Did you know there are nice and fast trains in Europe outside of the Paris region?

Which carry all those people mentioned, around? Europe is crazily, densely populated.

Perhaps you'll be shocked to hear that countries like Sweden have HSR despite not being particularly densely populated? It's absurd how much money is poured into roads and yet never attracts the same criticism.

The areas in Sweden with railroads are more populated than the Van/Sea/Pdx corridor, by about 1.8x, more if you drop a couple outlying small towns that don't make sense in themselves to connect except for network completeness reasons. Also, railways in Sweden are more middle-speed trains these days, running 200km/h as far as I am aware. These people are proposing 300km/h+ which requires a significantly higher level of track investment - you can't just use standard sleepers and bolted rails.

Yes. I've ridden on many of them. I'm a huge HSR proponent. I just don't think it works for Eugene to Vancouver. If we had double the population it would be a no-brainer.

The math is very clear. Below about 25,000 people per linear kilometer of lines, they require massive subsidies and never really pay off. Eugene to Vancouver BC is <12,000 people per linear kilometer. Honestly I would love to be wrong.

We massively subsidize highways, so I don’t really see a problem with having other options that aren’t “profitable”

The whole WA is just around 7 million people. Portland area is around 2.

Yet the distance between Seattle and Portland is the same as between Frankfurt and Munich.

There's simply not enough traffic to justify a train. Another lane on I-5 would help a lot more.

> Another lane on I-5 would help a lot more.

That rarely works out how you would think:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

To play devil's advocate, induced demand is a good thing - more people getting to go where they want to go. I'm all in favor of HSR but you have to balance the viewpoint - roads are a good thing, in general, they just should be a (much smaller) part of the mix instead of the only answer. Most freight should move by boat and rail, most passengers should move by rail and bus, and roads should be mostly for adhoc trips and deliveries rather than daily commutes.

Why should buses EVER be a part of any solution?

They are terrible, and always will be. It's simple math: buses have to either have long intervals, or be horribly wasteful (and thus too expensive).

At the moment, the most realistic solution is to just wait 10 years for the self-driving cars to mature and then build infrastructure around them.

It'd be a shame if makers of self-driving cars stuck to actual cars and single trips.

Something in between that and buses might be very efficient and practical, especially for things like work commutes, visits to the supermarket and the like. Having say 6 or 8 seats and picking up multiple parties who are heading in the same direction or going to roughly the same destination. It would likely be quicker than waiting for a single trip car and definitely cheaper. Additionally it would likely reduce the number of autonomous vehicles on the road and use less resources.

That just sounds like busses with extra steps :)

The difference is busses travel fixed routes and are not on-demand.

Is that the most realistic? Because I don't think they're ever going to get L5 automation to work.

What Waymo et al have now probably is sufficient for a "public transport" role, given the fixed service area and high density enabling investment in mapping infrastructure with manual fixes and local heuristics.

Erm. Waymo exists already. It's not perfect, but it works. You can get a ride in an actual human-free taxi in SF.

Extending Waymo to handle ALL possible situations autonomously (you put in "New York" in the address field and the car drives you there from Seattle) is probably a too big ask, but working within a pre-mapped area on semi-fixed routes seems plausible.

I fucking hate that argument.

Induced demand is a sign of success: it allows more people to move comfortably between points, and it increases the overall economic activity by inducing more trips.

The only reasonable part of that argument is that lane expansion doesn't increase the average _speed_. And this is indeed true. Instead of lane expansion we ideally should just increase the interconnectivity by building new roads.

In the case of the Puget Sound, I-605 that would bypass I-405 bottleneck is sorely needed.

Another lane would not actually help, because I don’t want to drive there.

I'd say the vast majority of the population of Oregon and Washington is along the I-5 corridor.

Yep. Half live in the Portland and Seattle metro areas alone.

Yes, that's why I said "a substantial portion". About 25% of OR/WA don't live within an hour of the corridor. I live in Oregon, along the I-5 corridor. I've been looking at the feasibility of HSR for years. The math does not yet make sense. If the population was doubled, it would be a no-brainer.

How long until the population doubles? How much harder would it be to build HSR on a route with double the density?

Hopefully never, and not much more than currently

and it looks like they have 7 high speed lines coming from Paris. Seems the PNW could afford 1.

Vancouver BC to maybe Salem is pretty densely populated. They won't get much density past that to get to SF.

And before the 70s there were none.

You probably don’t realize this, but you’re just perpetuating misinformation that’s been debunked repeatedly for decades.

Normally, I'd agree with you, but the Portland-Seattle HSR corridor is around the low end of viable HSR corridors. You're connecting the 17th, 27th, and 28th largest cities in US+Canada, with no realistic prospects to connect anything else approaching a major city--the next largest city is Boise, but that's 350mi away as the crow flies (and mountains means it's quite further in practice), and smaller than even places like Fresno/Bakersfield, which people complain about CAHSR considering to visit. Oh, and one of those three cities is on the other side of an international border, which tends to dampen ridership a fair amount.

By contrast, all the other standard HSR candidates anchor regions that involve at least one, and for all but the Midwest two, cities in the top 10, with many more in the top 50.

I mean I've been doing the math and looking at ridership, transportation and population density mapping in hopes of justifying it for about two of those decades.

Show me a similar area with fewer than 12,000 people per linear kilometer that has HSR and I will be impressed and take notes. I don't know of anywhere on earth that has fast trains and that few people.

Now compare to Spain.

Spain has double the population density of OR/WA, much less if you include BC. What's your point?

Population density of entire states/provinces is completely irrelevant. I trust you're aware that ~ 2/3rds of BC's population, for example, lives in a tiny strip of land (Lower Mainland).

There are 10 million people in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver metro areas, and the distance between the three is about 500 km. That would be more than enough density for high speed train in any part of the world. Spain's major population centres are a lot more geographically spread out.

I'm not sure I'd start with high speed rail in this corridor. The focus should be on high-frequency, high-reliability fast trains that may not hit the true HSR speeds, but at e.g. 200 kmh would be plenty fast enough for now. But the argument that "the population density isn't there" for HSR is absurd.