In 2017, WSDOT published a feasibility study of high-speed rail (HSR) in the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland corridor. It estimated a $25-42 billion capital cost for a rail line that would carry about 5,000 riders a day in 2035 and would just cover operation costs by sometime in the 2040s. This hardly appeared promising, but was enough to prompt a trickle of funds from the Legislature and regional partners for a “business case” study.
We have obtained a copy of the business case study which WSDOT will send to the Legislature this month. How does it advance our knowledge beyond what we learned in 2017?
In broad terms, the financial outlook for high-speed rail in this study looks a lot like the numbers presented two years ago. The business case doesn’t attempt to revisit the capital cost estimates of the earlier study. Ridership is somewhat better, but break-even on operating costs remains somewhere in the 2040s.
Ridership
Ridership is revised upwards vs the predictions of the FRA’s model. Whereas the earlier study predicted 1.7 – 2.1 million annual riders in 2035 on the core Vancouver-Portland corridor, the more current study raises that to 1.7 – 3.1 million by 2040 (average 8,500 per day for the upper estimate). The 2040 date assumes construction is complete by 2034 and ridership has finished its ‘ramp-up’ window. Anticipated fare revenue per passenger, at 52 cents per mile (2019 $), is unchanged.
The ridership estimates are, peculiarly, based on a voluntary survey that was promoted by HSR advocates. Despite the skewed sample, the analysis is close to the earlier estimates for express travel between the three major cities. The higher best-case results improve on those estimates by assuming up to nine stops, greatly increasing the number of possible trip pairs.
The business case predicts high-speed rail will capture 12-20% of the in-scope travel market. The in-scope travel market are those journeys within the Cascadia corridor that might reasonably be taken by regional rail. Most journeys are more local, and some are longer distance. The addressable market is estimated at 10.7 million annual one-way trips today, rising to 14.7 million annual trips by 2040.
To place that regional trip demand in perspective, it’s about one-fifth of person trips through Seatac. This validates an observation from the earlier feasibility study. While HSR captures a healthy mode share in its market, it doesn’t overcome how there isn’t very much travel between the major Cascadia cities.
In the highest ridership scenario, a fifth of high-speed rail ridership is from the assumed elimination of air travel that is entirely within the corridor (4% of in-scope travel in the baseline). However, air travel on connecting flights is hardly affected (16% of baseline). Another fifth of high-speed rail ridership is cannibalization of slower conventional rail services. The balance (up to 12% of the market) is taken from auto travel between the cities.
Service Model
Three service models are highlighted, though several others are reviewed in the study. All anticipate 220 miles per hour design criteria.
“Scenario 1C” illustrates a three-stop alignment with 21 trains running express between Vancouver, Seattle and Portland. Travel times would be 48 minutes to Vancouver, or 58 minutes to Portland.
“Scenario 2A” is an eight-stop alignment with a base and express service. Major Puget Sound stations are at Bellevue and Tukwila. Nine express trains per day serve the major stops, with 12 base trains also serving other stops. Travel times on local service are about 30% longer than the express trains.
“Scenario 1D” is a nine-stop alignment with a base and express service. Service levels are the same as Scenario 2A, but the Puget Sound area station is in Seattle.
Paying for HSR
Building high-speed rail would be an enormous capital cost. The study attempts to place this in context of other costly alternatives, arguing that high-speed rail looks better when benchmarked against major highway expansions or new airport construction. Perhaps high-speed rail could pre-empt the estimated $108 billion cost of adding a lane on I-5 across the state, or building an additional runway which could exceed $10 billion.
The problem with this argument, of course, is that HSR ridership is almost immaterial to whether we make those alternative investments. The reduced demand for air travel, across all regional airports, is far less than 1% of expected traffic at Seatac alone. HSR will hardly affect even the timing of future airport investments, let alone whether those investments are necessary.
Neither is anybody proposing a general widening of I-5 to address travel between the major cities. In the rural areas, it’s generally uncongested. In the urban areas, the overwhelming majority of auto trips are shorter distance, and the fraction of longer distance auto trips that would be diverted to rail is a rounding error on overall demand at any point that is congested.
This year, the Legislature approved $225,000 for another study if Microsoft, Oregon, and British Columbia would kick in the balance of the $895,000 cost. This was a 94% reduction from Governor Inslee’s budget request. Meanwhile, WSDOT is updating their Long Range Plan for more incremental improves to Cascades service. Legislators seem content to fund more studies, but not the several orders of magnitude higher cost of building HSR. The debate over the future of intercity rail in the northwest is likely to continue inconclusively for some time.
Imagine if Link were expected to achieve only 5,000 daily riders for $25-$42 billion in capital costs. It never would have made it to the ballot box, and if it did, it would have been defeated resoundingly. Why is so many fewer riders per dollar deemed acceptable for the Seattle->Portland market?
It’s also worth noting that 52 cents per passenger mile translates into fares of about $180/person for a round trip. That’s a lot, and is high enough to make train service compete more with airplanes than with cars and buses. For a daytrip, even a single person who doesn’t own a car (the best possible case for the train) could rent a car and drive it back and forth for significantly less than the train fare. Already, earlier this year, I considered taking Amtrak up to Bellingham for a day trip, but decided to carpool instead when I saw what the fares were.
Incremental upgrades to Cascades service makes sense. But, I can’t help but wondering if the most cost-efficient way to get more alternatives to driving for these long-distance trips is to look for ways to speed up the old-fashioned bus. This means 3-person HOV lanes for I-5 bottlenecks like the JBLM and Columbia River bridge. With no traffic and no stops, I have ridden Bolt between Seattle and Portland, with one-way travel times as little as 2 hours 45 minutes. If buses could achieve those times consistently, it would go a long way.
I would start with abolishing the current boarding circus (I don’t know the last years’ development though). I have never ever seen a train where they recommend to arrive 1hr in advance — except Cascades. It should not be necessary to arrive more than 5mins earlier, and one should be able to do all the reservations on internet. And then you just walk on the train and pull all your bags with you yourself.
It is a nice option to have personal service, luggage taken care of, etc, but that should be an option for those who are interested.
I agree; but at a minimum, you still need to allow enough buffer time to ensure that, even with unexpected traffic delays, you make the train on time. In most cases, arriving less than 20 minutes before the train departs would be cutting it very close. (You might be able to do a little better if you live within walking distance of a Link Station).
You can avoid the boarding circus if you arrive 10 minutes or so before departure time. You won’t get the seat you want, but I have yet to see a departure where they didn’t leave one door open until just before departure time, and allow a few late arrivals to get on.
Thanks to the walking speed pace of the waterfront shuttle buses I did this very thing in June. I managed to get on maybe 3 minutes before departure time.
The King Street boarding process is an embarrassment but it’s a workaround for Amtrak’s outdated an inefficient registration software. A modern system would allow us to reserve our seats while making the purchase, as we can on an airplane. This is impossible on Amtrak and I wish Cascades would build their own system.
Handwritten seat assignments on check-in is a way to ensure families sit together as much as possible. When you board a train at Penn Station in NYC, they announce the track number 10 minutes before departure and a chaotic line snakes around before the gate opens. Then people make a mad rush for their seat. Our system isn’t perfect but it’s unfortunately the easiest solution to Amtrak’s problem they apparently are incapable of fixing.
I don’t know if this is true or not but I’ve also heard the reservation system is incapable of selling a seat twice on the same leg. For example, if I buy a ticket from Seattle to Bellingham that seat will be ‘sold out’ all the way to Vancouver. If this really is the case, it seems like a pretty serious issue with the current registration system that should’ve been resolved years ago.
_asdf2_: I like your point. The wasteful boarding process is an (incomplete) substitute for local transportation related uncertainty. Such a 19-century process is still a waste of time, but somewhat less that would appear otherwise.
“I have never ever seen a train where they recommend to arrive 1hr in advance”
I never heard that. I arrive 30 minutes ahead. The drop-dead point is 10 minutes when they won’t allow any more boardings. If you’re with a group, then yes you’d want to be earlier, but many people travel alone or with one other person.
“The King Street boarding process is an embarrassment but it’s a workaround for Amtrak’s outdated an inefficient registration software.”
Seat assignments are a state law, so I’ve heard. So complain to the legislature.
“I’ve also heard the reservation system is incapable of selling a seat twice on the same leg. For example, if I buy a ticket from Seattle to Bellingham that seat will be ‘sold out’ all the way to Vancouver.”
That’s true for the long-distance trains at least. If you reserve for Seattle-Tacoma or Seattle-Wenatchee, nobody else can reserve Tacoma-Portland or Tacoma-Spokane. I’m not sure where the reservation segments end; if they’re at Portland and Spokane or all the way to Oakland and Chicago. But at the time of travel they’ll release them for standby purchases.
From Amtrak Cacades webpage:
https://www.amtrakcascades.com/riders-guide
* Arrive early—it’s a good idea to arrive 30 minutes before your train is due to depart especially if you are checking baggage.
* Please arrive one hour early if you will be crossing the United States/Canadian border.
* …
So they wish you were there 1hr early if going to Vancouver.
“Seat assignments are a state law.”
If that’s true why do they only assign seats at King Street and not the intermediate stops? They also assign seats in Portland, which is in Oregon, so OR and WA have the same bizarre law?
“That’s true for the long-distance trains at least.”
Since they use the same reservation system, I assume it applies to corridor trains as well.
A fairly cursory look at RCW and WAC showed nothing even remotely relating to seat assignments on passenger trains (or any other form of conveyance); I could well have missed that but would be interested in a citation so that I could ask my reps to try and have that removed.
Why you are asked to arrive an hour early if you are going to Vancouver BC – when you don’t even go through border formalities until you arrive – is beyond me. Departing Vancouver is a different story, of course, as you go through customs/immigration there before boarding – although even then we nearly missed the train last time and still were able to get through the checkpoint and board with 5 minutes to spare.
I can go online and book a seat on a Chilean bus in Patagonia right now with no problems (and get a far nicer bus than you see in this country); why this is still beyond WSDOT/Amtrak’s capabilities is shameful.
There are lots of things about US transit we’d like to improve compared to Latin American.
Not the Buenos Aires bus system, though – you have to tell the driver where you are going and then they tell you how much the fare is. You also have to somehow know where the specific bus you want stops (unless you’re catching it at one of the “stations” on the major arterials). You also have to go to out-of-the-way locations to get a fare card, and show ID.
In Rio and Panama City you pay your bus fare to a conductor seated at a little desk behind the driver, who makes change and then lets you through a turnstile. Not exactly rapid boarding!
So – there are some things we do better here – unfortunately places that had good passenger rail systems like Argentina mostly have gotten rid of them – long-distance bus travel is definitely not one of them however.
“The King Street boarding process is an embarrassment but it’s a workaround for Amtrak’s outdated an inefficient registration software. A modern system would allow us to reserve our seats while making the purchase, as we can on an airplane. This is impossible on Amtrak and I wish Cascades would build their own system.”
This is already in place for Acela First Class. No information about rolling it out in other corridors, though.
“Handwritten seat assignments on check-in is a way to ensure families sit together as much as possible. When you board a train at Penn Station in NYC, they announce the track number 10 minutes before departure and a chaotic line snakes around before the gate opens. Then people make a mad rush for their seat. Our system isn’t perfect but it’s unfortunately the easiest solution to Amtrak’s problem they apparently are incapable of fixing.”
I know the contributors to this forum are the epitome of the non-automotive savvy travelers , and can perfectly navigate all the nuances involved.
Train travel for the unwashed masses (a.k.a. the auto-dependent) is still a challenge.
There is still much hand-holding needed.
“I don’t know if this is true or not but I’ve also heard the reservation system is incapable of selling a seat twice on the same leg. For example, if I buy a ticket from Seattle to Bellingham that seat will be ‘sold out’ all the way to Vancouver. If this really is the case, it seems like a pretty serious issue with the current registration system that should’ve been resolved years ago.”
That is not true.
However, what makes a train look ‘not full’ is when you have overlapping station pairs. Tacoma-Olympia/Lacey- Centralia are the most susceptible to this.
For instance, if you have enough people coming from Portland to Tacoma, but a large amount getting on in Olympia/Lacey going to Seattle (or farther north), they would have to ‘share a seat’ as it were for that one segment.
The train is essentially ‘sold out’ for city-pairs outside that segment.
“That’s true for the long-distance trains at least. If you reserve for Seattle-Tacoma or Seattle-Wenatchee, nobody else can reserve Tacoma-Portland or Tacoma-Spokane. I’m not sure where the reservation segments end; if they’re at Portland and Spokane or all the way to Oakland and Chicago. But at the time of travel they’ll release them for standby purchases.”
The system does set aside seats for certain city-pairs for long distance trains when booking opens up (11 months in advance), which get released as the train departure gets closer, to keep one city-pair from overly dominating longer distance travel. Only the original programmers know the algorithm. (and they’re all dead by now)
“From Amtrak Cacades webpage:
https://www.amtrakcascades.com/riders-guide
* Arrive early—it’s a good idea to arrive 30 minutes before your train is due to depart especially if you are checking baggage.
* Please arrive one hour early if you will be crossing the United States/Canadian border.
* …
So they wish you were there 1hr early if going to Vancouver. “
That is a vague statement, but it’s really coming FROM Vancouver BC, TO the US you need to be 1 hour early. On that leg, US Customs officials are at Pacific Central Station after you’re checked in with the train crew, to then process you.
Going TO Vancouver doesn’t require a long lead time since Canadian customs is done after detraining, hence the generic 30min.
“If that’s true why do they only assign seats at King Street and not the intermediate stops? They also assign seats in Portland, which is in Oregon, so OR and WA have the same bizarre law?”
I’ve seen conductors, on the not so busy trains, just send passengers to the appropriate car for their destination.
I really hope they don’t try charging that rate except as a last minute fare. Fares in Europe are substantially lower than that except at the last minute – Frankfurt to Brussels for example is 100 euros each way on ICE for travel within a few weeks and that trip is almost twice the distances we’re talking about here. Further out you can get it easily for 40-50 euros each way.
Practically speaking, I’m guessing they could charge $20-40 (maybe going up to $50-60 at the last minute) for Seattle-Portland or Vancouver and get people to take the train. Charging $90/passenger would be crazy.
The rate they set is pretty high. The rate you’d pay for the Shinkansen on a similar-length trip is 40% less and they don’t do airline style pricing like HSR in Europe.
The sensitivity analysis found that lowering fares would increase ridership by a similar amount. A 40% lower fare, increased ridership by 39.7% while reducing revenue 13.3%.
The fare assumptions look high to me. Not that you couldn’t charge these fares. This is about the right fare to charge to get in the general ballpark of being operationally self-sustaining.
But if this train were to happen, it would be pursuant to a tens of billions of dollars capital subsidy. Once one does that, some operational subsidy to get more riders on to the train seems appropriate. It is (relatively) very small dollars to get to lower fares & higher ridership once the capital expenditures are already paid for.
What is unsaid in all the studies cited is the vast difference in demand comparing Seattle-Portland with Seattle-Vancouver BC. While the per-mile capital costs of both parts of the route would be very similar, the likelihood of ever covering operating costs on the Vancouver BC section is, in my view, slim to none. (Airline frequency and today’s Amtrak Cascades frequency to Portland is very much higher than to Vancouver BC.)
So the obvious question is why the various entities studying Cascadia HSR haven’t broken out the two segments so as to compare the numbers. Are they afraid of what their numbers might say?
I’d travel to Vancouver much more often if Border Patrol weren’t a bunch of power-hungry jerks. I remember when I could go to Canada without a passport and I’d be waved through quickly, even as an unaccompanied minor, and I’m not even that old. It’s unfortunate the proverbial wall between us and our closest neighbor has been built and reinforced to such an inane degree.
Nexus pass makes the trips a lot easier (and you get into TSA pre for domestic traveling as well).
Border patrol might bring up the spectre of the Millenium Bomber (stopped from coming into the US to blow up the space needle around Y2K).
Yet they managed to stop him without the onerous post-9/11 border process. Funnily enough I never have an issue going to Canada, it’s always coming back home when I’m treated like a suspected criminal.
Ask a Canadian, it’s the same for them when they go back to Canada.
Vancouver has more political and tech-company support; that’s what’s driving it. Seattle-Portland trips are just mundane transporation which the legislature can’t get excited over; look at how long it’s taking to get Cascades to 110 mph. Seattle-Vancouver connects to a world-class city in another country, which is exciting to tourists, tech companies, and tech workers.
The border situation is part of the reason for the depressed ridership. I used to travel to Vancouver monthly in the late 90s and early 00s, but I got tired of dealing with the border guards and never knowing when they’d unexpectedly interrogate me or ban me (plus I did some overseas trips in the same timeframe), so after 9/11 I just stopped going to Canada; I think my last trips were in 2002 and 2004. In Europe international train trips and international travel are part of the expected baseline. Here they’re still seen as an exception and those furreners are out to get us.
“In Europe international train trips and international travel are part of the expected baseline. Here they’re still seen as an exception …”
It’s easier there as most European travel is within the Schengen Zone, meaning that passport and border control is non-existent. Brussels to Frankfurt is as easy as Seattle to Portland.
and similarly, Brussels to London requires immigration checks (and probably soon customs), just like Vancouver to Seattle. I’ve never entered the UK via train, but via air it’s as painful as the US or Canada, although EU citizens could use automated gates (or at least could last time I flew in).
I meant that even when you have to go through immigration checks in Europe, it’s considered normal to travel by train, part of the baseline interchange between the countries, and some people cross every day to work.
Unfortunately, modifying policies on the border would likely be tough. Neither US nor Canadian immigration seems to want to encourage border crossings and the centers of federal power are too far away to care.
The best you can hope for is making sure people can use Nexus/Global entry for immigration and setting up an airport style immigration setup in Vancouver/Surrey. Many frequent travelers would be able to apply for those and that would cut down on border processing times.
They fail to mention the amount of energy expended for an HSR trip vs equivalent plane, bus and auto trips. This has to have some merit.
Even for a 200 mile trip on trains avoiding slowdowns and stoppages is at least as important as going faster. And given the greater comfort, ease of boarding, and better WiFi – time on board a train is more likely to be productive. All intermediate stops should have platform boarding – likely only 2 cars long.
It would be hugely cheaper to add one or more set of rails on the existing rail system, continue to add frequency, and negotiate better passenger train rights.
More ominous for trains will be the competition from Bolt buses – especially should they become autonomous.
I agree that frequency, faster boarding, straighter routes, and additional lanes that can’t be blocked for hours by freight trains would make Amtrak more tolerable, and a bigger deal than super-duper-expensive high-speed train rides available only a few times a day.
I’m not sure how Bolt Buses would be improved by being autonomous. They would still be stuck in traffic and need someone on board for security and to vouch for the bus at Customs. They could become somewhat less expensive, though, by running between Lynnwood TC Station and King George Station, and between Federal Way TC Station and Portland.
Remember when LINK LR opened the UW station and rail usage skyrocketed? Demand would be like that. I’d stop flying to Vancouver or SBA and stop driving to Portland.
High speed rail in California has been a financial disaster. Why would a Vancouver to Portland run be better? Land costs, noise midigation, labor have all been way more $ than projected. I would like a HS rail system but the political and money problems seem to make it a non starter
California’s problems are very difficult to translate to Washington, especially if Washington puts someone like Rogoff in charge. Morales put out bids years too prematurely (probably feeling a lot of pressure to meet fed deadlines), prop 1a was way to stringent and unrealistic given its station and speed requirements and 400-500 miles is too long a ways for a realistic HSR city-pair.
I think CAHSR has recently adapted well and has put an adequate plan together.
Link Light Rail was once looking light a financial disaster before its previous CEO got the finances in order and a more realistic construction path and schedule were put out.
We won’t know if CA HSR is a boondoggle until it opens for business. If the State of California bans flights between LA and SF as a tool to reduce the state’s carbon footprint, that might help the math.
I don’t think they’ll have to ban flights, SFO is already planning on switching routes from domestic to international once the hsr line is operational. I’m sure SeaTac would like to do the same, which is also something the study is overlooking.
I’m curious how they can ban flights between the two cities (would the FAA even allow that?). Certainly people travelling between the two could be expected/encouraged to switch to HSR. But what about connecting flights? There must be some destinations that serve one of those two cities but not the other. That’s definitely the case with SEA and PDX. Would they be forced to make people fly SFO-Fresno-LAX? Or force a modal change and cross-town trip to the rail station?
SFO stands to make a lot more money with international flights. I don’t think they will do an outright ban but they will require LAX-SFO routes to pay a higher gate fee thus discouraging these flights for the more lucrative overseas routes.
For what it’s worth, it is actually possible to ban flights. Congress long banned cross-country flights from DCA (DC’s Washington National Airport) because, among other reasons, members demanded short-haul flights to every small town within range. It didn’t matter to Congress that it made more sense to fly from DCA to another hub to connect to smaller markets.
Those restrictions are largely gone now; I’m not sure when they were phased out, but they were still in place as recently as 2010 or so.
A lot of the big east coast hubs are served directly by Amtrak, so the train effectively replaces connecting air services through those hubs. (BWI and EWR are currently served directly. There are plans to add Amtrak service to PHL and CLT. DCA and BOS are all easy to access by public transit from Amtrak stations. LGA, JFK and IAD are all an unfixable mess)
“High speed rail in California has been a financial disaster.”
Tell that to the tens of millions of people in northern and southern California, 500 miles apart (a few hours’ train ride). Multiple airlines have hourly flights between those areas; the total between larger cities is probably one every fifteen minutes. An anecdote I heard in the 80s: “Every weekend you see parents putting their kid on a flight across California to visit the noncustodial parent.” How many million people have moved there since then?
Let’s take a deep breath and look at what normal countries do. If Germany ran Cascadia we’d have hourly or regional trains to Portland, Vancouver, and Spokane; half-hourly commuter trains to Everett, Tacoma, and Redmond; a local subway network in Seattle and perhaps to Bellevue/Redmond; based on the existing interurbans and streetcars which wouldn’t have been dismantled; RapidRide-like buses on all core routes; and a commuter-rail or mainline train station at the airport. All by 1990.
The problems with CAHSR funding and routing are political. The case for WAHSR is borderline. A 2C network would be great. On the other hand, 110 mph Cascades would be adequate too. And half-hourly Sounder. Which the state could do if it bought the BNSF corridor and migrated the freight trains to the UP track. The problem is the political priorities. Why aren’t Microsoft and the legislators championing these and figuring out how to implement them, with the same sense of urgency the legislature has about new freeways?
There is no “business case” for high speed rail, Dan. If they can’t swing it in California with five times as many people and two of the ten largest urban agglomerations in North America as the end points, we have no business wasting money on this foolish dream.
And yes, I (did) ride the Cascades fairly regularly, though now with the “Cut-off” I’m less inclined. I can see beautiful I-5 from my own car.
Who says they can’t swing it in California?
The governor for one rather important example.
So far as “less populated areas” Centralia is not Fresno, nor is Bellingham Bakersfield. Grant that the routes from Seattle to either end point are less than half as long, how many people other than tourists travel between Seattle and Vancouver BC?
Not very many, because they are each in insular xenophobic countries and each is increasingly skeptical of the other’s motives.
The USMC Free Trade area is not the Schengen area.
This is a silly fantasy. Improve Cascades and build bus lanes through the Fort bottleneck. That is enough.
“The governor for one rather important example.”
You mean Gavin “Muddy-Waters” Newsom. He was just doing some chest beating and has since rephrased his comments. The system is back on track. Tomorrow the below RFQ will be approved. If this isn’t a sign of continuation I don’t know what is.
“Staff is recommending that the Board approve the issuance of a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) to obtain Statements of Qualifications (SOQs) from qualified offerors to provide the necessary Track and Systems for high-speed rail. “
What you call “the System” is 175 or so miles of track from 20 miles outside Bakersfield to Madera. From what I understand, at the Madera end there won’t even be a shoo-fly for Amtrak California trains to transition to the HSR tracks. They’ll have to do it thirty miles south around Fresno. The only “through” trains might be some ACE runs.
There is still no plan to close the 20 mile gap into Bakersfield, not even a shoo-fly to the adjacent BNSF/Amtrak line. People are still quarreling about Pacheco Pass and the Richie Riches south of San Jose are up in a roar about elevating through the towns down to Castroville, while Caltrain electrification grinds along at a glacial pace. The design for the EMU’s would make Rube Goldberg blush.
Nobody has any idea if the new San Francisco Terminal will accommodate enough trains to meet the system goals AND allow Caltrain to come into it at the same time.
Maybe folks can get drunk on cheap “Madera” [sic] wine while riding the train to nowhere.
“What you call “the System” is 175 or so miles of track from 20 miles outside Bakersfield to Madera.”
No, May 2019 Business Plan update includes downtown Bakersfield to Merced.
” From what I understand, at the Madera end there won’t even be a shoo-fly for Amtrak California trains to transition to the HSR tracks. They’ll have to do it thirty miles south around Fresno. The only “through” trains might be some ACE runs. ”
No, plans are for ACE transfers with HSR at Merced.
” People are still quarreling about Pacheco Pass and the Richie Riches south of San Jose are up in a roar about elevating through the towns down to Castroville, while Caltrain electrification grinds along at a glacial pace. ”
VL Long Range studies have shown Altamont will not meet Prop 1a. Both will occur, Pacheco for SJ 2:10 and Altamont for VL.
“The design for the EMU’s would make Rube Goldberg blush.
Nobody has any idea if the new San Francisco Terminal will accommodate enough trains to meet the system goals AND allow Caltrain to come into it at the same time. ”
No, there is plenty of bandwidth for HSR on the peninsula, I don’t have the numbers on me but it has been found to not be a problem.
The problem with capacity is at the terminal in San Francisco which certainly will have enough capacity for either HSR or Caltrain, but not both. Some Caltrains will still have to terminate at Townsend. No, that’s not fatal to HSR, but a lot more people would benefit from all Caltrains ending at Mission than some at Townsend.
It’s good to know that they are now determined to get all the way to Bakersfield, but what is the point of going to Merced? The Amtrak line on BNSF is 3/4 of a mile from the UP ROW that HSR will follow, so the San Joaquins won’t be able to use the new tracksge — or connect with the HSR trains — unless they use an industrial lead at the northwest edge of Merced. The first point of connection will be in Fresno.
What funding source is going to take the trackway over Pacheco Pass “for SJ 2:10”? There is none. I will grant that Pacheco is likely to be the least troublesome leg if it is ever built, because much of the land is scrub chaparral owned by large holders. There should be orders of magnitude less land purchase negotiation between the wye and Gilroy. But once there it’s in the heart of Rich NIMBY Land. Getting on into San Jose will be like trying to assemble land in the CV, but the opponents will be much richer.
And then of course the thing has to get to LA…….
Perhaps there will at some time mid-century there will be HSR service from San Jose to Bakersfield, but no farther.
Here in Washington the equivalent would be Tacoma to Kelso. That should be a winner, for sure!
“The problem with capacity is at the terminal in San Francisco which certainly will have enough capacity for either HSR or Caltrain, but not both”
Max Wyse did some nice calculations on this, I wish I could find his numbers. He showed that the capacity will be there, if not now, eventually.
They have the latest preliminary EIR’s out, but I haven’t had a chance to read them.
“It’s good to know that they are now determined to get all the way to Bakersfield, but what is the point of going to Merced? ”
They’re working on connecting ACE and SJs to HSR. They’re suppose to cut SJ’s off at Merced and only run HSR southe. I’m anxiously waiting to see the end result as much as the next guy.
“What funding source is going to take the trackway over Pacheco Pass “for SJ 2:10”? There is none.”
Nope, no cash yet. But they did bring on Beall(architect of Caltrains Electrification funding) to come up with a plan. I think once the ARRA fiasco is resolved with the feds we should see some semblance of a plan. What was bizarre for me was that they included Gilroy electrification in the request for track and electrification proposal. I would hope they had remote idea of a plan before they would do crap like this.
“But once there it’s in the heart of Rich NIMBY Land. Getting on into San Jose will be like trying to assemble land in the CV, but the opponents will be much richer.”
I think with all the pre-EIR stuff going on and the CV being built the brunt of the resistance has passed.
“Perhaps there will at some time mid-century there will be HSR service from San Jose to Bakersfield, but no farther.”
Mid-century at the earliest, no doubt.
“Here in Washington the equivalent would be Tacoma to Kelso. That should be a winner, for sure!”
Hey I have relies in Kelso, an expedited trip would be warrented. :)
Schedule for running Caltrains and HSR on same tracks.
https://www.caltrain2040.org//srv/htdocs/wp-content/uploads/CBP_Quarterly_Board_Update_May2019.pdf
HSR is all over the world, not just california.
California’s HSR, which is still being built btw, is a much longer and more expensive system going through less populated areas. It was also built in a nonsensical way, doing the least useful part of the route first.
There are some questions about the viability of HSR in washington, but it doesn’t have much to do with the problems California HSR has experienced…
Personally, I think Seattle to portland is a pretty good route. This study is basically saying there isn’t that much existing traffic to portland… which ok, sure that’s true, but mainly because it takes 4 hours to get there currently.
The irony: Reaching Portland faster than reaching Tacoma faster via Link or Sounder (which has much more demand). In fact it would take almost as long (25 minutes to Tacoma Dome or 31 minutes to ID-C + 10 minutes of walking through the terminal) to get from Seatac Airport to a HSR station on Link than actually ride on a HSR train. Even a BAR transfer would add lots of time.
No wonder the estimate isn’t that high.
Exactly. They are ignoring the dozens of places between the end point stations.
The correct question to be asking isn’t “Is there a business case for high speed rail?” but rather “What gets the most traffic off of Interstate 5?” That means looking at end points as well as local service to a bunch of intermediate stations.
In the abstract, I’d love to build Portland-Seattle-Vancouver HSR.
I would say that building out local transit service should be a higher priority.
The report puts the high end of HSR ridership estimates at 8,500/day or 3.1 million/year in 2040. In 2017, King County Metro had 11 bus routes with a higher than 8,500 weekday ridership, averaged more than 400,000 boardings each weekday, and had an annual ridership of more than 120 million. In 2018, Link averaged about 76,000 weekday boardings and 24.4 million annual boardings. ST Express buses had about 18.1 express annual boardings in 2018, while Sounder had roughly 4.6 million.
If we had completely built out our transit system and saturated possible ridership, then it might make sense to move on to building HSR, but I doubt many think that public transportation in Seattle and the surrounding area is all it could be. My understanding is that while nearly twice as many people commute to Downtown Seattle by transit than by driving alone, city-wide and region wide that’s still far from being true, and if you include non-commute trips, transit’s mode share will be still lower. There’s still plenty of room for growth in transit ridership in the city and region.
The HSR cost is supposed to be $25-42 billion. If we spent a third of that locally, it gives us a budget of $8-14 billion for transit projects. We should be able to fit in some combination of new Link lines, extensions of ST3 lines, and more bus lanes and more frequent bus service. Even if ST/Metro/SDOT make bone-headed planning decisions, they should still easily be able to far surpass 8,500 daily boardings on those projects.
Most people will make trips within the city and region on a daily basis, while they’ll take trips to Portland or Vancouver a few times a year (if that). Let’s fix the common case first, and make car-free mobility work for more people within the city and region before moving onto longer-distance trips.
Local and regional transit connections deserve more attention in this intercity/high-speed rail conversation. If getting to/from stations is difficult for most people, that’s an immediate detraction from riding in the first place.
HSR could very well have a stronger business case in the future, and I don’t believe we should skimp on this opportunity to at least start planning seriously for it. But we need to carefully balance the concerns of cost, time, and complexity with the demands of present and future riders. Short- and medium-term local transit needs are significant, and addressing them well will certainly bolster HSR’s regional attractiveness.
A problem I see is a lack of short-term benefit that’s desperately needed on a more local scale than the current proposal alone. And I think those could be addressed (at least partially) by:
1) Coordinating high-quality transit connections and improvements with agencies along the line;
2) Working with communities and regional governments along the line to make sure they are included in the conversation and can plan for compatible station surroundings; and
3) Making improvements to existing services like Cascades in order to facilitate transitioning to a rail culture in the lead-up to HSR.
Cascades already provides service in this corridor, and there are plenty of low-cost upgrades that could not only provide better local service but also improve regional usefulness. With inexpensive upgrades and effective connections to Cascades, as well as buy-in from local entities, we could lay the groundwork for HSR down the road and end up with a complete system that has short-, medium-, and long-term benefit.
For those Cascades improvements, see our state rail plan:
(https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2019/03/08/Rail-Plan-20132035.pdf )
The planning is fine. We’ll get some concrete concepts and cost estimates, and this generation and the next can evaluate whether/when to build it. In the meantime we should be studying and building other things that will improve metropolitan and regional transit overall.
My worry is that this can morph into the Sound Transit style of planning where they pick a corridor, pick a mode, and then building the mode in the corridor becomes an end in itself, regardless of whether it accomplishes larger goals (maximizing mobility and economic benefits while minimizing GHG emissions). The process turns into the old joke syllogism: We need to do something. This is something. Therefore we need to do this.
The crux of the problem is there’s not an opportunity to build a large network like what other countries and regions have. 3 nice size cities is a start but it’s nothing like say what France, Germany, Japan, California, NEC and etc have. Multiple destinations is always best.
I think a better alternative is to do something like what Caltrains is doing for SF to SJ, ie, electrifying a former freight line and then running 110mph EMUs as a high end commuter line over 18 stations. Those EMUs are made for quick acceleration and stops.
Correction: Caltrains will run EMUs at 79 but HSR will run at 110 on the same corridor. Northwest could run at the 110 with only a handful of stations.
I find it biased to have an intercity HSR plan rather than an intercity multi-modal plan or even an intercity rail plan.
Project-driven transportation plans have an implicit bias towards advocating a specific outcome. While they are important, they should be based on or at least accompanied by a more systemic analysis. What is the market/ value as a Seatac Airport distribution rail system? Should a repurposing of existing airports or moving airport flights have value? Would a spur it connecting rail shuttle to the State Capitol have value? Would open travel (no border agents) across the Canada border have value (like what the EU allows)? Would a Cascades crossing just to Ellensburg have value? Would rethinking private rail ownership have value?
I would think that rail electrification is a valid public purpose to analyze just by itself. It would serve Cascades but would help Sounder and freight rail. It would also set the stage for then determining what segment enhancements (curve corrections; grade separations) would help safety and speed further. From a “green” impact, it would also seem to have quicker greenhouse gas reduction benefits.
We should require electrification like we require PTC. These freight railroads have more than enough money to pay for it themselves, not sure why we need to give them more handouts when they’ll just charge us to use it anyway.
If the UP won’t electrify Ogden to North Platte with nearly 200 trains per day and a 7000 foot elevation summit and BNSF won’t electrify Barstow to Belen with equivalent elevations and even more trains, BNSF and UP won’t agree to electrify a 175 mile route. Changing engines for that short segment on through trains would be a complete non-starter.
The state doesn’t own the track and can’t exercise eminent domain against it. If the state paid to triple-track the UP between I-405 and Tacoma, Sounder might be electrified, but nothing more.
Even if done at a federal level, the rationale is not very strong. Diesel-electric trains are already much more efficient than most freight transit. Electrifying long stretches of track in the middle of nowhere will be expensive at best, extremely difficult at worst. And you’ll need a lot more maintenance than just with tracks.
I suppose WSDOT could pay for electrifying some of the current tracks while freights continues to use diesel, but if we’re considering building new track, might as well just electrify that.
” Electrifying long stretches of track in the middle of nowhere will be expensive at best, extremely difficult at worst. And you’ll need a lot more maintenance than just with tracks.”
And the alternative of new ROW with dedicated electric HSR track is cheaper how?
Benefits of EMUS:
https://www.slideshare.net/alevin/diesel-vs-eleclocovsemu
https://www.slideshare.net/alevin/caltrain-emu-dmu-comparison
“Electrifying long stretches of track in the middle of nowhere will be expensive at best, extremely difficult at worst”
I didn’t say they should be required to electrify every mile of track in the country, maybe just corridors that host a certain number of passenger trains per day? I’m sure we can figure it out in a way that makes sense. The point is to get freight railroads paying their fair share for improvements when we already pay to use the ROW.
@les: building new track would of course be much more expensive. But there’s no reason to throw money at tracks that don’t work well anyway. If we’re going to re-build to even 110 mph standards, may as well electrify then.
@barman: Basically what you’re asking for is that the railroad companies pay for something they’ll never use. Switching locomotives after a few hundred miles is probably not worth it. I doubt that would ever get through any legislative body.
But let’s say it got real momentum – there are a lot of problems. For example, are we electrifying for just passenger rail or passenger and freight? The latter requires a lot more power (6 MW for passenger vs up to 24 MW for freight from my quick search) and I don’t know whether the same voltages would be efficient (freight trains run slowly but pull a lot of stuff while passenger trains are much lighter).
Must as I agree that electric trains would be better, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to electrify the existing freight lines.
David, why would they have to switch locomotives? A diesel powered freight train can run under electrical wires, it happens every day all over the world (including the US). Forgive me if I have zero sympathy for freight companies paying for something “they’ll never use”, we’re paying them to use rail ROW the public gave them over a century ago. We have every right to regulate how it gets built/upgraded according to public need. The other option is to nationalize the ROW and let them pay us to use it.
barman, the NP received no land grant for the Seattle-Tacoma-Vancouver line except the stretch from Auburn to tidewater in Tacoma. The branch to Seattle and the old tangle of lines on north to Sumas via Bellevue was not land-granted, nor was the line south from Tacoma to Kalama and on to Portland via carferry to St. Helens.
None of the GN line from Seattle to Vancouver was land-granted.
Of course the non-land-grant roads paid very little per mile for lines through Federally-owned lines, but it wasn’t nothing and the land was of little “Euro-American” value until the railroads came.
This whole “robber barons and their land grants” thing is a confusion of Eastern and Western railroads and not true.
Freight rail and passenger rail have different market incentives. Passengers want speed because any additional time is time wasted. Commodity customers don’t care whether the iPhones arriving today in Florida where shipped from Seattle yesterday or three days ago as long as a shipment arrives today. Slow speeds allow the freight railroads to compete on price and be the WalMart of shipping: slow trains have less fuel costs, less purchase costs, and less maintenance costs. If you want something shipped fast, there are air-shipping companies that specialize in this. At that point it’s no longer a commodity but a unique item, so a completely different market. So electrification would not help freight railroads, it would just be an enormous expense. Although long-term we’d want to do it anyway for climate reasons, but that will have to wait until the Green New Deal.
As for land-grant railroads owing something to the country, I’m generally sympathetic to that, but I doubt the 1800s contracts said that railroads must electrify their lines.
Les, I wasn’t arguing that EMU’s are a bad thing. You’re right that they are a very GOOD thing. It’s THESE EMU’s with two sets of doors consuming a significant portion of their capacity that are Rube Goldbergish.
Better to run with the existing fleet until enough money is assembled for a crash project to raise the platforms and replace equipment rapidly.
That’s obviously an opinion, but I think a sound one. These multi-door EMU’s will be an Albstross on the system for decades
I just don’t know that I buy these low ridership numbers. They seem kind of implausible.
The number of trips between Seattle and Portland is currently not that high, and they seem to be extrapolating from that, and assuming that HSR would mainly steal existing trips from other modes.
However, the reason that trips is low is because it’s so time consuming to get there (3 to 4 hours), that you might as well fly to california.
The question is how many trips does HSR create? What about commuter service to Tacoma along the line?
The reason we are looking at this is because there is a big economic benefit to having clusters of interconnected cities. Seattle right now is somewhat isolated because we have a very poor connection to nearby cities (I-5).
At $180/person for a round trip, I doubt there’s going to be that much induced demand. Even if there existed a teleporter for those prices, I’m not sure the total amount of travel between Seattle and Portland would increase all that much.
In order to achieve real induced demand, the fares would have to be brought way down (e.g. to the point where a family of 4 could ride the train at a price comparable with the cost of gas to drive), the schedules increased to accommodate the extra demand, with taxpayer-funded recurring operating subsidies. It could be done, but that requires a debate whether funding local and regional transit within the cities is a better use of limited transit funding. My opinion to that question is “yes”.
Ok, I don’t know where you are getting $180 for a round trip… or what you mean by “round trip,” (Seattle to Portland? Portland to Vancouver?) but that’s roughly what a round trip ticket to portland does cost for air travel. So, people are already paying that…
Obviously, there will be subsidies. There is a subsidy for every form of transportation in our state aside from air travel, including buses, ferries, and driving on the road. In fact, there are already subsidies for conventional commuter rail such as sounder, and of course the feds subsidize amtrak. This isn’t California where BART has to pay for itself, and thus has super high fares.
Also, in Europe or Japan HSR fares are not that cheap. Often they are more expensive than flying. The Shinkansen fare from Tokyo to Nagoya (the next major city going west from Tokyo on Shinkansen) is over 100 dollars one way. So you may think $180 is a shocking amount, but it really isn’t. For inter city business travelers, they just expense this the same way they expense air travel.
Also, the shorter haul trips (Seattle to Tacoma) are obviously going to be cheaper, and very popular among commuters.
If the fare revenue is $0.52/passenger mile, $180/round trip is about what it works out to. Yes, business travelers will pay it, but it’s too expensive to be something that ordinary people will be willing to pay very often.
Even short-haul trips like Seattle to Tacoma, high speed rail will be fast, but commuting that way will be too expensive to do on a regular basis. Every ticket the railroad sells from Seattle->Tacoma means one less ticket they can sell from Seattle->Portland. Which means Seattle->Tacoma tickets have to be expensive enough that the number of people willing to pay for it matches the number of Tacoma->Portland tickets. I don’t know what the numbers would work out to be, but commuting by high speed rail would probably cost way more than Sounder, possibly even more per day than driving and parking in downtown Seattle.
Then, there’s the issue of schedule. As I indicated in my previous post, 5,000 daily riders translates into about one train every 4 hours. If none of those trains happen to match your work schedule, no matter how much money you have, it’s not going to work.
@asdf2: “Every ticket the railroad sells from Seattle->Tacoma means one less ticket they can sell from Seattle->Portland.”
This is only true if the train is reasonably full. If there are empty seats, the cost for the operator is (nearly) zero as the train will “go anyway”. In that situation they will probably settle for some sort of simple heuristics, like a fixed $$ per mile or such, but in periods of high demand you may indeed see cases where Seattle-Tacoma prices go up much faster than Seattle-Portland.
asdf2 you aren’t making any sense.
You are saying this is too expensive to ride, but your own math shows it’s comparable to other forms of transportation. It’s also comparable to what people pay for tickets in any other high speed rail system.
Business travelers ARE ordinary travelers. Who do you think travels intercity in the middle the workweek? The whole point of this system is business travelers. That’s why Amazon and Microsoft have been pushing it.
As far as commuter rail goes… again, your own math shows the tickets would be comparable to Sounder, except of course much faster. 52 cents a mile at 30 miles from Seattle to Tacoma is $15. That’s the same that sounder costs per ride. The reason the fare is lower ($5.50) is because farebox recovery is only around 1/3. In general, the government always pays about 2/3 of any public transport in Washington state.
Also, the idea that commuter rail steals seats from intercity rail doesn’t make sense. Sounder runs its own trains. Sounder on the HSR track will certainly run its own trains.
I think you are getting way too hung up on the price. No one ever said HSR had cheap tickets. People ride it because it’s the fastest and most convenient form of transportation for intercity routes.
$180 is $90 each way. Cascades charges $45-77 depending on how full the train is. Greyhound charges around $16-24. The Bolt website seems to be broken but it’s generally comparable to Greyhound or less. These are all Seattle-Vancouver non-refundable in October and August. So all of them are less than the proposal, and some of them much less.
Targeting it for business travelers means only a small fraction of travelers can/will use it. The purpose of transit is to transport most people. So we can price it at $90 to target airplane travelers and Cascades’ top echelon, but ideally we’d make it more broadly useful. Are we really going to build all that track just for business travelers?
In the survey, the majority of trips would be of a one or two day duration. And the majority of trips would leave on a Friday or Saturday. In other words, we’re going to spend $42 billion dollars for a fifth way to get to Portland for a weekend getaway.
Sam. America’s Most Trusted Transit News Source.
What’s your point? Tourism is a huge business too, no less legitimate than any other reason for traveling.
It’s a shame that the legislature will only consider intercity rail/HSR as something independent of local intracity transit. A statewide “climate emergency” transportation plan (not to mention a “catch up to the rest of the developed world plan”) demands that we build a statewide *network* of non car travel options. You wouldn’t build an expressway without considering local state highway connections, and neither should intercity/HSR/bus service be done independent of the local transit systems. And each component benefits immensely from the “network effect.” Washington has Sound Transit as a state level agency, so there is definitely opportunity to build on this.
ST is not a state level agency. Washington is one of the worst states in the country for local transit funding. As far as I know, Olympia contributes pretty much nothing to Sound Transit and in fact goes out of their way to step on their toes whenever an anti-tax Republican (from somewhere far away) wants to show off their grifting skills.
The state created ST as a regional transit authority because it could no longer ignore the need for inter-county transit which the county-based agencies couldn’t deliver (their priorities were always within their county), but the state didn’t want to manage Pugetopolis’ regional transit itself, and it certainly didn’t want to pay for it. The argument that Pugetopolis’ economy subsidizes the whole state is lost on many non-Pugetpolis and exurban legislators, and even more so a couple decades ago. So the state chartered ST and gave it limited tax authority, and always requires a vote for capital projects, even though highway projects don’t have those limitations.
“Washington is one of the worst states in the country for local transit funding.”
The state only allows counties to raise a few percent of sales tax for transit funding (I think around 0.8%?). Exceptions are granted on a case-by-case basis but usually they’re denied and must be small. Localities can use property-tax levies but they have to be renewed every five years and there’s an aggregate property tax maximum, so using it for transit means not using it for something else or having a smaller emergency cushion. That maximum is apparently constitutional, so it would require a constitutional amendment to change. The 1800s legislators had a very different view of property when property was mostly farms and large cities didn’t exist. And in the 1930s there was such anger at the monopolist railroad barons that the state passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting gas-tax money from going to rail projects. At the time that meant the robber barons’ pockets, but it’s now being used to argue against funding public light rail and commuter rail projects that way. So local transit agencies depend mostly on sales tax, and sales tax is very volatile in the boom-and-bust economy. That’s why Metro had to cut 20% of its service in the last recession (although part of it was canceled), and now has lots of revenue in the boom.
I assume that once the track is build, a HSR version of Sounder would run on it. This would put not only Tacoma, but also Olympia in very reasonable commuting distance to downtown Seattle.
The NEXUS pass also discourages transit use, or even carpooling. Frequent border crossers can skip the lines, but only if they drive. They can’t even carpool unless every single passenger also has one. If the pass is license plate specific, you can’t even use it with a rental car. You have to either own the car, or you don’t get the benefit.
I have used Nexus with a rental car many times. Every once in a while I get asked what happened to my car (I tell the truth– I loaned it to my parents when they were visiting). No problems.
NEXUS has to be done at the person level since immigration has to get done at the person level. If you can’t process everyone using NEXUS, you’re just going to hold up the rest of the line – it’s not fair to everyone else waiting behind you. If you’re carpooling on a regular basis, then make sure everyone gets NEXUS – it’s not that hard or expensive.
Similarly with transit – the way to address this is the airport model – you arrive at a station and get processed there. Those with NEXUS enter via one line and those without via another. Otherwise you’d be banning a good fraction of people.
As mdnative mentioned, you can travel with other cars. Only the Mexican border requires vehicle inspections, and as far as I remember, there are many other issues driving rental cars across the border there beyond immigration.
For alternatives with local and express variants, I bet they could hugely improve ridership by charging Sounder fares (or a bit higher) for short trips to urban centers, and target commuters. For example, this could be an express version of Sounder South from Tacoma. Fares would have to be low enough to be attractive though. Maybe adopting current Sounder fare for Tacoma to Seattle, then lowering the Sounder fare in Tacoma and Lakewood (Sounder south isn’t really a good route to Seattle, it’s just still a bit faster than the bus. But it seems kinda ridiculous to ride from Tacoma and pay a premium fare to go south to Puyallup before going to Seattle).
And if it goes to Bellevue instead, oh boy, that’s like a fast Sounder to Bellevue. That’s going to be a major hit! It’ll be terrible though for Seattle-Portland or Vancouver so that’s probably not a good option.
That is basically what they do for travel between Baltimore and D. C. The commuter trains are just as fast as the Amtrak trains. The trains go up to 125 MPH, making them the fastest commuter trains in the U. S. They are run by MARC (Maryland Area Regional Commuter) and are operated in part by Amtrak. I don’t know if there is much difference in price between buying an Amtrak ticket or a MARC ticket. I would expect them to be similar, just as I expect the ride to be similar (the only difference is where the train goes before and after connecting the two cities). I would imagine that if they built a brand new, very fast connection from Tacoma to Seattle (as part of a fast new line from Seattle to Portland) that we would do the same sort of thing, and that ST would operate it.
From what I remember, the MARC trains were a bit slower, and quite a bit cheaper. We took MARC from DC to Baltimore on the Camden line, and it took about an hour.
How does this compare to European numbers? Between cities that have high speed rail — are they similar? My understanding is that lots of people fly between the cities, as low cost airlines have been willing to beat the train in terms of cost. This makes the “hardly anyone will drive” prediction seem a bit overconfident.
Meanwhile, according to the survey, over half the people will drive, despite the fact that the trains will go 200 miles per hour. Why is that? Is it cost, or is it because people feel like they need a car where they are headed (unlike big European cities).
Either way it seems like this is a poor investment. I have serious doubts that you would completely eliminate flight travel unless you drop the price of a ticket. A smaller, cheaper investment in the trains is likely to result in the same sort of reduction in car travel, along with a sizable drop in air travel. Meanwhile, you could pour the extra money into building transit systems in each city, so that people can actually get around really well (and we don’t continue to have an “Oh, I would take it, but it doesn’t go where I want it to go” transit system).
It really doesn’t take a super fast train to make it more appealing than the alternatives. For business travelers, it has the huge advantage of going from downtown to downtown. For a lot of other folks, it eliminates the hassle of traffic, and is much more pleasant. It is about 175 miles to Portland. That means a train can average well under 100 MPH and get there in less than 2 hours. You have gone from a 3 hour drive to a 2 hour train ride. Even when you add the wait time and the time on either end (getting to downtown, getting to wherever you are going) it sounds like the best choice for a lot of people. In contrast, a train ride right now takes 3.5 hours — it is really amazing anyone even does it.
The only way this would truly be effective is if it is heavily subsidized. Not only the capital costs (which are a given) but the operational costs as well. And even then, most of the people might still drive (there is no data saying otherwise). That kind of huge subsidy seems crazy to me for the number of people who would use it.
If we aren’t willing to do that (and I would prefer we don’t) than we need to make incremental, but significant changes that move the needle to the side of public transit. That means the type of changes that have been discussed earlier. Eliminate the really slow areas and run trains over 100 MPH. Run the trains more often, and continue to improve transit on each end. That is likely to get people out of their car (and out of the planes).
This of course assumes a static cost to air and car travel, which is reasonable in the current political environment, but if we ever got to the point where the carbon emissions costs of both modes of transportation were included in the price, the assumptions all look very, very different.
Depending on how we get our electricity, that could be a factor in high speed rail as well. Above a certain speed, a train uses considerably more electricity. Thus a slower train could be a lot cheaper (assuming the faster train had a carbon tax). Of course if all our energy is from renewal energy, it doesn’t matter. But then again, the same thing could be said about the cars, if electric cars become more common. Alternative (renewal) fuels for planes seem farther away, but predicting technological advancement is very difficult.
I can give you a few more reasons from my point of view, but they all basically boil down to the extras needed on top of the train travel:
1. If you have kids (especially young ones, especially multiple), then traveling by train is substantially more difficult. Young kids also generally require a lot of luggage and packing is not their strong point.
2. If you don’t live close to the station, getting to the train is a pain. Then you need to park somewhere, etc… Add in kids, and every transfer is twice as difficult. This will be easier for tourists, harder for residents.
3. Not every place in both cities is accessible by public transit, especially Seattle. This works if you’re mostly staying downtown, but not if you go out of the city. And this area is known for nature. Even if you can get where you want to go, it’s not always easy via public transit. Let’s take a trip from Redmond to Vancouver. Even with Link, you’re adding at least 40ish minutes to each end of the trip. If you add an equal amount on the other side, then that substantially cuts into the difference.
HSR works well in Europe due to denser villages, less sprawl, and much much better local transit.
That is basically my thought. If the real goal is to cut carbon emissions and get people out of cars, improving travel between Seattle and Portland is not nearly as effective as improving travel within the two cities. The former is trips some people might make once every few years. The latter is trips nearly everyone makes every day.
As mentioned, spending $42 billion for 5,000 riders/day is ridiculous. We have *bus* routes which carry more than 5,000 riders/day for a capital cost more than 1000x cheaper.
Of course, options for traveling between Seattle and Portland are still needed. But it doesn’t need to be a full-out Japan-style bullet train. Minor improvements to the existing Cascades service, speeding up a few bottlenecks from 0 mph to 40 mph can go along way.
And, we shouldn’t poo-poo the bus option either. Back in the day before Bolt added the Tacoma stop, a bus ride from 5th and Jackson, all the way to downtown Portland could take as little as 2 hours 45 minutes, for those careful enough to plan a trip to avoid rush hour in either city. With more HOV lanes on the freeway (with 3+ occupancy requirements and real enforcement), the bus option could be more reliable. Buses have one huge advantage over trains, in that their cheap. Already, we’ve got private companies running buses back and forth for a profit, while the Cascades charges 50-100% more in fares, which don’t even cover its operating costs, let alone the capital costs. Plus, HOV improvements don’t just benefit inter-city travel, they also provide a huge benefit for intra-city travel, so even people who don’t go to Portland will realize the benefit.
And, if the plan for the high speed rail is to achieve operating self-sufficiency by hiking fares to $90/person, each way, the number of people who will be willing to pay that much will be limited. Yes, business travelers will gladly fork over the money for a premium ride that allows the employees to be productive during the journey, but families who are not only on a tighter budget, but face fares of $90*4 for 4 people, won’t.
Worse, if even these fares are to pay for the full operating costs, the schedule will need to be trimmed to match demand, so that every train is a nearly full train. If each train carries 500 people (10 cars at 50 passengers per car), that translates into 10 trains per day, or 5 trains per direction per day. This leads to a hypothetical schedule with daily departures at 6 AM, 10 AM, 2 PM, 6 PM, and 10 PM – a figure which is hardly impressive, and less flexible than what Bolt Bus offers today.
Thank you, asdf2. Well and clearly written.
Also note that the proposal is for beyond-Japanese style HSR (220 mph max vs. only 200 mph in Japan). Not sure why they are proposing building a more expensive system in a market that clearly can’t even sustain anything close to Japanese-style ridership.
“Buses have one huge advantage over trains, in that their cheap.”
Because they don’t have to pay for the roads they travel on.
2% black survey participation percentage? 1% hispanic survey participation percentage? Are those groups underrepresented in the survey on purpose?
The survey was a “voluntary” survey. So only people that knew about it would even consider filing it out. In other words its completely useless.
HSR in Japan carries about 17,000 passengers per hour in each direction during peak times on a single line, and averages around 9,000 passengers per hour in each direction over the course of a year (18,000 total per hour) for that line – and that includes the hours it isn’t even operating.
If this line will truly only carry 5,000 per day it is really hard to justify. The question is to what degree did the study assume having this line would generate additional demand that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
So much bashing on this comment thread. I’m surprised. Everyone’s talking about current demand and how lackluster it is (and continue to be), but in 20-30 years when this thing finally gets built – and will help grow our Cascadia regional economy for the next 100 – this should be an inevitable transportation project. Not IF, but WHEN. For the Puget Sound, it’d make more sense to add a commuter intercity component to help move even more people within our own metro quickly. In 20-30 years, I can’t even imagine how much larger, connected, and populous the three regions (Vancouver BC, Seattle, and Portland) will be. We can start planning now or just sit on our hands hoping for some miracle transportation breakthrough to happen by then.
That’s my main take away. A HSR Line should be considered the backbone of a full I-5 corridor transit system. The region will need such a line in the future be it 20 years or a 100 years. As we all know its always easier and cheaper to build it now before we need it than to wait until our hand is forced.
Only hope is to move freight line to a rebuilt I-5. Freight doesn’t need speed so can handle curves. Single level freight doesn’t need clearance so can handle 15 ft under over passes. HSR could never handle the contours, and electrification would require too much of a trench for I-5.
So you’re going to ban stacks and auto carriers from the eviction line? That’s brilliant. How will the garbage trains clean Seattle?
And, where are you going to put the tracks in places where the median has already been taken by the third pair of lanes?
Not to mention Napavine Hill, the climb out of the Niswuslly Valley toward Olympia and the hill next to Iliani. These are WAY WAY WAY WAY too steep for freight trains.
This idea is stupid. Full stop.
They don’t have to hug I-5 entirely and there are such things as tunnels. Considering the alternative of HSR along I-5, I would give it better odds.
Cargo carriers can be upgraded. We’re talking the year 2050, a lot can change by then. I know Italy is doing the reverse, ie, running some freight on HSR lines. That is always possibility for some freight. Expand your mind!
Even if they could straighten out and meet grade (which is impossible) on I-5 for HSR could you imagine the cost of building a 14ft trench the entire length of the system to accommodate catenary.
semi and fully autonomous/electric cars
ditto buses
electric short range airplanes
ditto, but STOL
Trains may have a lot of competition, and I say that as a rail fan
a ps:
Increasingly we will see freeway lanes for HOV 3 and plus. Vehicles with automatic forward emergency braking only. This alone would double freeway capapcity.
I’d be happy if it was a 1.5-2.0 hour trip, as that’s better than driving, and it’s way better than flying. Due to cost considerations, it makes sense to me to focus of bottlenecks, then work from there.
In my trips along the corridor that includes Vancouver, BC, over the past several years, these are: (1) Through Vancouver, WA, even though the tracks are elevated at this point; (2) Through Marysville, where the tracks need to be elevated or below the surface; and (3) Around Everett.
Did anyone else catch this article?
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2019/07/17/richard-bransons-virgin-trains-usa-lists-pacific.html
I don’t have a membership, so I can’t read the text. Anyone have access?
My spouse subscribes. What would you like to know?
Just curious what they are looking at for the NW? Are they trying to essentially get the contract to run Cascades? Or are they planning to run a competing service?
Very speculative article. The hard facts are that Virgin disclosed to the SEC earlier this year they may have a future interest in operating in the northwest, but without specifying any timeline or details. Also, Richard Branson may have been in Seattle recently (his plane was certainly here). Beyond that, it’s guessing.