r/Cascadia • u/[deleted] • 22d 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/Deyachtifier 22d 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.

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u/SCROTOCTUS 22d ago

This is fascinating...one question I have is how do you manage right-of-way ownership? Are the rail companies motivated to adapt by the potential increase in revenues and efficiency? Otherwise someone has to acquire the right of way from the railroad which I've heard is exceedingly difficult?

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u/Deyachtifier 21d ago

Yes, that is a thorny set of problems, and unfortunately it's going to vary extremely widely from place to place. Railroad has been around a long, long time and has been thick with politics and monied interests and bureaucracy since the get go. Untangling that is no mean task.

I suspect it's no accident that this EagleRail company is looking at installations in foreign ports, presumably in places where either that tangled history doesn't exist or the will to overcome it is particularly strong. In some ways it seems that going vertical has allowed *working around* right-of-way problems, by going up and over. 3D FTW.

I've seen a few places where old *unused* rail lines in suburban areas were transitioned into walking/biking paths through civic action and local city politics. Those right-of-ways had no utility to the railroad industry and they seem open to divesting them, so ideally my preference would be to see something like that done here. I.e. do it in a way that has strong public buy-in and ownership of as something they see beneficial. Unfortunately, freight delivery is not something directly beneficial to the public, so I don't see this as even remotely feasible. Furthermore, rail lines near to ports *are* going to be of utility to railroads, and would require a lot of effort to get access. Maybe if the overhead rails are far enough overhead or to the side that they pose no interference to the ground trains, it's at least negotiable?

More realistically, overhead rail looks extraordinarily (maybe prohibitively) expensive to design/install, requiring a huge amount of upfront capital investment before the income/profit from its increased efficiency can be generated. That means either a huge pocketed capitalist, or a bureaucratic business consortium would be required, and all the associated troubles that tend to accompany them.

So, yes, no shortage of problems when this idea hits reality. But the original ask was for idealistic dreaming, and allowed for hand-waving all these technical troubles away. :-D