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.

Can someone tell me why, exactly, Link takes it’s expensive and circuitus path? Considering it will take as long (or longer) as it currently does via bus to get from downtown to the airport, this would not seem like a great idea.

One would think a straight line would be the easiest, cheapest, and fastest route. This would take us through some industrial areas, which would seem to have inexpensive land. It would also drive by Boeing Field, which could be useful if it ever runs as a commercial airport. Plus it seems like there would have been little/no boring reqired.

Yes, the route drives through a few communities, but this seems like a reason to not put light rail there – you end up stopping at stoplights. Building communities around transit seems like a much better idea.

I imagine a strong difference between city-based transit, that tries to conform to neighborhoods, and regional transit, that should be built for speed. This is clearly regional transit, but seems to be designed as city transit.

In ST2 there was money to do a study for HCT from the UW to Ballard via NE45th. I don’t see anything about that. Everyone know that getting East/West in this city is a nightmare and ST and Metro really need to address this. I think that they should have at least 3 high quality E/W BRT routes that help people get from one side of the city to the other and allow them to transfer from LINK to RapidRide or other local service. If we aren’t going to have light rail for a while we have got to have a good BRT network.

(Full size http://students.washington.edu/adambp/mytake.jpg)

I have done a quick little overlay (see above) of what this would look like on their map. All of these routes exist so service hours could be taken from those routes. Also with LINK some current bus service can be redistributed to help pay for this. Possibly on busy streets like denny the buses could go a block or two north and use bus only streets.