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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

1 hr Seattle to Portland probably doesn’t even really make it commuting distance because very few people are going to live and work close enough to the endpoints to keep things to 90 minutes total. Boston to NYC is 4 hours or so and that’s useful for a lot of purposes although that’s admittedly in part because driving and parking in Manhattan is so awful. (I could drive from my house to Manhattan faster but I hardly ever do.)

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I don't think commuting should be the main focus - if you want HSR to make sense ecologically, it should replace existing car and airplane trips, not enable people to make longer commutes.

I’m not from the area but does anyone actually fly from SEA to PDX assuming they have a car? It’s not like SeaTac is even that close to Seattle. And depending on where you live and destination plans it’s hard for me to imagine trading a less than 3 hour drive for a train trip.

I can't relate to this at all. I would trade driving for a train trip if the total duration is somewhat comparable (or even a little bit longer), especially if I would have to make the trip regularly.

I don't think flying is convenient but taking a HSR-train is.

It depends on a lot of factors. Where do you live relative to the train station? How annoying is the drive? Do you want/need a car on the other end? New York checks two of those boxes for me. (Getting to the train is out of the way.) But a lot of places that could be train trips I’d want a car once I got there.

From the number of flights offered, I think it’s much more common than you might think. My guess is that part of the reason has to to with Seattle’s very very bad traffic. I once spent 4 hours traveling less than 15 miles on a drive heading south from the city center, and I don’t think that’s even super anomalous.

One of these days people are going to understand that "what makes most ecological sense" is allowing people to live their normal lives as they're accustomed to live them, without beating them over the head and telling them they're bad people.

The average American lifestyle (cars included) is what it is . . . so decarbonize that and stop expecting everyone to live like Brooklynites or Europeans.

In a WFH or occasional-office-visit basis, that's more tractable as the trip wouldn't be made on a daily basis.

Though another option is to both densify development near stations and to create a well-functioning feeder transit system to service areas further out. If those can operate at, say, 35 mph / 55 kph average speed, and assuming a 5 minute walkable commute to the work endpoint (jobs are easier to cluster near stations than housing), and with well-timed transfers, then the feed-in distance could be up to about 15 miles / 23 km from the actual HSR station.

Note that average speed is usually about half of top speed, so these would be relatively high-speed commuter-rail systems. Note that the typical average speed of an urban bus, say, is about 5-15 mph (8-24 kph).

Why is 90 minutes the magic number? For example lots of people commute from New Haven to New York City, where the train ride alone is 90+ minutes.

Manhattan is sort of a special case and I can tell you from personal experience that 90 minutes is pretty bad even if a lot of it is spent on a train. I commuted into Boston a few days a week when it was about 90 minutes door to door and IMO it was not sustainable. If I go into my downtown office now which I do rarely it’s 2 hours.

That some people are forced into super-commutes now and then doesn’t make it a really sustainable most days situation. So you’re up by 6am or earlier and you’re not getting home until 8pm or later depending on your work hours.

And it is an awful existence. People do it for the chance to earn more money, but I would not wish that quality of life on my enemies.

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