to my house. I know perhaps I shouldn't be this negative, but... let's use Germany as an example, as it is roughly comparable to Washington and Oregon. Its residents now have a 49 Euro ticket anywhere in the country, useable on multiple forms of transit. We don't even have buses,…
They probably don't suffer from as much graft as we here in the U.S.
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know the answer to either of your questions. Is track more expensive than new high-speed trains?
Construction is expensive, and purchasing right of way in populated areas is ridiculously expensive. Short tracks are more expensive because you want to do inconvenient things in order to keep them short (like tunneling and building bridges) instead of taking the path of least resistance. You need all of these things for a good high speel rail, but you need a lot of it to even improve the existing rail. There's some…
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 ever do.)
Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW
#100There are now only 3 decent sized concentrations of people in that corridor, but maybe building something like this would allow a whole new 1MM person metro to develop, e.g. around Olympia or in the Skagit Valley
I sincerely hope not. Sprawl is the anti pattern maximizing human impact. The skagit valley in particular is beautiful - the last it needs is a suburban megaplex.
An advantage of building on farms or other greenfield land is that you can start off with dense, walkable planning rather than car-oriented suburban expanse.