26 Replies to “Sunday Video: Potential HSR City Pairs, Ranked”
From a national perspective, I can’t see the federal government putting too much money into high-speed rail in this region when there are so many other decent corridors that could get more riders.
But one thing that could be interesting in the Seattle area is if it is pitched as an alternative to a new regional airport which no one seems to want near them. The video earlier this week from Lucid Stew hypothesized that 80% of current air travel between PDX, SEA, YVR, and EUG could be replaced by HSR, and we know that airport capacity could be better utilized by longer-distance flights.
I think a reasonably fast rail link between city centers that additionally included airport stations at least at PDX and SEA with good connections via local rail transit to YVR and maybe PAE + BLI could be pretty compelling. Especially if the legislature encouraged rail+air ticketing.
The need for California HSR often includes the issue of avoiding building another airport in both the Bay Area and the LA basin. Their airports just can’t handle many added extra flights! Planes are often held at SeaTac because the California airports are too busy to land those planes when they would arrive! Plus the extra costs to build rail to a new airport at both ends also would need to be done. It quickly makes HSR the obvious optimal technology investment for that metro area pair — and that shifting away California trips away from those airports and onto HSR makes it more possible for flying PNW travelers to land and depart on-time. CAHSR indirectly benefits us in Seattle too!
Anti-CAHSR advocates typically ignore need for adding two new airports as an issue — just like they usually ignore what it costs to build a new freeway to achieve the same capacity increase.
The issue with HSR reducing flights from SeaTac enough to avoid a new regional airport is it is pretty much limited to trips to Portland. The distance between Seattle and SF is too great, and unlike LA to SF there is too little between Portland and SF (and Seattle to Portland based on the cost of HSR). Tying HSR into CA HSR for trips south of SF doesn’t make sense time wise from Seattle.
In order to move travellers from SeaTac going to Portland to rail less expensive upgrades are needed. As one poster noted these include reliability, and reliability of trip time, and schedule consistency.
It takes close to 3 hours to fly to Portland doorstep to doorstep. About the same as driving if there is no traffic. Portland is a city where one doesn’t need a car downtown.
The region can’t wait for 30 or 40 years for HSR to relieve pressure on SeaTac to avoid another airport, and airlines will lobby against competition from rail anyway although the Seattle to Portland route is not a lucrative route (whereas routes to CA are).
Figure out a way to make the trip by train from Seattle to Portland 3 hours EVERY TIME especially with Link from the Eastside to the station at a reasonable fare which rules HSR out and flyers will switch.
I am not sure even CA HSR has the population and ridership to pencil out, but Seattle to Portland to SF certainly doesn’t. All you have to do is drive to Portland to see how much nothingness is in between.
I agree with you about the PNW, Rail Skeptic. Even CityNerd objectively demonstrates that HSR isn’t that advantageous for us.
The underlying challenge to better frequency and reliability are the tracks and their daily management. As long as the tracks aren’t prioritizing moving people, every incremental capacity or speed or reliability project or added train will be a Herculean effort and/or a significant cost.
The issue with HSR reducing flights from SeaTac enough to avoid a new regional airport is it is pretty much limited to trips to Portland.
Agreed. This is a small amount of the flights. A tax on air freight would probably reduce the number of flights more than HSR would. Just a decent level of train service between Seattle and Portland would give riders a nice alternative. This would also reduce the number of people who fly, especially if the train is significantly cheaper than flying.
Replying to Rail Skeptic:
“Figure out a way to make the trip by train from Seattle to Portland 3 hours EVERY TIME especially with Link from the Eastside to the station at a reasonable fare which rules HSR out and flyers will switch.”
If WashDOT had been able to implement the long-range plan for Amtrak Cascades (13 daily trips Seattle-Portland, 2:30 travel time; 4 daily trips Seattle-Vancouver, 2:37 travel time) and be close to their on-time percentage target of 88%, we’d already be living the dream. What is the cost to get there? Even the scenarios in their new Service Development Plan doesn’t seem to get back to the vision of 2006.
The problem is that lots of the flights between PDX and SEA are people connecting at SEA. Since in none of these scenarios does the HSR have a Schipol “station downstairs”, very few of those connecting passengers will be diverted.
That’s not true of SEA-YVR flights of course. YVR has direct flights to many cities in the US mainland.
Tom,
Agreed that you can’t use rail as a substitute for airport connections unless there’s a great connection to the airport. If you could get a station on airport property or within 1 local rail transit stop from the airport I think it would work though. I don’t know that it has to be literally downstairs, although the alignment in the recently posted LucidStew video did suggest that for PDX.
Only considering travel with 2 segments, one by air and one by rail would probably still be competitive with both by air as you only need to go through airport security once.
I like how Ray (CityNerd) remembers to take into account access time at the ends in his analyses. Of course, air travel requires arriving early and time to get off the train after it pulls into the gate but we often ignore that end in discussions.
Too often, we don’t think about access time when we talk about other “transit” trips too. In particular, ST forecasts ridership with seemingly no regard if it takes 30 seconds or five minutes to transfer or to reach the platform or the street. Yet there is a tendency to obsess about a trip taking an extra four minutes riding or waiting up to 10 minutes for a train rather than eight.
In my favorite example, transferring at CID-N/ Pioneer Square will require at least five minutes where staying in the DSTT is only about a minute (less if ST would ever look into adding those missing down escalators). While 4th Ave shallow is better it also will take a few extra minutes and the word “shallow” is a misnomer because the platform will still be deep. And these extra transfer times apply to every trip transferring or not — and not just the ones that are badly timed by chance.
San Francisco has dramatically missed their forecasts at Chinatown and Union Square because the stations are so deep and take so long to reach the platform or the street! They didn’t adequately consider that access time in their forecasts.
I get how tunnel engineers brag about how TBMs deep underground make building subways easier. But it’s literally “tunnel vision” to ignore the time to access to deep tunnel stations. It seems even easy to conclude that a deep tunnel transit trip isn’t viable unless the total transit trip is at least 2-3 miles and maybe more. And that doesn’t even get into how digging giant deep station vault holes is more expensive and can require moving more material from underground than the bored tube itself does.
It’s why I think any additional transit tunnel in Downtown Seattle should be built mainly for longer distance trips. Boring a deep tunnel under ground with a station in a giant hole every half-mile seems fundamentally very costly and time-consuming for a short-distance rider not to use.
If I’m at Westlake and Denny, will I really want to spend five extra minutes to get down to the deep platform only to reach Nordstrom only to have to take another five minutes to get back up the street? And that doesn’t even get into the issue of extra time for transferring to other lines!
This seems like a good argument for the first ave street car for intra downtown trips.
It’s a good argument for an aerial alignment, frankly. Surface alignments downtown will add many minutes of traveling like deep tunnels do because pedestrians need to cross the tracks every few hundred feet — and surfacevtrains must pause for that.
Or a dedicated transit street with lots of buses so that frequency is measured in seconds, not minutes. Oh wait, we already have that. Seriously though it is quite common for transit agencies to have both surface transit and underground (or elevated transit) for this reason. In our case we also have a bottleneck shape and lots of buses heading downtown (despite the metro) so it really doesn’t cost us anything. (The spine is essentially free.)
Ideally the train (or busway) is close to the surface so that it works for a lot of those trips but even the most robust systems have surface transit as well.
Took transit from Tacoma to Boise Friday. I can do the drive in about 8 hours. Left my house at 12;15pm: T-Link-574-AlaskaAir. Arrived in Boise at 5pm (Sea time).
So it saved me 3 hours or so, which is not nothing, but not the slam-dunk you think it is when you just look at the little over an hour of flight time. And that was hitting every transfer just about perfectly. I even had to run for the 574. That transfer could definitely be improved.
And if I count the hour it would have taken to get the last 5 miles by bus, instead of someone picking me up. It’s really 6 hours fly vs 8 hours to drive. If I’m heading any place besides downtown-ish Boise, car starts to make sense. Can we do better?
“a deep tunnel transit trip isn’t viable unless the total transit trip is at least 2-3 miles and maybe more.”
Why should Link chase trips less than 2-3 miles? That’s what local buses are best at.
“If I’m at Westlake and Denny, will I really want to spend five extra minutes to get down to the deep platform only to reach Nordstrom only to have to take another five minutes to get back up the street?”
No, Link is for if you’re going from Westlake & Denny to Beacon Hill or Roosevelt or Bellevue or West Seattle. No bus can match that, and before Link we didn’t have a way to get fast between them.
So Sound Transit has never released trip data (to the best of my knowledge). So I have no idea how many people ever took the train from say, Beacon Hill to Westlake in a particular year. But they used to release station data, including the number of people taking the train a particular direction (north or south). Before U-Link the train would end at Westlake, which means that any rider who boarded a northbound train at say, Stadium was getting off downtown. Here are the numbers from such a train:
Stadium: 458
CID: 1,200
Pioneer Square: 371
University Street: 204
To put things in perspective a northbound train carried 16,830 back then. So well over 10% of the riders were riding just within downtown. Stadium actually had more people going north than going south. The CID numbers are especially high, but that makes sense for a couple reasons. First there are a lot more people around CID than around Stadium. But it is also far enough to make the trip worthwhile. It is also not that far down to the station. If we had shallower stations then trips of this nature would be a lot more common. In New York, for example, trips of a mile or so (via the subway) are common as long as the trip works is convenient (often times a bus is better in terms of the stops).
Frequency matters as well. From what I can tell, ridership went down when we kicked out the buses. I think it was at that point that a lot of riders gave up on the tunnel for short trips. Previously a lot of people would end up taking the first vehicle that arrived. If it was Link, great. If it was a bus, great. But with the train running relatively infrequently, they switched to the surface. It will be interesting to see how many people switch to using Link once frequency increases (when East Link comes on board) or just stick with the surface option. It will be difficult to tell without data that ST doesn’t want to release.
In any event, this is an argument for shallower stations. Yes, by all means we should have a robust surface option. But for some relatively short trips the train can work well if it is frequent and shallow.
“ So Sound Transit has never released trip data (to the best of my knowledge). So I have no idea how many people ever took the train from say, Beacon Hill to Westlake in a particular year. ”
This is true.
Even in the WSBLE EIS there is no indication of trip pairs. The only thing that they describe is overcrowding between Pioneer Square and IDC Station. The thing is that it evaporates north of Dymphony and south of IDC Station in the forecast according to other info ST had previously released here:
The diagrams do show forecast daily loads by direction. So even though we don’t have trip pairs, the large spikes in some Downtown segments suggest to me that the forecasting model is picking up short distance trips that create the overcrowding.
Is there a way that you guys managing the STB can ask for updated info and posted here? ST provided it to STB in 2019.
Once the initial project is finished, how much will a ticket cost? And how much will it cost to get to the stations from either LA of San Francisco?
What project are you referring to?
I just hit two years in Portlandia after leaving a lifetime of social connections in Seattle. Still haven’t taken the train yet even though I live walking distance from the Portland station. The timing of a rail trip and prospect arriving without a car to visit folks scattered Tacoma to Lynnwood means the convenience factor isn’t there. Perhaps sometime I’ll have a reason to do something closer to King Street Station but as someone who’s not interested in sportsball it may be a while.
Your comment makes no sense, because the convenience factor would be there for folks “you made a lifetime of social connections with,” who are scattered between Angle Lake and Northgate along the 1 Line. So it makes no sense saying if you took the train up to Seattle, you would be limited to only doing something next to the King Street Station.
It makes more sense if one is in western Tacoma, one in Puyallup, one in north Kent, one in Arbor Heights, one in central Magnolia, one near Matthews Beach, one in eastern Kirkland, one in Edmonds, one in Brier, and one in north Lynnwood a mile from an hourly bus and two miles from a frequent bus.
Mike, his comment is a little bit hard to decipher, but what he is saying is he used to live in Seattle, but moved to Portland. And even though he lives within walking distance of the Portland Amtrak station, he hasn’t taken a train back up to Seattle because the idea of not having a car when he gets to Seattle, and just relying on transit, is inconvenient, because he has friends from Tacoma to Lynnwood. He said the only reason he could see to take the train to Seattle if he was going to do something very near King Street Station.
To me, what he said makes no sense. What he’s implying is he also didn’t take transit when he used to live in Seattle, because public transit is less convenient than a car.
My roommate on Capitol Hill went to Portland yesterday by train and came back the same evening. He raved about the quality of service, so I was glad it’s still good. I went to Portland for a day once to follow a band that had a show in Seattle and I was able to spend the afternoon with them in Portland and attend their pre-show practice. My friend in north Lynnwood takes the train to Longview once a month to visit a relative, although she stays for a week. I’ve also gone for overnight weekend trips to Portland, staying with somebody near Gateway MAX station. So some of these trips are feasible on Cascades.
I did that when I was studying at Highline College as I went to a few industry education and networking events in Portland. They generally aligned with my schedule for a day trip. Usually taking the first and last train back and forth to Portland. Get a bite to eat as late morning meal in Portland before heading to one of the hotels for the education and after event mixer. And then hop on MAX back to Union Station for the ride home.
I’ve done day trips a couple times, though Tacoma to Vancover WA. Without the 2 slow tails, (van-pdx, Tac-sea) it makes even more sense. I wouldn’t have done it if I had to drive,
From a national perspective, I can’t see the federal government putting too much money into high-speed rail in this region when there are so many other decent corridors that could get more riders.
But one thing that could be interesting in the Seattle area is if it is pitched as an alternative to a new regional airport which no one seems to want near them. The video earlier this week from Lucid Stew hypothesized that 80% of current air travel between PDX, SEA, YVR, and EUG could be replaced by HSR, and we know that airport capacity could be better utilized by longer-distance flights.
I think a reasonably fast rail link between city centers that additionally included airport stations at least at PDX and SEA with good connections via local rail transit to YVR and maybe PAE + BLI could be pretty compelling. Especially if the legislature encouraged rail+air ticketing.
The need for California HSR often includes the issue of avoiding building another airport in both the Bay Area and the LA basin. Their airports just can’t handle many added extra flights! Planes are often held at SeaTac because the California airports are too busy to land those planes when they would arrive! Plus the extra costs to build rail to a new airport at both ends also would need to be done. It quickly makes HSR the obvious optimal technology investment for that metro area pair — and that shifting away California trips away from those airports and onto HSR makes it more possible for flying PNW travelers to land and depart on-time. CAHSR indirectly benefits us in Seattle too!
Anti-CAHSR advocates typically ignore need for adding two new airports as an issue — just like they usually ignore what it costs to build a new freeway to achieve the same capacity increase.
The issue with HSR reducing flights from SeaTac enough to avoid a new regional airport is it is pretty much limited to trips to Portland. The distance between Seattle and SF is too great, and unlike LA to SF there is too little between Portland and SF (and Seattle to Portland based on the cost of HSR). Tying HSR into CA HSR for trips south of SF doesn’t make sense time wise from Seattle.
In order to move travellers from SeaTac going to Portland to rail less expensive upgrades are needed. As one poster noted these include reliability, and reliability of trip time, and schedule consistency.
It takes close to 3 hours to fly to Portland doorstep to doorstep. About the same as driving if there is no traffic. Portland is a city where one doesn’t need a car downtown.
The region can’t wait for 30 or 40 years for HSR to relieve pressure on SeaTac to avoid another airport, and airlines will lobby against competition from rail anyway although the Seattle to Portland route is not a lucrative route (whereas routes to CA are).
Figure out a way to make the trip by train from Seattle to Portland 3 hours EVERY TIME especially with Link from the Eastside to the station at a reasonable fare which rules HSR out and flyers will switch.
I am not sure even CA HSR has the population and ridership to pencil out, but Seattle to Portland to SF certainly doesn’t. All you have to do is drive to Portland to see how much nothingness is in between.
I agree with you about the PNW, Rail Skeptic. Even CityNerd objectively demonstrates that HSR isn’t that advantageous for us.
The underlying challenge to better frequency and reliability are the tracks and their daily management. As long as the tracks aren’t prioritizing moving people, every incremental capacity or speed or reliability project or added train will be a Herculean effort and/or a significant cost.
The issue with HSR reducing flights from SeaTac enough to avoid a new regional airport is it is pretty much limited to trips to Portland.
Agreed. This is a small amount of the flights. A tax on air freight would probably reduce the number of flights more than HSR would. Just a decent level of train service between Seattle and Portland would give riders a nice alternative. This would also reduce the number of people who fly, especially if the train is significantly cheaper than flying.
Replying to Rail Skeptic:
“Figure out a way to make the trip by train from Seattle to Portland 3 hours EVERY TIME especially with Link from the Eastside to the station at a reasonable fare which rules HSR out and flyers will switch.”
If WashDOT had been able to implement the long-range plan for Amtrak Cascades (13 daily trips Seattle-Portland, 2:30 travel time; 4 daily trips Seattle-Vancouver, 2:37 travel time) and be close to their on-time percentage target of 88%, we’d already be living the dream. What is the cost to get there? Even the scenarios in their new Service Development Plan doesn’t seem to get back to the vision of 2006.
The problem is that lots of the flights between PDX and SEA are people connecting at SEA. Since in none of these scenarios does the HSR have a Schipol “station downstairs”, very few of those connecting passengers will be diverted.
That’s not true of SEA-YVR flights of course. YVR has direct flights to many cities in the US mainland.
Tom,
Agreed that you can’t use rail as a substitute for airport connections unless there’s a great connection to the airport. If you could get a station on airport property or within 1 local rail transit stop from the airport I think it would work though. I don’t know that it has to be literally downstairs, although the alignment in the recently posted LucidStew video did suggest that for PDX.
Only considering travel with 2 segments, one by air and one by rail would probably still be competitive with both by air as you only need to go through airport security once.
I like how Ray (CityNerd) remembers to take into account access time at the ends in his analyses. Of course, air travel requires arriving early and time to get off the train after it pulls into the gate but we often ignore that end in discussions.
Too often, we don’t think about access time when we talk about other “transit” trips too. In particular, ST forecasts ridership with seemingly no regard if it takes 30 seconds or five minutes to transfer or to reach the platform or the street. Yet there is a tendency to obsess about a trip taking an extra four minutes riding or waiting up to 10 minutes for a train rather than eight.
In my favorite example, transferring at CID-N/ Pioneer Square will require at least five minutes where staying in the DSTT is only about a minute (less if ST would ever look into adding those missing down escalators). While 4th Ave shallow is better it also will take a few extra minutes and the word “shallow” is a misnomer because the platform will still be deep. And these extra transfer times apply to every trip transferring or not — and not just the ones that are badly timed by chance.
San Francisco has dramatically missed their forecasts at Chinatown and Union Square because the stations are so deep and take so long to reach the platform or the street! They didn’t adequately consider that access time in their forecasts.
I get how tunnel engineers brag about how TBMs deep underground make building subways easier. But it’s literally “tunnel vision” to ignore the time to access to deep tunnel stations. It seems even easy to conclude that a deep tunnel transit trip isn’t viable unless the total transit trip is at least 2-3 miles and maybe more. And that doesn’t even get into how digging giant deep station vault holes is more expensive and can require moving more material from underground than the bored tube itself does.
It’s why I think any additional transit tunnel in Downtown Seattle should be built mainly for longer distance trips. Boring a deep tunnel under ground with a station in a giant hole every half-mile seems fundamentally very costly and time-consuming for a short-distance rider not to use.
If I’m at Westlake and Denny, will I really want to spend five extra minutes to get down to the deep platform only to reach Nordstrom only to have to take another five minutes to get back up the street? And that doesn’t even get into the issue of extra time for transferring to other lines!
This seems like a good argument for the first ave street car for intra downtown trips.
It’s a good argument for an aerial alignment, frankly. Surface alignments downtown will add many minutes of traveling like deep tunnels do because pedestrians need to cross the tracks every few hundred feet — and surfacevtrains must pause for that.
Or a dedicated transit street with lots of buses so that frequency is measured in seconds, not minutes. Oh wait, we already have that. Seriously though it is quite common for transit agencies to have both surface transit and underground (or elevated transit) for this reason. In our case we also have a bottleneck shape and lots of buses heading downtown (despite the metro) so it really doesn’t cost us anything. (The spine is essentially free.)
Ideally the train (or busway) is close to the surface so that it works for a lot of those trips but even the most robust systems have surface transit as well.
Took transit from Tacoma to Boise Friday. I can do the drive in about 8 hours. Left my house at 12;15pm: T-Link-574-AlaskaAir. Arrived in Boise at 5pm (Sea time).
So it saved me 3 hours or so, which is not nothing, but not the slam-dunk you think it is when you just look at the little over an hour of flight time. And that was hitting every transfer just about perfectly. I even had to run for the 574. That transfer could definitely be improved.
And if I count the hour it would have taken to get the last 5 miles by bus, instead of someone picking me up. It’s really 6 hours fly vs 8 hours to drive. If I’m heading any place besides downtown-ish Boise, car starts to make sense. Can we do better?
“a deep tunnel transit trip isn’t viable unless the total transit trip is at least 2-3 miles and maybe more.”
Why should Link chase trips less than 2-3 miles? That’s what local buses are best at.
“If I’m at Westlake and Denny, will I really want to spend five extra minutes to get down to the deep platform only to reach Nordstrom only to have to take another five minutes to get back up the street?”
No, Link is for if you’re going from Westlake & Denny to Beacon Hill or Roosevelt or Bellevue or West Seattle. No bus can match that, and before Link we didn’t have a way to get fast between them.
So Sound Transit has never released trip data (to the best of my knowledge). So I have no idea how many people ever took the train from say, Beacon Hill to Westlake in a particular year. But they used to release station data, including the number of people taking the train a particular direction (north or south). Before U-Link the train would end at Westlake, which means that any rider who boarded a northbound train at say, Stadium was getting off downtown. Here are the numbers from such a train:
Stadium: 458
CID: 1,200
Pioneer Square: 371
University Street: 204
To put things in perspective a northbound train carried 16,830 back then. So well over 10% of the riders were riding just within downtown. Stadium actually had more people going north than going south. The CID numbers are especially high, but that makes sense for a couple reasons. First there are a lot more people around CID than around Stadium. But it is also far enough to make the trip worthwhile. It is also not that far down to the station. If we had shallower stations then trips of this nature would be a lot more common. In New York, for example, trips of a mile or so (via the subway) are common as long as the trip works is convenient (often times a bus is better in terms of the stops).
Frequency matters as well. From what I can tell, ridership went down when we kicked out the buses. I think it was at that point that a lot of riders gave up on the tunnel for short trips. Previously a lot of people would end up taking the first vehicle that arrived. If it was Link, great. If it was a bus, great. But with the train running relatively infrequently, they switched to the surface. It will be interesting to see how many people switch to using Link once frequency increases (when East Link comes on board) or just stick with the surface option. It will be difficult to tell without data that ST doesn’t want to release.
In any event, this is an argument for shallower stations. Yes, by all means we should have a robust surface option. But for some relatively short trips the train can work well if it is frequent and shallow.
You can see the numbers on the last page of this: https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/SIP2016_FinalDraft.pdf
“ So Sound Transit has never released trip data (to the best of my knowledge). So I have no idea how many people ever took the train from say, Beacon Hill to Westlake in a particular year. ”
This is true.
Even in the WSBLE EIS there is no indication of trip pairs. The only thing that they describe is overcrowding between Pioneer Square and IDC Station. The thing is that it evaporates north of Dymphony and south of IDC Station in the forecast according to other info ST had previously released here:
https://seattletransitblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/PM_Peak_ST3_Plan_2040_Midpoint.pdf
The diagrams do show forecast daily loads by direction. So even though we don’t have trip pairs, the large spikes in some Downtown segments suggest to me that the forecasting model is picking up short distance trips that create the overcrowding.
Is there a way that you guys managing the STB can ask for updated info and posted here? ST provided it to STB in 2019.
Once the initial project is finished, how much will a ticket cost? And how much will it cost to get to the stations from either LA of San Francisco?
What project are you referring to?
I just hit two years in Portlandia after leaving a lifetime of social connections in Seattle. Still haven’t taken the train yet even though I live walking distance from the Portland station. The timing of a rail trip and prospect arriving without a car to visit folks scattered Tacoma to Lynnwood means the convenience factor isn’t there. Perhaps sometime I’ll have a reason to do something closer to King Street Station but as someone who’s not interested in sportsball it may be a while.
Your comment makes no sense, because the convenience factor would be there for folks “you made a lifetime of social connections with,” who are scattered between Angle Lake and Northgate along the 1 Line. So it makes no sense saying if you took the train up to Seattle, you would be limited to only doing something next to the King Street Station.
It makes more sense if one is in western Tacoma, one in Puyallup, one in north Kent, one in Arbor Heights, one in central Magnolia, one near Matthews Beach, one in eastern Kirkland, one in Edmonds, one in Brier, and one in north Lynnwood a mile from an hourly bus and two miles from a frequent bus.
Mike, his comment is a little bit hard to decipher, but what he is saying is he used to live in Seattle, but moved to Portland. And even though he lives within walking distance of the Portland Amtrak station, he hasn’t taken a train back up to Seattle because the idea of not having a car when he gets to Seattle, and just relying on transit, is inconvenient, because he has friends from Tacoma to Lynnwood. He said the only reason he could see to take the train to Seattle if he was going to do something very near King Street Station.
To me, what he said makes no sense. What he’s implying is he also didn’t take transit when he used to live in Seattle, because public transit is less convenient than a car.
My roommate on Capitol Hill went to Portland yesterday by train and came back the same evening. He raved about the quality of service, so I was glad it’s still good. I went to Portland for a day once to follow a band that had a show in Seattle and I was able to spend the afternoon with them in Portland and attend their pre-show practice. My friend in north Lynnwood takes the train to Longview once a month to visit a relative, although she stays for a week. I’ve also gone for overnight weekend trips to Portland, staying with somebody near Gateway MAX station. So some of these trips are feasible on Cascades.
I did that when I was studying at Highline College as I went to a few industry education and networking events in Portland. They generally aligned with my schedule for a day trip. Usually taking the first and last train back and forth to Portland. Get a bite to eat as late morning meal in Portland before heading to one of the hotels for the education and after event mixer. And then hop on MAX back to Union Station for the ride home.
I’ve done day trips a couple times, though Tacoma to Vancover WA. Without the 2 slow tails, (van-pdx, Tac-sea) it makes even more sense. I wouldn’t have done it if I had to drive,