Amtrak really needs a replacement program for their current fleet. Everything in the current fleet needs to have a scheduled refurbish/rebuild or replacement date (with orders in the pipeline to accomplish that). In addition they should get enough cars to cover demand on current routes, offer 2x train per day services on popular routes, and add some of the long discussed service restorations or additions: Sunset Limited to Florida, Chicago-Florida service, DC-Kansas City service, extending Heartland Flyer to KC from OKC, restoring North Coast Hiawatha, Pioneer, and Desert Wind service, etc.

For the low-level fleet I think Talgo gear should be seriously looked at though I’m not sure how practical it would be for some services given the difficulty of changing cars out. However with the right motive power it would allow an upgrade in train speed on many routes and a better experience than the Amfleet, Horizon Fleet or Heritage Fleet.

For the Superliners I’d like to see a hybrid between the lounge cars and coaches, perhaps as something to offer as a premium service over the standard coach service. The scenery on most of the Western Amtrak routes is rather spectacular and it can be hard to find space in the lounge coaches.

As part of the fleet rebuilding and general upgrading of Amtrak services I’d like to see the Dining and Sleeping car services upgraded to something at least like VIA Rail’s level of service if not European overnight train levels of service.

10 min headway = frequency of 6 trains/hour
5 min headway = freq. 12 tph

Then I remembered the other lines I’ve ridden or have seen online, and I was grateful for what we have. Find me a better looking light-rail car in Portland, San Francisco, Denver, Houston, or Phoenix.

No one has ever argued that Link won’t help or wasn’t designed to “get people out of their cars.” What most people, including me, believe is the most important benefit of a new high-capacity transit line, like Link, is that it will make it easier for people to choose a life in which they don’t even have a car. Link is the first step in building a region in which it is easier for the average person to live without a car than it is now. A secondary effect of that will be to reduce congestion on the freeway. Got it?

A light rail system that merely gets people off of buses and onto trains, and does nothing else, is a failure.

It seems to me, at best Mayor Nickels needs to modify his statement. He needs to say some thing like this: “After some inital missteps and poor management, we were able to deliver a scaled down project from what was voted on in 1996, in a timely and somewhat cost efficient manner.”

This sound closer to the truth to me.

To say that light rail was delivered on time and under budget strikes me as an outright lie

http://soundtransit.org/News-and-Events/News-Releases/TacomaLinkClosure.xml

You’re right that changing the HOV formulas, and taking away GP lanes as necessary, would be incredibly cost-effective. In fact, we could do this AND pay for light rail.

But instead, you’re spending all your time slagging the plan that’s actually moving forward. If, instead, you devoted your efforts to the change in Olympia that would allow a better HOV plan to progress, at very little cost to the taxpayer, we’d be first in line behind you.

To put this in transit terms, consider that the peak power output of the EMD F59PH powering the Sounder is 2.3 megawatts. All six blue angel jets performing for one 30 minute session expend enough energy to power at least 38 Sounder commuter trains at peak power output for 30 minutes.

I ride the bus every bloody day. My area is *never* going to be included in any presently approved SoundTransit plan for light rail. I can tell you at length that all the TSP in the world doesn’t get you past freeway bottlenecks; the 522 is living, breathing, delayed proof of that. I’ve learned to live with it, but it sucks. I also know that there’s no way to add bidirectional HOV capacity to I-5 through the original Seattle Freeway segment (Northgate Way to I-90, the southern third of what opened in ’65) because we chose the Express Lanes to bolt on capacity already. We’re out of room, so the 522 is gonna sit there with my fat butt on it trying to get to school, work, etc.

I’m not an advocate of any single form of transportation. I am an advocate of a transit system whose many parts work together. The light rail is a logical first step, much as the once-derided Sounder to Tacoma was a first step, too. See also Tacoma Link. Both of these projects were roundly mocked and people howled of their waste. Tacoma Link has had passenger loads well in excess of a supposedly overly optimistic 2010 ridership level; Sounder has a mess of jam-packed trains every day. Sounder’s also on time 99.85% of the time and it’s about to be operating as many trips to Tacoma as the BNSF will allow. Both of these, when initiated, were derided as failures; for now we know they work as part of larger systems and do so rather well. Central Link forms a similar role.