Sigh. While I'm a huge fan of high speed rail, and in fact Portland-Seattle-Vancouver is close to the ideal distance for it to compete with air travel, two thi

Sigh. While I'm a huge fan of high speed rail, and in fact Portland-Seattle-Vancouver is close to the ideal distance for it to compete with air travel, two things make this really hard to justify in cost-benefit, at least for the near-term: 1. Low density of population in this area, low absolute demand 2. High cost of rail development in the US These 2 factors just structurally disadvantage any such venture to create a high speed rail line between these cities, as sexy an idea as it may sound at first. Speaking only of present demand, there is not really a huge enough sustained daily ridership between even Portland and Seattle. There are approx. 2600 daily airplane seats one-way between the cities between the hours of 6am and 12 midnight, or 150 passengers per hour. There are very frequent (sub-hourly) departures on very small planes, because people value frequency for such a short trip. For a top of the line rail service they're talking about (and to most utilize the high fixed cost of the infrastructure), you would expect there to be at least hourly (or even be generous, 2-hourly) service to call it a true frequent high speed rail solution. You don't build a high speed rail to have it run only every 3 hours. The 150-300 people taking planes now just doesn't fill a 700-900 seat train, and hope as you may to say that you can displace car vehicle passengers onto the train, it seems like a big stretch to think you'll stimulate 700 people per hour to take the train, especially at probably >$100 per ticket. This is not to say that having such a service couldn't start to stimulate demand over several years between the 2 cities. But would the public be willing to foot the bill to make that bet, and for how long? Secondly, the cost to acquire rights of way and get the expertise to built such a high speed rail line is just way too high in the US. There have been good articles wondering why this is, and that deserves a thread of its own, it's so complex. We don't have a good track (hah) record of being able to source the talent and the property rights and engineering leverage / cost efficiency to do this affordably. Other countries have 1000s of rail planning engineers who work on this stuff every day. It would be hard for us to fill a single train car with such expertise. Much as I wish such a thing could be possible, the cost-benefits of high speed rail in the US really point you to spending your transportation $ elsewhere for more positive impact. If it could be built at 1/10 the cost, it would be a no-brainer, and for sure I would say take that bet. But that's not the reality we've created for ourselves in this country.