meridianowl asked:

what improvements do you think Amtrak Cascades route could make to improve ridership?
what knock-on effects could the transit organizations along the route try to work towards?

It has decent speed but I would say doing speed improvements to get Seattle-Portland down to 2 and a half hours, expanding the Sounder commuter trains or the Link to reach more of the Seattle area like Redmond and South hill, expanding the MAX in Portland to reach more suburbs like Oregon City and Sherwood are the 2 things most important to raising ridership. Also getting a High Speed Express line on the Cascades would be good, but yeah those are my suggestions.