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0 pointsMa8ee4y ago0 comments

When you do this kind of estimates, in particular when the time scale is many decades, the outcome depends on way to many assumptions and other projections to even a little reliable. I still think it is useful exercises, but it is certainly legitimate to use it as only one of many variables in the decision making process.

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bombcar4y ago

I spent a large amount of time years ago reading the LOSSAN reports [95] and it would have been interesting to see things noted as "for certain will help" and "most likely will help" etc. Many of the improvements were things like "double track this single-track section between two double-tracked ones" which would almost certainly help; others were things like bridge replacements which wouldn't necessarily help but would prevent maintenance issues in the future, to things like station improvements which would only really help travel times if travel volumes got above a certain amount.

For example, this project: https://www.octa.net/LOSSAN-Rail-Corridor-Agency/Central-Coa... doesn't really change average transit times, but would allow two or three trains to "start" each day at the farthest north.

Of course US passenger rail is in such a state that there's almost always very obvious low-hanging fruit.

[95]: https://www.octa.net/LOSSAN-Rail-Corridor-Agency/Overview/

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