SEATTLE — A team of Washington Democrats is calling for the federal government to help fund a high-speed rail line that would travel up to 250 miles per hour and stretch from Canada to Oregon.
Washington's Congressional delegation said its ambitious Cascadia High-Speed Rail proposal has the "potential to transform the Pacific Northwest" in a Tuesday letter to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. The Cascadia rail line would connect Vancouver, British Columbia to Seattle to Portland, according to the delegation.
In the letter, the Democrats argued the project would lead to better access to jobs, affordable housing, climate initiatives, shared resources, increased tourism and economic growth for the Pacific Northwest region. At 250 miles per hour, a rider using the high-speed service would travel from Vancouver to Portland in under two hours. A rider could travel from Seattle to Portland in under an hour. The top speed of 250 mph for the project is faster than other rail services on the horizon in North America.
During the 2022 session, the Washington State Legislature allocated $4 million for additional analysis and framework for future high-speed rail and another $150 million legislators hope the federal government will match for the project.
According to the letter, Seattle, Portland and Vancouver are expected to add as many as four million people by 2050. That would bring the region's population to over 13 million at that time. The delegates argued the rail project is a way to manage the level of growth and provide efficient travel to allow people to live in less densely populated areas.
Another positive trade-off of completing the "visionary" project, the Democrats said in the letter, is the rail line would decrease emissions on Interstate 5 by reducing traffic congestion and mitigating the effects of climate change caused by fossil fuels.
Officials sent a status report to Governor Jay Inslee and the Legislature on June 30. The project is currently in the planning phase, as legislators wait for the possibility of federal funding before further study occurs. Opportunities for public comment will be coming in the future
In 2019, a report on high-speed rail in the Pacific Northwest recommended that Oregon, Washington and British Columbia formalize their interest in a Cascadia bullet train by creating an independent body to plan and eventually build it. The study built on previous state-sponsored studies that asserted there is sufficient demand for trains running at up to 250 miles per hour between Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, BC.
The report said one of the first jobs of the coordinating entity should be to select a technology for the “ultra-high-speed ground transportation” corridor. Options include traditional high-speed rail, magnetic levitation trains, or a hyperloop, where passengers move in capsules that are propelled electrically down sealed low-air-pressure tubes.
But a critic with a conservative think tank said the region should take heed of California’s high-speed rail woes and end the Cascadia bullet train ambitions, the Northwest News Network reported. Problems facing California’s high-speed rail project led an analyst associated with the conservative-leaning Washington Policy Center to recommend against moving ahead with a Cascadia bullet train.