U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) joined Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), and Representatives Rick Larsen (D, WA-02), Derek Kilmer (D, WA-06), Marilyn Strickland (D, WA-10), Adam Smith (D, WA-09), Suzan DelBene (D, WA-01), and Pramila Jayapal (D, WA-07) released a joint statement to announce that the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has awarded $49.7 million for planning work for the proposed Cascadia High-Speed Rail project, which would link the Pacific Northwest’s major population centers, including Vancouver, B.C., Seattle, and Portland, with regular train service running at up to 250 mph.
Yep.
It’s just $50m for an initial assessment.
At this rate, this one high speed line might be built in something like 20 years.
Its been about 15 years of building just a light rail system in the Seattle area… and we’ve got One line as a spine from Lynnwood to SeaTac (about 30 miles), and Two line as a spine from Redmond to Bellevue (about 8 miles).
These lines don’t even link up.
Whole system planned completion date?
2045?
Total cost so far?
50 billion dollars? More?
Total planned cost out to project completion date?
150 billion dollars? More?
I pose these all as question marks as it takes a fairly involved effort to actually figure out real numbers.
If anyone can give me an accurate, unbiased breakdown, I’d appreciate it, I can’t find one easily with a fucked up wrist, on a phone.
…
I like transit. I think we should build more transit.
I know HSR has less stops and stations than an urban light rail system.
The point here is that this scale of costs and timetables are ludicrous compared to what other countries or regions or cities of other countries have achieved.
Some of the broader reasons why it’s expensive are here:https://www.governing.com/finance/why-are-u-s-transit-projects-so-costly-this-group-is-on-the-case
It boils down to the US not having established experts in house, whether for design, permitting, technology, supply chain, etc. so they have to outsource it which makes us pay 3-7x global average cost. Artificial dominance of auto travel due to lobbying over decades does not help political resistance and transience either to completing such a project.
Yeah… I can see why Not Just Bikes just said fuck it and moved to the Netherlands.
Seems like Seattle is doing ok.
Link across lake Washington was supposed to be done already, but the floating bridge itself has an issue with improperly made concrete for the tremendous additional tonnage frequent train service will add (particularly if there was a seismic event).
This has had a number of knock-on effects, particularly the lack of access to the main OMF (operations and maintenance facility) in Bellevue, so the 1 line only has access to the smaller facility near sodo. That also means the additional train sets ordered can’t be stored in a useful place, and messes up the phases of other parts of the schedule.
Good news: tracks are done, most likely we should expect to get trains testing for a few months in mid to late spring, with the cross-bridge connection finally opening to the public in summer 25.
Little late, sure, but I’d say this system is coming along quite nicely, after having previously supported NYC’s transit systems.
Just a slight correction: the Link Light Rail project officially opened their first station (although served by bus at the time) in 1997. It’s taken almost 28 years to get to this point.
The Tacoma Link started in 97 as just a bus line/station, and later grew into a low speed, at grade/street level, street car system.
It does not and cannot directly connect to Link Light Rail, which is a different thing, uses completely different train cars with significantly higher speed and passenger capacity, which could not make many of the tight street car system’s turns, has much more high capacity stations, many of which are below ground or elevated… both just include ‘Link’ in the name.
What is now called the One Line of Link Light Rail was originally named Central Link.
Construction on that began in 03, went down from Westlake Center to Seatac, completed in 09, later expanded up to the U District, Northgate, Lynnwood, etc.
Its not helpful at all that the nomenclature is confusing and basically changing every couple of years, but basically, Tacoma Link (which is now called the T Line) is a street car… not a lightrail system comparable to a subway.
Seattle also has its own street car lines… but these are managed by the city itself and the county Seattle is in… whereas the proper light rail system and the Tacoma streetcar are managed by SoundTransit.
Its all clear as mud.
Anyway thats a long way for me to say I’m counting the 03 starting date of the Central/One Line under SoundTransit as the starting point for the light rail system, not Tacoma Link, which is a streetcar.
EDIT: Fucking woops, I’m actually counting from roughly when the first segment of the One Line / Central Link was completed, not started, in my original post.
I lived in and near Seattle since 07 and I can’t even keep any of this straight, blargh.
EDIT 2: Just for shits and giggles;
When Seattle’s first, modern streetcar system opened up (we used to have one back before WW2, but car companies lobbied the city to tear out the tracks)…
It was officially named the South Lake Union Trolley.
So, within a week, people began making tshirts with ‘I rode the S.L.U.T.!’
It was then renamed to South Lake Union Streetcar in about 2 or 3 months.
… Seattle is a place that is so bad at naming things that the official name, in all the official documents and such, the name that the automated voice on the lightrail speaks aloud when you arrive in a section of downtown is:
Chinatown/International District.
Because … it used to be called Chinatown, due to mostly being comprised of Chinese migrants.
But then other, mostly asian minorities began to move in, and Chinatown was seen as a racist term, so it was changed to International District.
But them the Chinese community got angry, because they’d been there longer and were still the majority minority in that area, and they actually liked the name Chinatown.
So then the official name became both, and not either/or, both.
And then it got even more specific with block by block different secondary languages on road signs after english.
Some are Mandarin, some are Japanese, some are Vietnamese…
Oh, sure, it’s been a while. I just wanted to point out that the system has a lot of positive inertia coming towards the end of the project.
For the record, I’m sad that a system this size still took almost an engineer’s career to implement, time-wise.