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.
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 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.
For some definition of small. Which I suspect is larger than “180 miles apart”.
I quite frankly just don’t see the value is connecting Portland and Seattle by high speed rail. Who gives a shit? Spend billions of dollars so that hundreds, perhaps even a whole thousand, of people can take a weekend trip that is slightly faster than a 3 hour drive?
I’d rather see Renton and Kenmore/Bothell quintuple in density and get connected by a nice, fast loop.
Seattle to SeaTac probably has about the right number of stops. Well, a few too many, but should be more than zero. Those stops just need to have something at them. We built a minimal amount of transit and then failed to upzone the neighborhood.
> I quite frankly just don’t see the value is connecting Portland and Seattle by high speed rail. Who gives a shit? Spend billions of dollars so that hundreds, perhaps even a whole thousand, of people can take a weekend trip that is slightly faster than a 3 hour drive
dramatically faster. travel time between portland and seattle along a realistic route is on the order of 90m with a few stops and 60m non-stop. about as long as my commute from SF to palo alto. at those distances a high speed rail connection is transformative, it would turn portland and seattle into one large metro area. portland and seattle are ideally situated in terms of population and distance for high speed rail.
but if you don't see the point in investing in high speed rail in general, I would suggest that you take a look at the latest news on the arctic sea ice and review what your state is spending on highways every year
> 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.
The latter requires building millions of individual cars, each with large expensive lithium batteries, plus the road network and upkeep of that. Then building green energy, solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, plus storage!
The other includes building some train tracks and trains.
The planning system must be utterly dysfunctional, and the government incompetent when it comes to large projects, or tender for them, for the first to be anywhere near easier than the latter.
We already have road networks and power grids. They need upgrades, but moving to clean electricity generation makes sense regardless of what we use for transportation. And sure, millions of cars need to be built, but they'll be built anyway. If not EV's, then traditional ICE vehicles. And those are built by various private companies and sold directly to individuals. Comparing the difficulty of an existing industry to continue doing what it's already doing to a giant public infrastructure project just doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
EVs still emit brake particulate matter, generate roadway noise, put pressure on roadway infrastructure (either for maintenance or expansion), and still tie up the driver's time in transit. Rail does none of those things. It's a matter of political will in the US, and most Americans tend to be fine wasting lots of time driving.
New York City has the best public transit in the US… and the longest commute times. Average commute time in Tokyo (58 minutes) is twice as long as Seattle (27.5 minutes). It’s not the same problem as induced demand, but the net effect is similar.
Ultra dense, transit rich cities are more expensive and have longer commute times. There’s no free lunch.
The problem in NYC [1] is that 21.4% of people have > 60 min commutes, which probably is the same problem with Tokyo and many US cities: COL is really high so commuters come in from long distances to commute. Fukuoka has a 30 min average commute time, closer to Seattle. Moreover the real important thing when it comes to commute time is that driving requires active participation. Sure you can listen to whatever music you like and sip your favorite drink in the car, but every minute spent driving a car is time spent using your attention. People are willing to put up with longer transit commutes because those commutes are passive.
> There’s no free lunch.
I mean, are we seriously comparing the capital, operational, and environmental costs of a train with tens of thousands of BEV cars and the charging infrastructure required to make this work? There's also the permanent kneecapping of throughput in an auto-oriented corridor. The long tail of BEV adoption will be quite long. The only reason this is even a discussion point is because building transit is politically unpopular and US governments can't really build anything anymore on time or under budget.
When I spent 10 years in Nyc everything is at least 45 minutes away no matter where you are. The walks between stations can be long, wait times are long, travel times slow. If you live far out on a local line it can be longer for sure. But even going downtown from UES is a 45 minute affair. I rarely left my neighborhood other than for work because I had to plan 2 hours of round trip travel. That sucks up most of a day.
I'm not sure what to say, your lifestyle in NYC sounds nothing like the lifestyles of any of my friends who live in the area, even those who live in Hoboken or Jersey City.
> I mean, are we seriously comparing the capital, operational, and environmental costs of a train with tens of thousands of BEV cars and the charging infrastructure required to make this work?
Not really. Because transit dorks never fucking talk about how much anything costs. It’s quite frustrating.
I’ll take a 30 minute driving commute over a 45 minute transit commute every day of the week. YMMV.
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 carbon alone, this is a ludicrous prospect. cars also fare dramatically worse in terms of specific energy. and in mortality rate, and comfort, and ...
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.
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.
> i'll ignore the infrastructure costs, it's free to drive on I-5 after all.
Ugh. Like I said. =\
We aren’t building a new city with no initial infrastructure. This isn’t Sim City. And we aren’t rebuilding after getting firebombed and flattened in WW2. What we do have is an actually pretty good interstate highway system that was built in the 50s by eradicating minority neighborhoods and rampant use of eminent domain.
The only relevant question “given where we are today, what makes sense”. How much does it cost to go from where we are to a rich and robust train system?
So, we have a bunch of highways that require maintenance/growth and a bunch of train track that needs to be built. If you want to move budget from highway maintenance to train track construction and maintenance that’s totally cool. But you can’t just handwave it away.
I’ve read all the articles about why America sucks at building rail and what the per mile cost is.
So. Napkin math. How much to build, operate, and maintain a high-speed rail system in the PNW. Full system costs. Face value. With zero complaining or snark about how much we spend on cars/highways today.
There's been quite a lot of building around Northgate, Othello and Columbia City. I'm surprised there hasn't been more upzoning at Rainier Beach, though - maybe displacement concerns on the part of planners
