Submitted by Breck Lebegue MD MPH, WA Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Amtrak Cascades service in Washington just received a boost of positive new energy with House passage of ESHB 1837. Senator Nobles co-sponsored a companion bill in the Senate that did not advance, so the House bill now needs to also pass the Senate for us to enjoy faster, more frequent, reliable train service between Vancouver, B.C., Seattle, and Portland by 2035. The bill expects trains to be on time a minimum of 88% of the time, much better than a 50% on-time average over the past 10 years. Trains would run 14 roundtrips between Seattle and Portland, taking only 2-hours 45-minutes each way–a much more relaxed, healthy, and climate-conscious way to travel, than driving on busy freeways or flying from crowded airports.
Cascades has a total of 12 stops in Washington, including Tacoma and Olympia-Lacey. No Cascades stop at the future DuPont Sounder station is planned. Pierce County residents may contact Sen. Nobles office to express their opinion on ESHB 1837 and ask Senate Transportation Chair Marco Liias to hold a hearing to advance the bill.
I hope Sen. Nobles is paying for these weekly ads!
It would be nice to have train transportation like Europe. This would be a big step to get there. Unfortunate this will have taken decades IF approved by the WA state Senate & House. Thank you Senator Nobles for trying to move our transportation system into this century.
We business and property owners in the Tacoma Dome District, have been dealing with the development of multi-modal transportation schemes for decades.
What could have and should have been built and operational long ago, is still in the “planning” phase.
The transportation behemoths behind these schemes, basically took a three year vacation to Covid-land, then slowly returned with new people to redo the “planning” which had already been done.
There was more track laid 150 years ago, in a fraction of the time, with steam, horse, and man power.
This is the type of inefficiency that is begrudgingly being ripped out of federal government today, because we can no longer afford such institutionalized welfare.
If we had engineers, architects, and construction people in charge, instead of bureaucrats and politicians, this thing would have been built out long ago, for far less than it will cost today.
A lot of us tried really hard to tell you so.