Comment by _ah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _ah | Hacker News Reader

This is dumb.

In a high-density environment (hey there Japan!) HSR makes tons of sense. In a much lower-density area, moving people isn't the biggest problem, it's moving stuff.

Next time you take a long-distance flight in the USA, look out the window and ponder how dang big AND EMPTY the country is. People can be transported quickly by air, but for cargo you want energy efficiency per kg (not speed). For most of the USA, it's completely rational to build a slow, efficient cargo rail network. The overhead of airports makes sense for human transport given the distances involved. This is different from Europe/Japan where the overhead of air travel matters proportionally more given the short distances between destinations.

It gets worse. The value of a (human) rail network grows as its density grows. Germany is awesome because the rail network connects a bunch of different cities. Even if the Seattle+Portland route makes sense in isolation, that's basically the entire network right there. Maybe add Vancouver? There's no other population center even close... just 3 cities in a line on the coast. There's absolutely no multiplier effect on the new HSR links. They'd be better served by building a small dedicated airport at either end and running frequent commuter planes back and forth all day.

I don't think anyone is proposing building high-speed rail in empty places like Wyoming.

Most Americans don't live in those vast empty areas. There are large parts of the US that are as densely populated as Western Europe. HSR would make sense on the Eastern Seaboard, in the Midwest, California, the Texas triangle, and the Pacific Northwest. There are plenty of city pairs in the US with a few million people, separated by a few hundred miles, which is ideal for HSR.

Eugene -> Albany -> Salem -> Woodburn -> Wilsonville -> Tigard -> Portland -> Vancouver WA -> Woodland -> Long View -> Castle Rock ->Centralia -> Grand Mound -> Olympia -> Lacey -> DuPont -> Tacoma -> Federal Way -> Seattle-Tacoma International Airport -> Burien -> White Center -> Seattle -> Shoreline -> Lynnwood -> Everett.

You could keep going, but that gives you the spine of the populated places between Seattle and Portland and a little past them too covering basically the Willamette Valley in Oregon. You could extend through Mount Vernon and Bellingham up to British Columbia. You could run an East-West line connecting Forest Grove and Gresham through Hillsboro, Beaverton and Portland.

I know Seattle and Portland are the big ones, but the value to people in passenger rail is the whole rail network, not just two points. That said, I’m not going to defend the economics of high speed rail in America either, I’m a bit soured on it, just thought your characterization was unfair that Portland and Seattle were the only two points that mattered when you’ve got most of metropolitan Oregon and Washington around them.

That route at the top would make any high speed rail pointless. You would never get up to a speed to make it worth while. All to stop at places like Castle Rock population 2500. Going down to Eugene and Salem would make sense, but with the intent that they places would aim to grow in size considerably.

Places like Gresham to Forest grove are better for the Portland tram network, they are just part of the one metro area, they are not different metro areas like Seattle and Portland.

Big HSR systems have a mix of express and local trains, like in Shinkansen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Service_names Not every train stops at every stop.

You can cut some of those out then if you think they don’t make sense. It was a quick and dirty example I came up with from my minimal knowledge of Oregon/Washington geography (not nothing but not exceptional) and tracing a route through Apple Maps. Anyone with better knowledge of the local geography can take a second pass and come up with something more reasonable.

You do want some local service at some in-fill stations though between the major destinations, even run express and local service, but as long as you can park your car at a station, having a station that the more suburban/rural parts slightly off the beaten trackway can go to still makes it accessible to more people in the State.

Yeah absolutely! A local service that works well alongside a high speed intercity one would be greta, though may be better to build after the main route (don't want some small stations slowing down the main route build).

For the East/West corridor slower speed trains at the same stations allowing transfers would be preferable (cheaper and quicker to build, with minimal speed impact) to high speed rail.

Ah, express and local service are terms of art used by at least Caltrain that I may or may not be wrongly assuming is more widespread (although another commenter below mentioned it’s used by the Shinkansen services in Japan as well which I think I knew but forgot). They have their “baby bullet” service which amounts to: these set of trains in particular skip a bunch of stations along the way, and the local service just serves all of them.

You can run them on the same tracks with the same stock. You have e.g. the 9:00 express train depart from Portland serving a subset of the stations between it and Seattle and maybe the 9:15 departs and serves all of them followed by another express at 9:45. Each stop shouldn’t add more than 2 or 3 minutes between terminuses, if the service stops for a generous amount of time at each one.

And then yeah, you have your regional transportation agencies to serving the metro areas along the way more comprehensively.

Shanghai to Beijing has a high speed line and no cities nearly as big as either of them between the two. Not to mention China's HSR network covers a number of cities over large distances. I think that'd be the better comparison to the US, no? Large geography with pockets of higher population?

High speed transportation tends to grow the low density areas.

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