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Lawmakers announce high-speed rail to link Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, BC (www.kptv.com)

submitted 16 hours ago by chaospatterns to c/seattle

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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.

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[–] pdxfed 6 points 12 hours ago (8 children)

It's better than nothing, but not by much. Criticize China for many things but they had ZERO HSR in 2007 and now have the largest network in the world they had an essential network completed within ~10 years and now are just adding to it.

$50m for planning and nothing actually happening. $8b in 2010 was allocated by Obama and it went to planning in Florida and CA and "improving service" in 11 other high impact states with rail including WA. Compared to $50b bailout auto industry got, it of course amounts to nothing which is why the US is a nothing burger of HSR (don't buy the marketing of Acela in the NE as HSR, that's just semantics and categorization--just like how internet companies lobbied for decades to categorize crappy speeds as "high speed internet" when it wasn't anything close to what was offered in other developed countries.

If anything close to what we waste on roads was allocated to rail in the US, we could have HSR in logical corridors in 10 years. As it is, I fear I won't see it in my life now with the Trump Trifecta government.

[–] RubberElectrons 2 points 5 hours ago

We the people are not fans of use of eminent domain. It severely damages a project's reputation, see Robert Moses' destruction of many parts of NYC with shitty highways.

We do need more rail, and it gets easy to build in flat, unoccupied areas. CA HSR is taking advantage of that, so will WA. Maybe some day they'll connect.

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