you're not exactly making a good faith argument here [0] but sure i'll play ball i'll ignore the infrastructure costs, it's free to drive on I-5 after all. an

you're not exactly making a good faith argument here [0] but sure i'll play ball i'll ignore the infrastructure costs, it's free to drive on I-5 after all. an N700S costs about $50M and holds 1300 people. amortized over 30 years, you're looking at say $3M/year including a very generous maintenance budget. i'll throw in another $0.5M/year for misc personnel costs (driver, station staff). even if you ran only a single weekday peak hour round trip per trainset with tickets priced at $20 one way, revenue would be about $13M/year. so you could charge $10 for tickets, follow american "best practices" of running only peak service and idling your expensive rolling stock for the rest of the day and still make ends meet. in reality, the infra would be built following best practices to bring the runtime between portland and seattle to just under an hour[1]. this facilitates an hourly takt. running short turns between portland and seattle each trainset would make 5-8 round trips a day, which even with low occupancy factors is still tremendously profitable. [0] see the other comment where you say that "transit dorks" never talk about how much things cost. "transit dorks" are _obsessed_ with how much things cost. alon levy, who is by all accounts one of the more influential voices in internet transit world these days has a multi year project in collaboration with several other transit activists to find out exactly why transit projects are expensive as they are in the US. not to mention dozens of blog posts analyzing individual projects. Clem Tillier has a site going back 15 years where he publishes very detailed analysis on the bay area portion of the california high speed rail project, its cost overruns and policy driven technical failings. that "transit dorks" don't care about cost is a conclusion you could draw if you only follow reductive normies like alan fisher, but if you uncritically accepted that such sophomoric reddit tier dialogue was the state of the art in transit twitter - well, one would have to really question how much critical thought you've put into your stance on car dependency and EVs. [1] a route following I-5 is 260km so this is a reasonable assumption.