Sunday Movie: Amtrak is Looking Up

28 Replies to “Sunday Movie: Amtrak is Looking Up”

1. Amtrak is transit people actually want. Nobody wants to ride light rail from Tacoma to SeaTac to get on a plane to Portland when it’s easier to just take a train straight to Portland. Taking Amtrak to L.A. from Tacoma sounds absolutely insane, but people do it. I’ve taken Amtrak from Seattle to Whitefish MT a few times… it’s the easy enough to do. Montana isn’t what I’d call a public transit hotspot, but the State does love trains!

   When Sound Transit decided to build a new ( and very slow) light rail line between Seattle and Tacoma, I just turned 100% against the clowns running Sound Transit. There’s already a heavy rail line between the two cities. BN owns the tracks you say? I think a 10 billion check would have went a long way to getting the proper upgrades for a lot more rail service… and here’s the thing. upgrading the tracks to Tacoma is the first step to upgrading the tracks all the way to Portland. Sound Transit has zero regional vision.

   As it is, Tacoma will get a clunky light rail line that’s slower than a bus… service will be every 30 minutes because of low ridership. Only the destitute will ride because if you have money and need to get to the airport, a ride service saves you well over an hour of farting around with transit and who needs that sort of time suck before catching a flight? Or going to a business meeting in Downtown Seattle?

   1. I think part of the issue with upgrading the existing tracks is that there are places where space constrains what you can do. Ideally for $10B, you’d be building dedicated passenger tracks and electrifying them. Doing that in downtown Kent and Auburn would involve significant property acquisition and might be a non-starter politically. The route also isn’t all that direct, so I think there was plenty of reason to build a new line. Just that light rail maybe wasn’t a good choice.

      And as someone who has taken Amtrak from Portland to LA to Chicago and back to Portland, it’s definitely an experience, but I don’t think it’s insane. I prefer it to flying if I’ve got the time, and it was usually cheaper than any other option. Two consecutive nights in coach is definitely hard on your body, but it’s also an experience I think everyone should have.

      1. blumdrew,

         The reason Sound Transit is less than successful is because they’ve never done a single thing that was politically difficult. Sure fighting with Auburn and Kent for double tracks would be hard. Sure arm wrestling with Burlington Northern would be hard. Spending 10 (how about 25?) billion in tax money on anything new is hard.

         On every step of the way Sound Transit took the easy political way out. And every one of their projects is way over budget and not as good as they could be.

      2. They already have space for the third track through all those places. In fact, the third track already exists in those places.

         Furthermore, WASHdot says their ultimate plan is half hourly Cascades trains. Building the infrastructure for that also gives capacity for Sounder. Currently, Sounder takes an hour to get from King Street Station to Tacoma, and Amtrak Cascades 50 minutes. You could put a Sounder train out and follow with Amtrak 20 minutes later and they don’t occupy that much more track space than Cascades one.

         One of the major problems with the BART equivalence argument is that BART is built to hit high population regional centers. In the Puget Sound area, that would be Kent, Auburn, Sumner, etc. The fastest driving route to SeaTac is Highway 509, but no population centers like that are on that highway. To get a justifiable number of riders for a line to SeaTac, it probably has to go by way of White Center and Burien, but even those aren’t the major activity centers that you see in Bay Area suburbs served by BART. Would these places upzone to allow 20+ floor buildings near a station if someone built a transit line to them, as per SkyTrain stations?

      3. “And as someone who has taken Amtrak from Portland to LA to Chicago and back to Portland, it’s definitely an experience, but I don’t think it’s insane. I prefer it to flying if I’ve got the time, and it was usually cheaper than any other option.”

         I’ve gone from Seattle to Chicago, San Francisco, San Jose, and Portland multiple times, and once to Los Angeles. Compared to flying you get a larger seat, traditional legroom, an electric outlet, two carryon suitcases and two checked ones, more space in the overhead rack, a dining car with complete meals and a chance to chat with new acquaintances at the table (often the highlight of the day and you learn things you never expected), an observation car, and no continuous airplane motor noise you have to wear noise-cancelling headphones to get away from. And if you pay more, sleeper rooms and a premium lounge.

         Cost is hit or miss. Sometimes it’s more expensive than flying, and it’s usually more expansive than an intercity bus. Seat prices are based on how full the train is. In the off season there are sometimes midweek sales. But in the last couple days when airline prices get insane, Amtrak may undercut them. If the train departs and there are still empty sleepers, they revert to the lowest price, and the conductor goes down the aisle looking for someone who wants to upgrade.

   2. Nobody wants to ride a train from Rainier Valley to downtown Seattle to catch a bus to Tacoma, or to backtrack to ride Sounder to Tacoma, or to hang out at King Street Station for an hour or two or three to catch Amtrak to Tacoma.

      I will catch a bus in the right direction to a Link Station, then down to Federal Way, then catch a bus the rest of the way to Tacoma.

      Though, to be fair, there are probably more reasons to visit Rainier Valley than to visit downtown Tacoma.

      1. Brent White,

         But the link from downtown is slow. It’s slow down to Rainer Beach, it’s going to slower to Federal Way and something over 75 minutes to make it to the Tacoma Dome, which isn’t really part of Tacoma. We’d give that part of town to Fife if they’d take it. (they won’t)

         So to take transit from, Greenlake to the Lincoln District or the Proctor District in T-Town, you will need to take 2 bus rides, 2 train rides and the better of half a day the way Sound Transit has it planned.

   3. It all comes from not thinking like a passenger. People have a general preference for trips in the 20-25 minute range. Driving from Seattle to Tacoma without traffic takes 15 minutes. So a train should aim for as close to 30 minutes as possible, maybe up to 40 minutes. But Link is estimated to take 75 minutes. That’s the problem right there. If you’re really going to build light rail to Tacoma, it needs to be at an 85 mph spec, not 55, and not with 35 mph arterial segments. Link is trying to do two contradictory things at once.

      1. “Driving from Seattle to Tacoma without traffic takes 15 minutes.”

         Only if someone is driving over 120 mph average speed! That’s double the speed limit on I-5.

         The I-5 Tacoma 705 exit is numbered as mile 133. The Seneca exit in Downtown Seattle is numbered as mile 164.

         You might want to reestinate those travel times.

      2. OK I misremembered. It’s 30 minutes to Tacoma, 60 to Olympia.

      3. It’s way closer to 40 minutes to get from downtown to Tacoma, but with traffic it’s even longer. For the many residents who live in north seattle it’s even longer than that.

         But at the end of the day how many people are going from Seattle to Tacoma? The utility of the line comes from commuters to Tacoma from Federal Way, Fife and Tukwila, and from Commuters to Seattle from those suburbs as well. The airport benefit is spread evenly between both. The line does double duty connecting the downtown business areas to (some of) their respective suburbs.

         The argument about not building link is also a head scratcher because the demand is basically all in the area it will serve. In any event, if I’m a commuter from Tacoma into Seattle I’d ride Sounder because it’s faster and more comfortable anyway, regardless of top speed, because it would stop less. The light rail has a different purpose, and building a BART style commuter rail down sr99 or i5 would be equally pointless as it would miss the demand. The main advantage of link is that you can build a decent amount of TOD and create demand. Federal Way and KDM stations are sufficiently far from the freeway that they will have a healthy amount of TOD around them in all directions.

      4. If we had a proper transit network, people would do their optimal number of trips to go to all the places they want to go when they want to, both Tacoma-Seattle trips and to and from places in between and beyond. Instead we have transit that’s unreasonably infrequent and slow, highway congestion, people forced to drive even if they don’t want to because they have no better option, and people who don’t make the trip because both transit and driving are infeasible and/or unpalatable.

         The proper thing to do would be to look at where people want to go and design a transit network that allows the largest cross-section of the population to do so conveniently on transit. Seattle has 770,000 people. Tacoma, Lakewood, and a few surrounding cities have the same. If even a fraction of those people go between Tacoma and Seattle each day, that’s a lot of people. Look at I-5. It’s not empty; several lanes of cars are going both north and south. That indicates there’s significant demand. If we had a much better transit network, a much larger percent of those trips would be by transit.

         Neither Link nor Sounder really addresses it. Sounder runs only a few times a day, weekday daytime only, and it takes an hour due to the Auburn/Puyallup detour. Link has the frequency, but it’s too slow, and it terminates at Tacoma Dome without reaching any regional center in Pierce County, unless you think the Fife station area will become as big as the U-District. And for a single rail line to serve both Rainier Valley and Pacific Highway on the one hand, and get to downtown Tacoma in 40 minutes on the other, is probably too much for a single line to do because you’re asking it to do two opposite things simultaneously. Then there are buses. Buses could take some of the load. But they’d have to be a lot more frequent, and they’d have to make trips from Pierce County to parts of south King County not on Link or RapidRide A reasonably feasible. So that’s the problem and the outline of a solution, but nothing the politicians are doing gets us there, and they don’t even have a plan to get us there, or a prioritized wishlist and steps to try to get resources for it, and they’re blind that it’s even necessary or that they’re leaving trips on the table and forcing people to go through unnecessary frustration.

         And whatever flaws Link has in King County, lie squarely at the feet of the politicians of Tacoma, Lakewood, University Place, and Pierce County. Those are the ones I’ve seen on the Sound Transit board or pushing ST to do something in particular. Yes, ST acquieces to what the counties and cities want, because that’s how ST is structured and what it sees its mandate as, and what its boardmembers have expertise in. They have experience in managing cities and counties, and that didn’t come with a transit degree, and our culture is such that they couldn’t pick it up from osmosis as they were living, because our culture hardly has it either. If it did we wouldn’t be having these problems, and we’d be solving the problems we do have in five or ten years instead of fifty years or never.

      5. Look at I-5. It’s not empty; several lanes of cars are going both north and south.

         Yeah, but a lot of the trips are fairly short. Just because there are a lot of cars between Seattle and Tacoma doesn’t mean all those people are going between the two cities. Imagine they closed off all the on-ramps between Seattle and Fife. Suddenly it would be smooth sailing — at rush hour — between the two cities.

         This is one of the big challenges. Consider commuting. If you go to this website you can see where people work and where those workers live. Now pick Seattle as the work destination. I think the best way to analyze it is via census tracts. Census tracts aren’t perfect but at least are fairly small and more consistent by size than the other options. Using the website isn’t easy so I copied a couple images (north and south). There is a clear pattern. The highest concentration of Seattle workers come from Seattle itself (as you would expect). There are a handful of places (mostly close to Seattle) with decent concentrations but otherwise it is very spread out.

         But the opposite is true as well. If you look at where people in Tacoma are commuting, it is a slightly different pattern. Here are a couple maps, north and south. Again, as expected, the highest concentration of jobs for Tacoma residents are in Tacoma. There are a few areas outside it here and there. A lot of the jobs are industrial and thus spread out. Kent Valley and the industrial part of Seattle for example.

         The point being, there really aren’t that many people trying to get from Seattle to Tacoma on a given day. It is also quite likely that a relatively high percentage take transit. Sounder is not especially fast from Tacoma but it is quite comfortable. The buses are fast midday (and also comfortable). They aren’t as frequent as I would like — as ST promised — but half hour service (midday) for a trip that far is not crazy. People aren’t likely to make spontaneous trips (the way they do inside Tacoma) no matter how fast the mode.

         Then there are buses. Buses could take some of the load. But they’d have to be a lot more frequent, and they’d have to make trips from Pierce County to parts of south King County not on Link or RapidRide A reasonably feasible.

         The buses don’t take some of the load, they take most of the load. They could be better. The buses are underfunded while we spend billions on a mass transit system that will carry relatively few riders and solve problems that are largely already solved*. Frequent Sounder or Amtrak runs would be great but it is highly unlikely they would increase the transit mode significantly. If the midday buses don’t work for you then the midday trains won’t either. The only way you can significantly increase modal share is by adding more bus service and/or toll the roadway. But running buses from say Tacoma to Kent Valley is challenging because the jobs there are so spread out. You basically have a last-mile problem on both ends. But that is really the only practical solution — run a lot of buses.

         To be clear, I’m definitely supportive of improving Amtrak, especially in the way suggested by the video. We don’t need bullet trains to Portland. We need faster, more frequent trains. Not so frequent that they could replace bus service between Tacoma and Seattle but fast and frequent enough to replace a high proportion of the car and plane trips from Seattle and Tacoma to Portland. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that huge numbers of people will make the trip once that happens. The Shinkansen system is fantastic. But it carries fewer riders than a metro in a midsize Japanese city. I’m all for improving our long-distance bus and rail system but that is not where most people are going.

         *Or at least they will be in about a month, when Federal Way Link gets here.

   4. Amtrak and Link are completely different transit markets. Most people in Tacoma going out of state are not going to Portland.

      1. Mike Orr,

         I don’t want to name the companies, but I know 2 that had big back offices in Tacoma that used Amtrak to Portland all the time. One of them went full remote but is currently looking for office space in Tacoma again. It’s cheap and easy for any company in Portland to start a Tacoma branch and just use the train to shuttle workers back and forth on the train.

         Over the years my Mrs., a corporate trainer at the time, took the train to Portland over 50 times. The travel time is maybe 50% less than flying?

      2. Most people in Tacoma going out of state are not going to Portland.

         Hard to say. For Amtrak, Portland is the most popular destination for Tacoma riders, followed by Vancouver, WA (https://www.railpassengers.org/site/assets/files/2542/tac.pdf). But way more people fly, and Portland is only 8th for SeaTac (https://stacker.com/stories/washington/seattle/most-common-domestic-destinations-seattletacoma-international-airport). Of course Tacoma is only a tiny portion of the ridership of SeaTac. The Greater Seattle MSA (which includes Tacoma) is about 4 million. Tacoma itself is about 5% of that. SeaTac has about 50 million annual flyers. If about 5% of that is from Tacoma that works out to a quarter million people flying and about half that taking Amtrak. Given only a tiny portion of the riders are flying to Portland my guess is the numbers are even smaller for Tacoma. Thus even if Portland (and Vancouver, WA) make up the lion’s share of Amtrak trips from Portland, more people are flying to other destinations.

         But all of that has to be put into perspective. Last year the 594 had about half million riders. This is way more than the total Amtrak ridership and the estimated SeaTac for Tacoma combined. This is only one bus. You also have the 590 riders as well as the riders from Sounder which combine for about a third of a million. A lot more people are taking transit to Seattle than are going anywhere out of state.

   5. 10 billion is spare change for BNSF and won’t ever cover the cost of a heavy rail line. America can’t build anything anymore. Count yourself lucky there’s even link…if it ever gets actually built for what probably will cost 2X the current estimate

   6. Without urban transit feeding the Amtrak route, where do you think Amtrak’s ridership is coming from?

      One of the reasons that Amtrak Cascades is doing well is that cities along this corridor have good transit. If you live in Texas and you travel out of town in distance like Seattle to Portland, you’d never even consider taking Amtrak even if it runs as frequent as Cascades.

      1. If you live in Texas and you travel out of town in distance like Seattle to Portland, you’d never even consider taking Amtrak even if it runs as frequent as Cascades.

         I’m not sure about that. Various pundits have proposed bullet trains connecting the “Texas Triangle” (Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio). A private company (Texas Central Railway) is interested in building a high speed rail between Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston. If high speed rail is worth considering than service equal to Amtrak Cascades would certainly be plausible.

         Transit is a factor but it isn’t the only issue. Size is a factor especially the size of the business district. Likewise the more concentrated a city is, the better (assuming the trains serve that concentrated center). Texas doesn’t have great transit but then neither does Seattle or Portland. Even if we have a little better system it is unlikely to make up for the huge size of the cities in Texas.

      2. Ross,

         I don’t think small activities coming out of Corridor ID Program counts. Texas Central might be one step ahead, but it has been 5 years (I think) since they announced the “big news”. They said they would kick off construction the next year (they said that in 2020ish) and finish by 202X. Clearly that’s not happening. I think Texas is so clueless that they think running HSR is just like running airlines. But it is surface transportation and you have a lot of things on the ground that needs to be dealt with even if it is private money.

         They clearly have no clue that size and density of city matters. The Houston station is not even in Downtown. It is by I-610 and there is no plan to connect the station with Downtown Houston with rapid transit. The whole project to me feels like Tesla’s tunnel in Las Vegas.

      3. The Houston station is not even in Downtown.

         That’s a big deal. Bigger than the overall quality of transit in a lot of ways. Most American cities — even ones in Texas — at least make it relatively easy to get downtown. Meanwhile, a lot of the people who take trains are doing so for business. They are trying to go downtown to downtown. At worst they take a cab a short ways. It is one of the big advantages over plane travel. But if the station is on the outskirts of town it just won’t work. From what I can tell, the Houston Amtrak station is in a terrible location (close to the freeway) but not particularly far from downtown. In that respect it is kind of like Tacoma. But unlike Tacoma you have to walk a ways to get to the nearest transit stop. From there you have one bus running every 12 to 15 minutes heading to downtown. But it doesn’t go through the middle of it so you could be walking a ways. Realistically you are taking a cab (if it is a business trip).

2. I’m sure the new Cascades trains will be better than the worn out Amfleet or Horizon cars, but they really need to tackle the high floor problem.

   A Bombardier / Alstom “lozenge“ type car (the type used on Sounder) with only one set of center doors rather than two has enough car length to have an internal ramp from low floor level to train floor level.

   However, I don’t know if Siemens and Alstom electronics can be made to talk to eachother, or if the semi-permanent couplings on the Siemens trains can be made compatible with other manufacturers’ cars.

3. Ah Amtrak. Just watched a video about how the best Amtrak is as bad as the worse in Europe. Something like 4X slower than driving and far more expensive.

   1. While European trains are generally much better than Amtrak, the situation isn’t as dire as you’re saying. For instance, compare a trip on Amtrak Cascades between Seattle and Portland:

      Cost: $27 train (advance ticket) vs $121 car (IRS mileage rate)
      Time: 3h 25m train vs 2h 40m to 3h 30m car (depending on traffic)

4. The B&P tunnel mentioned in the video makes me wonder about our great northern tunnel used for sounder and Amtrak. Does anyone know when that will need to be upgraded/replaced?

5. Is the northeastern tunnel in the video the same New York-New Jersey tunnel the Trump administration defunded?

   1. I don’t think it’s officially defunded. Trump does so much threatening that it’s hard to know when it’s real and when it isn’t. However, big civil and construction firms are integrated across both political parties and would raise a stink if they got a huge stop work order. Plus a catastrophic tunnel failure due to cancelled funds would result in a huge political embarrassment. And there is an FFGA signed along with construction contracts including materials awarded so a lawsuit on a cancellation would have a decent chance of success. At worst, it just gets slowed down but not canceled.

6. Somewhat astoundingly at least some of these disruptions are being labeled as 2 line tie in work we are fast coming up on six years since rhe first smdisruption for that purpose. And some wonder why others rhink we should dcap the whole agency???

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