But… these don’t all have to be like North Link. Seattle is not Manhattan. There won’t be 50-story buildings throughout the city. Grade-separated transit is most necessary for long-distance trips (Northgate-SeaTac, Seattle-Everett). We don’t need three parallel lines for long-distance trips. For these we just need a way to quickly get to a Central Link station (by which I mean the whole Lynnwood-Federal Way line).

When Brooklyn station opens, it will be almost as fast to go from Ballard to downtown by taking the 44 to Link, vs taking the 15 local. That’s the low-budget scenario. Modest improvements to the 45th corridor would approach the 18-express level, and an MLK-like train on 15th W would surpass it. I don’t think we need more than that. Anybody going further than five miles should transfer to Central Link.

This provides a model for the rest of the city. There should be a maximum 20-minute time from any neighborhood center to a Central Link station, and if we can cut that further, so much the better. The west side also needs a N-S line to avoid having to go to Central Link for short trips (which could be potentially 20 minutes to Central Link and 20 minutes from it). But it doesn’t need a full metro-level line. Just set a target time for Ballard-West Seattle. 40 minutes is a good moderate target, and maybe they can shave it down to 30.

This would of course have to be funded by BC or Canada, or maybe Vancouver, and would cost at *least* hundreds of millions, probably over a billion.

This is why the Vancouver end has been so poorly served relative to the Seattle-Portland route. The Washington State part of it isn’t that bad comparatively.

They are quite intelligently eliminating low-speed and congestion bottlenecks first. There are only a couple more.

This should see a huge sharp increase in demand for the Cascades service. *After that happens* the political will for many more, faster trains will be there.

China is actually building HSR lines off across vast empty space to their western colonies. This, like Russia’s decision, is arguably mostly a political exercise in “linking the country together” to prevent secessionism, but that was the justification for both the US and Canadian transcontinental railroads. The US is probably going to have to do it again eventually.

It’s totally not worth it until there’s something to connect at either end, but if California developed rail as dense as Japan (possible) and the Pacific Northwest developed a dense rail system too, *THEN* it would be worth thinking about.

And of course the HSR plans do involve connecting Seattle to Vancouver, BC.

Yes, 110 is fine for now, and electric 150 will be fine for a long time.

Due to major built-up area, the existing route will be used from Tacoma to Seattle (apart from minor changes), until there’s ridership for a massively expensive cutoff. And also on the north side of Seattle, and also on the south side of Tacoma

The existing route will most certainly be used from Vancouver, WA to Portland (and it can be made faster on the existing route), and also on the north side of Vancouver, WA.

Now look at where the money for the *current* plans has gone in.

In exactly these areas.

The next step is dedicated passenger tracks on the long stretch from Tacoma to Vancouver, WA. They are currently planned near the existing ROW.

A true high-speed trunk line could be built from south of Lakewood to north of Vancouver, WA. It’s not clear that it’s worth the ROW acquisition; 110 mph service along the existing route would give very successful timings on this route.

Even better McGinn is talking about taking the ROW needed for MLK type alignments from the space already allocated to cars which should be much less expensive than the amount of property acquisition that was required on MLK.

A pedestrian tunnel would be an expensive and complex project. There is a continuous wall of buildings from Jackson to Dearborn along 4th Ave S. You’d also have to find a way to connect International District station to the tunnel without disrupting operations.

The separation of rail traffic would be necessary if they’re really running at 110 mph, as rail traffic isn’t really safe above 80 mph or so.

I’m the biggest HSR fan you’re ever going to meet. I went to France just so I could take one of the longer TGV rides you can, from Brussels to Avignon. I loved every minute of it. If, one day in the future, there is a chance to build true HSR on the Eugene-to-Vancouver Canada corridor, I will be in favor of it. But right now, I think the 110 mph goal they have in place is a great one. Cutting 1 to 1 1/2 hours off a trip that’s already faster than driving isn’t going to get much for us. A 2 1/2 hour train ride (that’s consistently on time and has lots of daily trips) would be very competitive with flying.

IMO, the big challenge in HSR is to convince the naysayers that it can work in the US. There is a big experiment going on down in California right now, and I think it’s the perfect test case. SF to LA is one of the busiest air corridors in the country. That HSR should make bucketloads of money once it gets going, and it will loosen up the coffers, both publicly and privately, for true HSR elsewhere in the country. It will also teach Americans what real HSR is (it is NOT the Acela).

Right now, they can do a heck of a lot for our trip from Seattle to Portland with just the upgrades they have currently planned.

Not “High Speed Rail”, “emerging High Speed Rail”. See the post near the bottom for why.

Ben,

No, of course we should not stop spending money on trains. Are you going all Gush Bimbo on us here? This is not Israel renaming itself.

It’s about spending the taxpayers’ money in ways that make the most sense for the most people. Seattle is almost a real city. The downtown makes it look like one, but if you go to Vancouver BC you’ll see what a genuine city looks like. In the area between Stanley Park and the old Expo grounds, the waterfront and False Creek Vancouver has a density rivaling New York’s. That’s density of people living, not just working. There are over one hundred twenty to forty story condo towers right in downtown, with many more under construction. The overall density of the city is nearly 14,000 people per square mile, but most of it is single family homes. The downtown approaches 100,000 per square mile.

When Portland and Seattle start to look like that, we will be able to support real HSR because there will be enough carless people wanting to make the journey to support it. Until then diesel hauled 110 from Lakewood to Salmon Creek should be the immediate goal, electric 150 the eventual. It’s fast enough.

The only reason TGV-style services work at the 600 mile range is because they stop at a bunch of significant cities in between. A good example is Lille to the southern TGV terminal at Marseilles, which is about 550 miles. Intermediate stops are made at Lille, TGV Est (Euro Disney and the eastern suburbs of Paris), Lyon, and Avignon, all cities of more than 1 million people. Plus of course, there are myriad TGV and conventional lines radiating from Lyon to points east and south.

The “cities” between the Bay Area and Portland are the seething Megalopoli of Eugene, Medford, and Redding.

Give it up, dude, and take a plane.