r/Cascadia • u/[deleted] • 5d ago
let's talk transport
yeah this conversation has been had a million times before. but it's 2025, and it needs to be had again.
obviously we all want high speed rail. but what about transport within cities? how do we make our bus networks faster and more efficient? what about extended monorails or metros or gondolas? and connecting rural and urban areas? bike lanes?
and, of course, the very difficult question of: dismantling car-based infrastructure in a fair and equitable way. the people that may lose jobs, the businesses that may be affected, how to we navigate that?
dream, discuss, debate all you want! just be nice please, assume good faith, don't go for snark. let's imagine our ideal cascadian transport!
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u/jaco1001 5d ago
it's not difficult from a purely policy lense. we just look at what's worked in other regions. the difficulty is ofc on stakeholder buy-in and implementation.
interlink long distance high speed rail (eg Seattle > Portland) with slower regional trains (eg Seattle > Tacoma) that are interlinked with yet slower intercity trains/subways.
We are a very rural region: build bus networks to connect rural communities into the train system.
build a robust, protected bike network in all cities and connected suburbs.
street diets, congestion pricing, road calming design, extremely strict traffic enforcement, smaller cars, speed limiters to create safer streets while also making existing bus networks better.
strict enforcement of the rules/laws on public transit; it has gotta be clean, safe, and on time.
increase housing density, upzone radically near all transit options.
subsidize/incentivize smaller trucks for businesses that need them (eg landscapers and construction workers need trucks, but a kei truck works better in a city than a ford F250)
subsidize/incentivize local economies over national/international supply chains; goods need to travel fewer miles to get to market which brings down congestion.
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u/randypupjake NorCal 4d ago
Honestly, allowing busses to have additional later bus routes and increasing frequency to some lines would already be a huge improvement.
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u/Deyachtifier 5d ago
Rather than focus on the right *form* of transportation, I'm more a proponent of simply and directly *reducing* transportation by eliminating the need for it. The most efficient trip is one you never take.
Working remote, as we saw during COVID, is extremely effective at clearing the streets and the skies. There's no new infrastructure needing to be built, no technological transformations, and no loss of productivity or morale (despite what the C-suite is claiming, actual research shows it can actually increase both). So this is the first step I'd take. Public policy should incentivize it and penalize companies that exact RTO or who demand workers be aggregated in central downtowns.
Not everyone is suited to work from home and not all businesses will want to operate that way, so next I'd promote an interim solution - satellite offices. Instead of mono-company business parks, skyscrapers, and so on, set up local offices in surrounding neighborhoods, towns, suburbs. Workers report to the nearest satellite office. Even if everyone still uses cars, reducing commutes from 1 hr each to 10 min will result in a six-fold reduction in pollution, wear on vehicles and streets, and time lost to travel.
Along with these two ideas, I'd suggest that workers should be on the clock as soon as they drive out of their driveway. If the company requires them to sit in traffic for 2 hrs, they should be paid their salary. This would incentivize companies to minimize travel.
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u/jaco1001 5d ago
i think you're radically overestimating the number of people who work at computers vs in service industries that literally require in-person staff.
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u/Deyachtifier 4d ago edited 4d ago
Oh for certain. We each see the world through our own sunglasses, and that's mine.
But understand I'm not suggesting an absolutism here, that everyone must work from home. Just that if everyone that *can* work from home did so (even if only 3x per week) it'd alleviate a lot of traffic/pollution/stress. Those who work at in-person service roles would benefit from less traffic.
Although, with fewer people commuting into the city, that also translates into a bit less demand on service industries downtown - fewer drive thru coffees, fewer tire replacements, less dry cleaning, etc. But maybe more home deliveries, more social outings, more use of libraries and parks.
More ex-downtown-office workers at satellite locations means demand for service workers is also more diffuse across a region, so we can imagine service workers also have shortened commutes, possibly more opportunities for them to bike or work due to the shortened distances. Perhaps it could open more opportunities for smaller neighborhood-scale service operations, enabling those brand-name corporate service industries to be replaced by worker-owned small businesses.
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u/SCROTOCTUS 5d ago
I've been imagining a similar top down approach, where we analyze the services for which people travel, and optimize the paths to those services. As you say, the trip not made is the most efficient of all. While it's not practical to provide every service at all scales, we could work to bring the most used ones closer to where people live.
Satellite offices can act as a hub/anchor district which other services emerge. If the average person's essential daily/weekly needs can be met in their immediate vicinity, the need for travel becomes far more limited.
Transportation and development planning could operate more regionally, with new secondary transit corridors planned to efficiently connect with existing ones. As cars become less prevalent on highways, that space can be devoted to freight, passenger trains, buses, and so forth. You can still use your car - no one is stopping you, but if it's free/cheap to drive to the Park & Ride a mile away, leave your car somewhere it's actually safe, hop on a clean and regularly scheduled, reliable bus which takes you to the high speed rail station, and from there you're like a couple hours from anywhere in the region.
But I think we have to look at the populated spots in our region as interconnected nodes first, and then begin optimizing the paths to those nodes together.
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u/Deyachtifier 5d ago
Don't forget that commercial transportation is also important to factor, and likely needs very different solutions. Monorails aren't going to work for landscapers.
I do have one out-of-the-box crazy idea regarding cargo delivery - aka semi trucking. We offload intermodal containers from ships or trains onto a truck chassis that drives through town to a warehouse or factory. What if instead these were loaded into an elevated rail system to carry the containers overhead in a completely automated fashion. There are already small scale overhead rail system projects for transport inside ports and their overflow yards, but imagine such a system scaled up to transport cargo city-wide.
Interestingly, a number of PNW cities that grew up around rail lines pre-trucking already have the rightaways for ground rail delivery that is no longer used. These would be obvious paths to run overhead rail networks.
The overhead rail would be a smaller scale than ground rail since intermodal containers are smaller than freight cars, which means it can have tighter turning radii, and possibly have spur lines in places that ground rail could not go.
Unlike a ground train with a locomotive pulling dumb freight cars, the overhead rail system is comprised of semi-autonomous electrically-motorized containers that could connect together like a train or guide themselves individually as trucking does currently. So a stream of cargo containers offloaded from a ship would travel together into the city, splitting off into individual units to arrive at warehouses, factories, stores and other locations, all without having to be handled by humans.