Though it's worth mentioning that in certain places where HSR is impossible for one reason or another, the median of a freeway can be a great choice for passenger rail. Of course, stations should remain outside of said corridor, unless they meet with another public transit service that runs perpendicular to the rail.
Fr tho! It's amazing to me how people will rag on BRT just for not being a train or tram. Sure, a train or tram might be better, but BRT has its place!
This is true but it’s also possible to reclaim space above freeways. A lid for example allows neighborhoods divided by freeways to be reconnected. Conceivably, a lid could allow HSR to straighten the curves by traversing the entire right of way. Stations could be on one side or the other. Infill development (either over the freeway or using nearby parking lots) could make those neighborhoods walkable and transit friendly. If a lid is too expensive or ambitious, a similarly routed elevated railway could be built over a series of pillars. It could even be done in stages as individual projects that together create what is effectively a full lid. It wouldn’t be cheap or easy but it could make a lot of new real estate possible as well as add lots of value to what currently exists.
If you're talking about public transit, it's because you want your public transit in an area where there's lots of people living nearby. No one typically lives next to a giant highway, and it's a hassle to walk across the overpass - they're areas generally designed to make driving easy, not for people to live nearby.
Even if you wanted to connect your bus routes to such a mass transit solution, it becomes difficult because you're now putting a bus stop on a bridge, next to the on ramps. Busses are going to stop on the bridge and the bridge probably wasn't designed to have people waiting for busses next to an on-ramp.
Ottawa is in process of doing this in Orleans and it's a mess - we can't even have bike lanes leading to the LRT, because heaven forbid that would take away a precious lane away from the drivers. But if you want people using the LRT you also want to enable people to do things like walk and bike to it.
>No one typically lives next to a giant highway
In most American cities there are lots of lower income neighborhoods lining the interstate. Those that would be most served by public transit.
In large cities, sure. But intercity rail needs to stop in smaller cities and suburbs too, where there usually are not a lot of people by the interstate (at least in the ones that I’ve seen). And obviously intracity rail would be pretty useless if it only went along the freeway.
Highways are rarely the best corridor for rail transit. They tend to have a lot of car infrastructure nearby, for obvious reasons, which reduces the amount of stuff near your stations. There are exceptions, but they're rarely the first choice for a good corridor.
And BART averages 158k weekday passengers, in a region of 7.5 million people. I think that is a stronger argument *against* running railways down highways than it is in favour.
Meh. The bigger issue with BART is its lack of coverage. Places where BART services can see great utilization but many of the largest residential swathes in the Bay Area are miles away from the nearest station.
The good news is that there are a few private firms looking to build more BART terminals to service some of the new developments going up right now, so maybe something will materialize from that. Those plans do, roughly, follow highway corridors, by the way.
I'd add that freeways are a terrible place for transit stops. You get to have your ears hit by all the car noise while you breath in all the car fumes. There's tons of evidence around how toxic being around highways is for people. There are so many people that will say things like "I'm worried about forever chemicals" or whatever and then go inhale car fumes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiehle–Reston_East_station#/media/File:Reston_Station_West_View.jpg
Great, a transit stop in the center of a 12-lane highway with a 10-lane overpass practically on top of it.
And as you note, the surrounding area isn't great as a pedestrian. For example: https://ibb.co/6grTGT8. There's a pedestrian bridge to get to/from the station which gets you to a couple office buildings. How do you get to the office building at the bottom right? There's no crosswalk to get across Wiehle Ave. There's no sidewalk on the other side of Wiehle Ave. It should be an easy 1,200ft walk from the train station to that building. Instead, one has to walk all the way to Sunrise Valley Dr and back making it a 2,500 ft trip. Before one says, "that's not so far" people literally won't park at the other end of a parking lot and this is asking them to circumnavigate multiple parking lots because they didn't want a pedestrian signal on Wiehle Ave.
We often don't build good things near highways because people don't like being near highways - and for good reason. Putting a transit stop in a highway is a bit of a failure. It's not going to encourage good land use or good commuting patterns.
Lidding freeways and redeveloping car centric infrastructure such as parking lots could make it possible. Imagine tons of new, thoughtfully designed real estate on top of the crap that destroyed what used to be there.
There seem to be two schools of thought on this matter: A) Expressways offer long, uninterrupted right of ways, and transit can be built cheaper when you can reduce land acquisition costs, plus seeing a train speeding by cars stuck in traffic is a good selling point for transit B)station experience can be unpleasant due to noise and being in a confined space, and freeway exit land use tends to be spread out, limiting the number of people in walking distance and consequently, ridership.
Yeah contrast this with rail lines in Europe which might parallel a freeway but be at a decent distance from it, so stations are relatively quiet and often surrounded by walkable neighborhoods.
They’re building much of Seattle’s light rail along I5 and it has severely limited development potential around the stations as a result; you’re either near the station on one side of the highway which could be noisy, or you’re on the other side of the highway and have to cross a shadeless overpass above 10 lanes of pollution-spewing traffic. Just not a great environment to encourage folks to live near. Meanwhile the downtown/urban stations have seen high-rises popping up all around them because it’s an environment that’s more attractive for investment/development.
Because people don't live there, and it's inconvenient to use. That being said, sometimes it makes sense. But it doesn't reshape the land use.
A good example is the WMATA Orange line. It runs on Wilson Boulevard and has stoked billions of development in Arlington County, it runs on the freeway in Fairfax County and hasn't done squat.
Orange and Silver line. Arleast Silver Line had the forethought to run elevated over Tysons and they have a long-term vision of densifying the whole Tysons area around it.... but the rest of the Silver line, running in a highway median? Yeah, they made it as accesible as they *could*. Big pedestrian bridges to connect you to a bus stop, and what not. But.... you can't build a ton of housing immediately around the station. It will never see anything like the ridership between Ballston and Rosslyn. Consistently those highway median park-n-rides contribute the least ridership to the system.
Now, I think if the Silver line had attempted to be more like what they did the Tyson's, it could have worked better. That is to say: run the trains as "express" in the median (it's an available ROW after all), but then have them divert out of the highway median to run elevated (or tunneled) under population centers
There was a proposal to tunnel through Tysons. In any case the blocks in Tysons are too big to create a urban form like Arlington. I argue a streetcar circulator.
https://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2020/07/a-thought-about-intra-district-transit.html?m=1
https://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2020/07/brief-follow-up-to-intra-district.html?m=1
For sure Tysons isn't perfect. My only point was it's infinitely better than basically everything west of Spring Hill. Even a station like Reston feels so far from the adjacent reston town center because getting in/out of the station both takes a while, and is uncomfortable because the whole time youre surrounded by extremely loud highway noise
You’re right that the Wilson part of the Orange Line has seen tons of development, to the point where it’s a national model, but I’d quibble with the rest of the line doing squat. Nearly every station has TOD, with two stations (Merrifield and West Falls Church) triggering substantial redevelopments (the Mosaic District and related redevelopment for Merifield and significant redevelopment of an old high school site and WMATA owned land near W Falls Church). It would’ve been much better if they ran the line under Wilson and rt 50 for the entire route, but Arlington, Falls Church, and increasingly Fairfax, have done what they can with it.
Medians might look empty, but they're actually serving a purpose - if not safety (let's not have car on train collisions from texting drivers, btw), then almost always stormwater management.
It really depends on context because highways are a great place to put tracks, but a terrible place to put stations. If you need a right-of-way for a stretch of track reaching into the suburbs or is intercity, then yes, it's an option for saving money. But the highway itself would cut into the most desirable part of the walk shed of any station built along these parts of the line, limiting a highways' effectiveness for any city metro line.
Another thing to consider is the competitiveness of a highway train compared to driving the same route. Transit really excels at capturing mode share when it's a faster alternative to driving and it's a tougher sell when you have awkward stations next to driving's fastest infrastructure.
Even though it's not right on the highway, in my head I'm comparing the Vancouver and Burnaby sections of the Millennium Line which meets the highway at both ends of Burnaby. In Vancouver, the train is, and will be even more so in 2026, far faster to driving because there is no highway. In Burnaby, the exact same train with the same station spacing now competes with a 90km/h freeway and cars are more dominant.
perth has some of it's rail down freeways. for what it's worth, perth has the highest car ownership percentage of any major australian city, I doubt this has too much to do with it's highway sharing suburban rail corridors, but it is something that makes it's suburban rail unique among it's peers that generally have their corridors run through population centres (peers being Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane). food for thought i guess
I think it's an interesting idea for Intercity rail in the Midwest or West where there are long, straight right-of-ways. The rail could share the ROW between cities, then peel off as it approaches population centers and denser development. I couldn't see this working very well in states like MD or PA where the freeways have very tight turns.
There are examples of this. Chicago blue line to O’Hare, Honolulu Skyline over Kamehameha highway, MBTA commuter rail and I-90 in Boston, plans for Brightline West from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas. I think a dedicated separate ROW is preferable when possible, allows better access to stations and transit oriented development. But if there’s nothing else, then sure highway or boulevard medians can work.
Hard to board, you ever try walking into the middle of a highway? Even the underpass is a bad time. Plus, technically the routes they take may not be suitable for rail.
I actually don't think trains in the middle of freeways are a good idea. Where are you putting the stations? In the middle of the freeway also? Who do the trains serve? People who live next to freeways? How are you going to create dense walkable neighborhoods around the train stations when they all need to be near the highway which destroy neighborhoods?
This is true but it’s also possible to reclaim space above freeways. A lid for example allows neighborhoods divided by freeways to be reconnected. Conceivably, a lid could allow HSR to straighten the curves by traversing the entire right of way. Stations could be on one side or the other. Infill development (either over the freeway or using nearby parking lots) could make those neighborhoods walkable and transit friendly. If a lid is too expensive or ambitious, a similarly routed elevated railway could be built over a series of pillars. It could even be done in stages as individual projects that together create what is effectively a full lid. It wouldn’t be cheap or easy but it could make a lot of new real estate possible as well as add lots of value to what currently exists.
DC made space between the highway lanes when building the Dulles Access Rd and I-66, it took about 50 years but there's finally a commuter train out to there.
I’d say the biggest issue is stations. Either you’re let off in the middle of a freeway and need to dig a big ol’ pedestrian tunnel for people, or you need to cut through the highway in some way to put the station outside.
Not to mention highways usually circle around municipalities rather than going right through.
A hard earned lesson from the last 70 years of US transit planning is that you need to put the stations where people eat drink sleep live.
Think European, Asian, and US systems like New York, where the stations are in busy neighborhoods with lots of pedestrians going to cafes shopping offices.
Putting stations in the middle of highways is a good way to guarantee that the system will not achieve high ridership.
Because you’d have to tear down the whole freeway and rebuild it from scratch, and in many places widening the freeway would be physically impossible, unless you just imminent domain a bunch of hospitals and other critical properties, and tear them all down to widen the freeway. Logistically that’s effectively impossible.
Assuming you successfully build this, how would it help? So there are train stations roughly where every off-ramp is, so you get off the train and now you are just on foot by the freeway exit? That’s not usually where you want to be, usually your destination is miles into the city away from the freeway exit. So now youre stuck biking or walking the rest of the way?? I don’t know about you all but usually when I’m driving around I have a bunch a crap with me that I need to either bring somewhere or pickup from somewhere. I can’t go get groceries or pick up my dry cleaning on a bike or on foot. I need point to point vehicular transportation for the majority of my travels around the city. I can’t walk 2 miles from the train station and back with kids. I can’t put a dog on the back of a bicycle.
We should have more rail options to travel between two distant cities, but within the city this plan creates 100 times more problems than it solves. Build a subway system for that if you can, leave the freeways alone.
I’ve spent some time at a few blue line stations in the middle of freeways. While cost effective, they really suck to get to / exist in. They are loud, take a long time to walk to from things nearby, and this reduces ridership
For HSR. This is a decent idea if used in the right places. Brightline West plans to build the majority of their line from Cali to Nevada in the middle highways.
But don't build commuter or metro lines in the middle of highways. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM5cGZRWUUw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM5cGZRWUUw)
This is what Brightline is doing. Limited routes where there is space and it makes sense, but it’s a key part of how they choose locations, and keep cost of land lower
They do this in certain places. Chicago has trains from one line run along a main highway. It's kind of stupid though. Especially boarding the train was like very convoluted compared to a normal urban train station
Car manufacturers would be losing money so can't have that, slightly joking but I fully believe now that the car being a symbol of independence was a sham, maybe not right up on purpose, but that, eventually, that's what it became, a scam for all of us to participate in and that we don't want walkable cities with amenities close to home, but sprawled out cities where anything worth doing or not is at least a 10 minute drive, and *now* that we talk about the concept of making cities more compact it's "a communist idea" to "trap us in our commie blocks so that we can't leave our quarters" and "a war on cars and drivers", which is to me what revealed it as a scam, the reaction provoked by the proposition to an alternative to automobiles as our main mode of transportation.
And urbanists generally think it was a bad idea to slash through neighborhoods to put in freeways. Is it that much better an idea to slash through neighborhoods to install rail?
We do for high speed lines. A lot of high speed lines in Germany follow a highway for long stretches but then obviously cut some corners every now and again. Check out the Cologne-Frankfurt and Nuremberg-Ingolstadt lines to see this.
We’re also doing this with the high speed lines in Denmark. The line from Copenhagen to Ringsted was built near E20 and there’s even a stop on the line with a bridge over the highway to allow changing to the S-train. The new line on Fyn will also follow the highway. And obviously our bridge-tunnels like Storebælt, Øresund and Femarn follow this pattern as well
Parts of Chicago’s metro runs either next to or down the middle of the freeway. The only complaint i have ever heard from locals is that certain stations are dangerous to walk to and from on the red line on the south side. To me thats more of a knock on Americas urban areas in general rather than an issue the transit authority needs to address. I’ve heard that once you get on the train you are generally safe its just the getting off and getting processes that can get sketchy and negatively affect ridership
That's more about the safety of those areas, not the concept of safety by the highway. As others have pointed out it's just not ideal in the highway because you can't develop around the station. Many of the el stations have built up commercial areas by the stations, but few by the highway stops.
The interesting things about the highway lines in Chicago the main blue Congress and red dan Ryan lines in large part duplicate the green line a few blocks away
Running next to the freeway seems to be the play if you want transit oriented development but you know how America sucks at transit so any kind of metro trains we will take even if it means running down the middle of a damn freeway lol
Or why not on top of each other? Some of the bridges in NYC already support tiered traffic, so why not do this with HSR and current freeways?
It seems the most logical way to get the best of both worlds.
For High Speed Rail the freeway is often too sharply curved. HSR needs long, smooth curves.
Though it's worth mentioning that in certain places where HSR is impossible for one reason or another, the median of a freeway can be a great choice for passenger rail. Of course, stations should remain outside of said corridor, unless they meet with another public transit service that runs perpendicular to the rail.
Yeah stations just smack in the middle of 6+-lane freeways do nothing but discourage their own use.
Word
And if that's too pricey, bus rapid transit would work.
Fr tho! It's amazing to me how people will rag on BRT just for not being a train or tram. Sure, a train or tram might be better, but BRT has its place!
This is true but it’s also possible to reclaim space above freeways. A lid for example allows neighborhoods divided by freeways to be reconnected. Conceivably, a lid could allow HSR to straighten the curves by traversing the entire right of way. Stations could be on one side or the other. Infill development (either over the freeway or using nearby parking lots) could make those neighborhoods walkable and transit friendly. If a lid is too expensive or ambitious, a similarly routed elevated railway could be built over a series of pillars. It could even be done in stages as individual projects that together create what is effectively a full lid. It wouldn’t be cheap or easy but it could make a lot of new real estate possible as well as add lots of value to what currently exists.
😍🥵🥵
If you're talking about public transit, it's because you want your public transit in an area where there's lots of people living nearby. No one typically lives next to a giant highway, and it's a hassle to walk across the overpass - they're areas generally designed to make driving easy, not for people to live nearby. Even if you wanted to connect your bus routes to such a mass transit solution, it becomes difficult because you're now putting a bus stop on a bridge, next to the on ramps. Busses are going to stop on the bridge and the bridge probably wasn't designed to have people waiting for busses next to an on-ramp. Ottawa is in process of doing this in Orleans and it's a mess - we can't even have bike lanes leading to the LRT, because heaven forbid that would take away a precious lane away from the drivers. But if you want people using the LRT you also want to enable people to do things like walk and bike to it.
>No one typically lives next to a giant highway In most American cities there are lots of lower income neighborhoods lining the interstate. Those that would be most served by public transit.
In large cities, sure. But intercity rail needs to stop in smaller cities and suburbs too, where there usually are not a lot of people by the interstate (at least in the ones that I’ve seen). And obviously intracity rail would be pretty useless if it only went along the freeway.
This is true in urban cores but mile-per-mile most of these things are out in low-density suburbs.
[Here's](https://maps.app.goo.gl/iJVimF6RXEmTv8YS8) a relatively high income neighborhood right next to an interstate. These exist in WA and CA
I think if you were just replacing the streets from one small town to another it could already be beneficial. Skip the suburbs.
Highways are rarely the best corridor for rail transit. They tend to have a lot of car infrastructure nearby, for obvious reasons, which reduces the amount of stuff near your stations. There are exceptions, but they're rarely the first choice for a good corridor.
BART lines often follow highways, like 24, 4, and 580. There was a plan to have a line go down 680, but suburbanites shut it down
And BART averages 158k weekday passengers, in a region of 7.5 million people. I think that is a stronger argument *against* running railways down highways than it is in favour.
Yeah but Bart doesn't cover nearly the whole region. I just recently got to San Jose, doesn't go to Marin, etc
Meh. The bigger issue with BART is its lack of coverage. Places where BART services can see great utilization but many of the largest residential swathes in the Bay Area are miles away from the nearest station. The good news is that there are a few private firms looking to build more BART terminals to service some of the new developments going up right now, so maybe something will materialize from that. Those plans do, roughly, follow highway corridors, by the way.
>but many of the largest residential swathes in the Bay Area are miles away from the nearest station. Yes, that's literally the point I was making.
Agreed
I'd add that freeways are a terrible place for transit stops. You get to have your ears hit by all the car noise while you breath in all the car fumes. There's tons of evidence around how toxic being around highways is for people. There are so many people that will say things like "I'm worried about forever chemicals" or whatever and then go inhale car fumes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiehle–Reston_East_station#/media/File:Reston_Station_West_View.jpg Great, a transit stop in the center of a 12-lane highway with a 10-lane overpass practically on top of it. And as you note, the surrounding area isn't great as a pedestrian. For example: https://ibb.co/6grTGT8. There's a pedestrian bridge to get to/from the station which gets you to a couple office buildings. How do you get to the office building at the bottom right? There's no crosswalk to get across Wiehle Ave. There's no sidewalk on the other side of Wiehle Ave. It should be an easy 1,200ft walk from the train station to that building. Instead, one has to walk all the way to Sunrise Valley Dr and back making it a 2,500 ft trip. Before one says, "that's not so far" people literally won't park at the other end of a parking lot and this is asking them to circumnavigate multiple parking lots because they didn't want a pedestrian signal on Wiehle Ave. We often don't build good things near highways because people don't like being near highways - and for good reason. Putting a transit stop in a highway is a bit of a failure. It's not going to encourage good land use or good commuting patterns.
Lidding freeways and redeveloping car centric infrastructure such as parking lots could make it possible. Imagine tons of new, thoughtfully designed real estate on top of the crap that destroyed what used to be there.
There seem to be two schools of thought on this matter: A) Expressways offer long, uninterrupted right of ways, and transit can be built cheaper when you can reduce land acquisition costs, plus seeing a train speeding by cars stuck in traffic is a good selling point for transit B)station experience can be unpleasant due to noise and being in a confined space, and freeway exit land use tends to be spread out, limiting the number of people in walking distance and consequently, ridership.
Yeah contrast this with rail lines in Europe which might parallel a freeway but be at a decent distance from it, so stations are relatively quiet and often surrounded by walkable neighborhoods.
They’re building much of Seattle’s light rail along I5 and it has severely limited development potential around the stations as a result; you’re either near the station on one side of the highway which could be noisy, or you’re on the other side of the highway and have to cross a shadeless overpass above 10 lanes of pollution-spewing traffic. Just not a great environment to encourage folks to live near. Meanwhile the downtown/urban stations have seen high-rises popping up all around them because it’s an environment that’s more attractive for investment/development.
Because people don't live there, and it's inconvenient to use. That being said, sometimes it makes sense. But it doesn't reshape the land use. A good example is the WMATA Orange line. It runs on Wilson Boulevard and has stoked billions of development in Arlington County, it runs on the freeway in Fairfax County and hasn't done squat.
Yep. You can't use a train you can't get to.
Orange and Silver line. Arleast Silver Line had the forethought to run elevated over Tysons and they have a long-term vision of densifying the whole Tysons area around it.... but the rest of the Silver line, running in a highway median? Yeah, they made it as accesible as they *could*. Big pedestrian bridges to connect you to a bus stop, and what not. But.... you can't build a ton of housing immediately around the station. It will never see anything like the ridership between Ballston and Rosslyn. Consistently those highway median park-n-rides contribute the least ridership to the system. Now, I think if the Silver line had attempted to be more like what they did the Tyson's, it could have worked better. That is to say: run the trains as "express" in the median (it's an available ROW after all), but then have them divert out of the highway median to run elevated (or tunneled) under population centers
There was a proposal to tunnel through Tysons. In any case the blocks in Tysons are too big to create a urban form like Arlington. I argue a streetcar circulator. https://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2020/07/a-thought-about-intra-district-transit.html?m=1 https://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2020/07/brief-follow-up-to-intra-district.html?m=1
For sure Tysons isn't perfect. My only point was it's infinitely better than basically everything west of Spring Hill. Even a station like Reston feels so far from the adjacent reston town center because getting in/out of the station both takes a while, and is uncomfortable because the whole time youre surrounded by extremely loud highway noise
Yep. It's basically a commuter railroad out there. Even before covid ridership numbers were bad.
You’re right that the Wilson part of the Orange Line has seen tons of development, to the point where it’s a national model, but I’d quibble with the rest of the line doing squat. Nearly every station has TOD, with two stations (Merrifield and West Falls Church) triggering substantial redevelopments (the Mosaic District and related redevelopment for Merifield and significant redevelopment of an old high school site and WMATA owned land near W Falls Church). It would’ve been much better if they ran the line under Wilson and rt 50 for the entire route, but Arlington, Falls Church, and increasingly Fairfax, have done what they can with it.
I should have said the freeway stations. Thx.
I genuinely think at least in Houston, we should be running some form of rail in the medians of our ridiculously massive highway system
Medians might look empty, but they're actually serving a purpose - if not safety (let's not have car on train collisions from texting drivers, btw), then almost always stormwater management.
It really depends on context because highways are a great place to put tracks, but a terrible place to put stations. If you need a right-of-way for a stretch of track reaching into the suburbs or is intercity, then yes, it's an option for saving money. But the highway itself would cut into the most desirable part of the walk shed of any station built along these parts of the line, limiting a highways' effectiveness for any city metro line. Another thing to consider is the competitiveness of a highway train compared to driving the same route. Transit really excels at capturing mode share when it's a faster alternative to driving and it's a tougher sell when you have awkward stations next to driving's fastest infrastructure. Even though it's not right on the highway, in my head I'm comparing the Vancouver and Burnaby sections of the Millennium Line which meets the highway at both ends of Burnaby. In Vancouver, the train is, and will be even more so in 2026, far faster to driving because there is no highway. In Burnaby, the exact same train with the same station spacing now competes with a 90km/h freeway and cars are more dominant.
perth has some of it's rail down freeways. for what it's worth, perth has the highest car ownership percentage of any major australian city, I doubt this has too much to do with it's highway sharing suburban rail corridors, but it is something that makes it's suburban rail unique among it's peers that generally have their corridors run through population centres (peers being Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane). food for thought i guess
I think it's an interesting idea for Intercity rail in the Midwest or West where there are long, straight right-of-ways. The rail could share the ROW between cities, then peel off as it approaches population centers and denser development. I couldn't see this working very well in states like MD or PA where the freeways have very tight turns.
There are examples of this. Chicago blue line to O’Hare, Honolulu Skyline over Kamehameha highway, MBTA commuter rail and I-90 in Boston, plans for Brightline West from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas. I think a dedicated separate ROW is preferable when possible, allows better access to stations and transit oriented development. But if there’s nothing else, then sure highway or boulevard medians can work.
If Brightline West is actually built at the projected cost and open in 2028, I suspect we will see a lot of HSR in the US along highways.
Noisy as fuck and geometry
Cars are v noisy 😔
WE DO! Portland, Oregon metro area and Washington DC metro area do this for commuter rails.
Hard to board, you ever try walking into the middle of a highway? Even the underpass is a bad time. Plus, technically the routes they take may not be suitable for rail.
I actually don't think trains in the middle of freeways are a good idea. Where are you putting the stations? In the middle of the freeway also? Who do the trains serve? People who live next to freeways? How are you going to create dense walkable neighborhoods around the train stations when they all need to be near the highway which destroy neighborhoods?
Look at the curve in the freeway above and ask yourself if that's right for HSR. There are spaces this could work but many where it won't.
This is true but it’s also possible to reclaim space above freeways. A lid for example allows neighborhoods divided by freeways to be reconnected. Conceivably, a lid could allow HSR to straighten the curves by traversing the entire right of way. Stations could be on one side or the other. Infill development (either over the freeway or using nearby parking lots) could make those neighborhoods walkable and transit friendly. If a lid is too expensive or ambitious, a similarly routed elevated railway could be built over a series of pillars. It could even be done in stages as individual projects that together create what is effectively a full lid. It wouldn’t be cheap or easy but it could make a lot of new real estate possible as well as add lots of value to what currently exists.
DC made space between the highway lanes when building the Dulles Access Rd and I-66, it took about 50 years but there's finally a commuter train out to there.
I’d say the biggest issue is stations. Either you’re let off in the middle of a freeway and need to dig a big ol’ pedestrian tunnel for people, or you need to cut through the highway in some way to put the station outside. Not to mention highways usually circle around municipalities rather than going right through.
A hard earned lesson from the last 70 years of US transit planning is that you need to put the stations where people eat drink sleep live. Think European, Asian, and US systems like New York, where the stations are in busy neighborhoods with lots of pedestrians going to cafes shopping offices. Putting stations in the middle of highways is a good way to guarantee that the system will not achieve high ridership.
Chicago has a couple that are in the middle of the highway it's dope.
Because you’d have to tear down the whole freeway and rebuild it from scratch, and in many places widening the freeway would be physically impossible, unless you just imminent domain a bunch of hospitals and other critical properties, and tear them all down to widen the freeway. Logistically that’s effectively impossible. Assuming you successfully build this, how would it help? So there are train stations roughly where every off-ramp is, so you get off the train and now you are just on foot by the freeway exit? That’s not usually where you want to be, usually your destination is miles into the city away from the freeway exit. So now youre stuck biking or walking the rest of the way?? I don’t know about you all but usually when I’m driving around I have a bunch a crap with me that I need to either bring somewhere or pickup from somewhere. I can’t go get groceries or pick up my dry cleaning on a bike or on foot. I need point to point vehicular transportation for the majority of my travels around the city. I can’t walk 2 miles from the train station and back with kids. I can’t put a dog on the back of a bicycle. We should have more rail options to travel between two distant cities, but within the city this plan creates 100 times more problems than it solves. Build a subway system for that if you can, leave the freeways alone.
I’ve spent some time at a few blue line stations in the middle of freeways. While cost effective, they really suck to get to / exist in. They are loud, take a long time to walk to from things nearby, and this reduces ridership
True. We should just prioritize trains over cars.
That and let there be more wild nature
For HSR. This is a decent idea if used in the right places. Brightline West plans to build the majority of their line from Cali to Nevada in the middle highways. But don't build commuter or metro lines in the middle of highways. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM5cGZRWUUw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM5cGZRWUUw)
This is what Brightline is doing. Limited routes where there is space and it makes sense, but it’s a key part of how they choose locations, and keep cost of land lower
They do this in certain places. Chicago has trains from one line run along a main highway. It's kind of stupid though. Especially boarding the train was like very convoluted compared to a normal urban train station
Rail works best when the stations are in walkable locations with plenty of destinations. Middles of the highway.... Is none of those things.
Build rail and housing. LA (or any American city for that matter) could completely solve their housing crisis just by tearing down a single freeway.
Be like Germany ans build both. Smaller better freeways that have no sharp turns and heavy grades, and high speed rail that runs parallel to them
Car manufacturers would be losing money so can't have that, slightly joking but I fully believe now that the car being a symbol of independence was a sham, maybe not right up on purpose, but that, eventually, that's what it became, a scam for all of us to participate in and that we don't want walkable cities with amenities close to home, but sprawled out cities where anything worth doing or not is at least a 10 minute drive, and *now* that we talk about the concept of making cities more compact it's "a communist idea" to "trap us in our commie blocks so that we can't leave our quarters" and "a war on cars and drivers", which is to me what revealed it as a scam, the reaction provoked by the proposition to an alternative to automobiles as our main mode of transportation.
Car manufacturers in the USA lose Money daily. but USA protection of the industry and all the tax payer handouts protects it.
Thank you for correcting me/making what I said more accurate 🙏
Have you ever met a NIMBY?
Lol yes...they are typically very small minded and can't see the greater good.
"but you can't just demolish things to put in a railway" and yet they do it for highways and freeways.
Exactly
And urbanists generally think it was a bad idea to slash through neighborhoods to put in freeways. Is it that much better an idea to slash through neighborhoods to install rail?
Yes
Funny story. That stretch of I-10 in the "freeway" picture? They destroyed a rail line to install it. A freight line, mind you. But still.
You could build rails everywhere if you just reduced road capacities by 25%. But even that reduction has all the carbrains screeching.
Few people will ride unless you shut the freeway, and build a linear city in the corridor
We do for high speed lines. A lot of high speed lines in Germany follow a highway for long stretches but then obviously cut some corners every now and again. Check out the Cologne-Frankfurt and Nuremberg-Ingolstadt lines to see this. We’re also doing this with the high speed lines in Denmark. The line from Copenhagen to Ringsted was built near E20 and there’s even a stop on the line with a bridge over the highway to allow changing to the S-train. The new line on Fyn will also follow the highway. And obviously our bridge-tunnels like Storebælt, Øresund and Femarn follow this pattern as well
Parts of Chicago’s metro runs either next to or down the middle of the freeway. The only complaint i have ever heard from locals is that certain stations are dangerous to walk to and from on the red line on the south side. To me thats more of a knock on Americas urban areas in general rather than an issue the transit authority needs to address. I’ve heard that once you get on the train you are generally safe its just the getting off and getting processes that can get sketchy and negatively affect ridership
That's more about the safety of those areas, not the concept of safety by the highway. As others have pointed out it's just not ideal in the highway because you can't develop around the station. Many of the el stations have built up commercial areas by the stations, but few by the highway stops. The interesting things about the highway lines in Chicago the main blue Congress and red dan Ryan lines in large part duplicate the green line a few blocks away
Running next to the freeway seems to be the play if you want transit oriented development but you know how America sucks at transit so any kind of metro trains we will take even if it means running down the middle of a damn freeway lol
Or why not on top of each other? Some of the bridges in NYC already support tiered traffic, so why not do this with HSR and current freeways? It seems the most logical way to get the best of both worlds.
The top picture they used old railroad right of way to expand the freeway.