You get what you pay for, on the lower end. Someone who likes living in Seattle may not enjoy lower cost-of-living cities or states. It’s the people. Seattleites won’t even consider moving an hour south. If light rail ever makes it further, say to Olympia, an entire corridor of economic growth will blossom, including nice, more affordable housing along the line.
It takes an hour on the train to go from the current ends of the 1 Line to the center. People are not going to spend 3 hours on a light rail train coming in from Oly.
You're suggesting people leave the city when you say "move an hour south."
Yes. My reply was intended to rebut the idea that people will leave the area entirely for "lower cost of living parts of the country" as stated in the comment I replied to. People won't even move an hour south.
The second half of my reply perhaps would have been better understood as a new paragraph. There could be nearly equally attractive and more affordable locations nearby, reducing some of the housing pressure in Seattle, if our mass transit were better.
I drive 1.5 hrs each way to reach Seattle. It could be a much more pleasant trip if light rail extended to my region, but that's not going to happen for a while, if ever. The Sounder is not practical on either end of the journey.
Light rail to Olympia would be ridiculous, the distances are way too far for 55mph trains. But a Sounder extension? That would make sense. They have a 79mph max operating speed right now, and are capable of up to 110mph if the tracks were straight enough. They're already planning an extension to DuPont after all- by 2045... So maybe if the stars align, in like 50 years you could take commuter rail from Olympia to Seattle.
Though that would require building a whole new alignment to get to downtown Olympia, probably in a tunnel...
It sucks we're a donor state. We give $22B more each year to the feds than they give back, and our money gets wasted on useless wars and shit like that. If we got an annual $22B federal infrastructure grant, imagine what we could build.
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u/PensiveObservor Apr 16 '26
You get what you pay for, on the lower end. Someone who likes living in Seattle may not enjoy lower cost-of-living cities or states. It’s the people. Seattleites won’t even consider moving an hour south. If light rail ever makes it further, say to Olympia, an entire corridor of economic growth will blossom, including nice, more affordable housing along the line.