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Comment by jeffwilcox | Hacker News Reader

Riding the Link Light Rail is super depressing when it stops at all the streets on Rainier Ave, just waiting to T-bone another left-turning car that isn't paying attention to how things work...

The appetite for large-scale transit outside highway lanes in America is downright depressing. I'm still under the influence of a recent trip to Japan, and a trip before that to Germany, while reading about high-speed trains in China, and essentially the rest of the world is not only willing to fully invest in smart rail tech for their cities, but they are willing to go the whole way with high-speed rail, too. Cargo trains and the car industry controls too much!

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At the time, businesses along Rainier Ave pushed for a surface alignment instead of a tunnel to get more stops along Rainier, to avoid disruption to business access from cut-and-cover tunneling, and because they thought having people above ground would make their area more visible. (There were also people who raised the idea that building a light rail system from the northern, and more white, part of Seattle down to the airport while "hiding" the more non-white part of Seattle from those riders by putting them in a tunnel was socially unfair.)

It isn't always construction concerns that dictate why we make the decisions we do.

That said, I have been on the HSR systems in Germany and eastern China and, yes, they are beautiful and I wish we had one in Puget Sound.

At the time, I remember many citizen groups complaining that Ranier should have a tunnel or st least some more grade separation.

Light rail and HSR are completely different things though. Also, the area lacks much density on its outside for HSR to go anywhere, maybe Portland with a stop in Vancouver and Tacoma?

Olympia would be a good stop too. When Worked down there for the State there were people that commuted all the way from Renton and even Portland(Seriously). Not to mention I reckon there is a lot of traffic from Seattle <-> Olympia. Now that you mention it add it Bellingham too.

The only issues with this is I can see a lot of complaints about rising property values in the more rural parts of the Sound, but you've got to start making adaptations for the influx of people at some point, right?

There isn’t a lot of density, and how many people would be willing to pay $100 to commute daily from Bellingham to Seattle? HSR isn’t cheap to run, many can’t afford it for daily commutes even in Japan.

>Riding the Link Light Rail is super depressing when it stops at all the streets on Rainier Ave, just waiting to T-bone another left-turning car that isn't paying attention to how things work...

I rarely have it stop anywhere on Rainier, but when it does it takes so long for something that already takes forever. I live south of Seattle and it takes me 45 minutes to get home on the light rail where a bus will take 20 -- unfortunately the bus I need doesn't run on weekends so I have to take the light rail.

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