I can't quibble with the content (it all holds water) and it's a good promotional summary of the topic.
The whole sponsored thing is a bit "ick", but whatever, newspapers aren't what they once were! And it's a nice counter to the regressive, anti-HSR editorials recently published in the Seattle Times.
I'm hearing lots of people are surprised by the idea of 30 round trips on the proposed #Cascadia#HighSpeedRail line. Yes, that's a staggering number of trips! But once you've built brand-new track that you don't have to share with freight trains, you can run many more trips. And also, faster service vastly increases demand, so you can fill more seats than if you just added 30 round trips at current speeds (there likely wouldn't be ridership to fill that many slow trains).
The initial 2017 study looked at the cost recovery ratio for various numbers of round trips on the new HSR line. Looks like the sweet spot is around 12 to 24 roundtrips, and it slowly starts dropping off after that.
Then the 2019 business case analysis moved forward with two scenarios, of 21 and 30 roundtrips. So the 30 roundtrips mentioned in the Microsoft-sponsored Seattle Times article is certainly the high end, but not outside the realm of possibility.
In the scenarios in this chart, note that most of the options include a mix of local and express trains, so a town like #BellinghamWA might only get 12 trips per day.
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