As a side note, I’m intrigued by the discussion about coal and rail.  45% by volume of material we move around in trains is coal (wow!).  Before the recession, the cost of shipping coal shot up along with the cost of oil, causing the coal industry to get nervous.  One big fear about peak oil is that it may cause an increase in coal use.  Coal has earned it’s reputation as enemy of mankind, as it has far more global warming potential than any other fuel.  But if the costs to ship coal around go up along with the cost of oil, maybe this won’t be quite as large effect as feared.  (unless, of course, we do something really stupid like allow coal powered engines back on the track…)

One of the tensions with High Speed Rail is balancing the desire for stops among communities along the route with the desire to keep the train moving to its destination. This resolves that tension.

Airport congestion is a mounting problem exacerbated in part by all the short flights in and out of major airports.

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These short hops should not exist. They’re short enough to take by train. It seems airlines keep the flights to attract more passengers by providing connecting service to destinations beyond their hubs. But why would anyone want to put in the time to travel to and from airports, deal with security and then risk delays due to weather or congestion?

There’s a solution. Airlines need to team up with railway lines to optimize the effectiveness of our railway and airport systems.

The post goes on to discuss the various ways this is being done in Europe and even parts of the US.

I think this is one way in which American high-speed rail will be unique, owing to our different land use patterns. We’ll have to build (a) stations with rental car facilities, and (b) stations both in the downtown core and at the nearest airport, to facilitate transfers. Not that these things are completely unique to the US; my point is simply that HSR will look somewhat different in America than it does in Europe and Japan. There probably won’t be the same giant, above-ground hangar-like stations that you have in Europe, for example.

I suspect we’ll see this play out in Florida, which looks like it’s going to be America’s first high-speed rail state. The Tampa-Orlando route, with right-of-way donated by Disney, will probably be a tourist-heavy affair. The benefit is that you get riders right away. The danger in this approach is that it becomes a novelty, not unlike Orlando’s other major rapid transit system.

I’m excited to see Washington State receive $590 million in high-speed rail grants. It’s pretty remarkable that our state, with just 2% of the nation’s population, managed to snag 7% of the $8 billion in federal dollars.

As much as I adore Sen. Patty Murray, I’m not sure we can give her office the lion’s share of the credit here. To my knowledge, this didn’t go through the typical appropriations process where Sen. Murray has disproportionate clout. Rather, this is the result of 20 years of work by the states of Oregon and Washington to seriously invest in rail when not many other states were doing so.

In addition to shaving several minutes off the Seattle-Portland trip, we’ll also get a couple of new round-trips per day, and some significant work towards systems which will allow our Talgo trains to hit their maximum speed of 125mph.

This is, also, the perfect use of stimulus money, IMO. You have a long-term plan (pdf) for infrastructure investment that might have been cut because of state budget issues, so the feds come in and play the counter-cyclical role of keeping the project and the jobs afloat until the economy recovers.

Finally, one of the criticisms of the $8 billion fund was that it wasn’t enough to do a national network, and so you had a choice of either putting all the money on one “showpiece” project, or doleing it out piecemeal and maybe not seeing any HSR actually get built. Overall, I thought the DOT did a really good job of balancing those two goals. California and Florida, with projects in the advanced planning stages, got over half the money, and the rest was largely doled out to a few projects in substantial amounts that it could actually make a difference.