 So Anthony, I have a question while we're gathering those. Santa Cruz is a coastal county and one of our concerns as planners is sea level rise. So can you talk about how that might affect our future transport network and maybe what the rail network would do to address that? Well the good news is that you don't have a lot of tunnels on your line. I think the places that are going to be really hard hit by climate change superstorm type effects will be places like New York City and others that have a lot of underground electric railroads. You know, there's still one tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn that's being rebuilt and the line is closed from the superstorm Sandy I think that was two years ago now. When you have a coastal rail line that's above ground well you may have washouts and bridges to worry about but those can be re-put back into place actually more easily than highway redevelopment. Rail infrastructure is pretty resilient because it's usually got a narrower footprint. It isn't fully sort of concrete. Some of it might be but the less concrete you have to replace on the system the more it's about gravel and wood trestles and that sort of thing. The easier you can put it back as and when you get sooner or later one of those big climate events that happen. But we're all going to be struggling with this. I live one meter above the water level in Vancouver and I wonder some of my architect friends tell me that new buildings that are going to be designed high-rises all of the electrical and service infrastructure is going to be five stories up in them. They're not going to put them at the ground level or in the basement anymore. I imagine there will be design adaptations for infrastructure that will also allow it to be flooded without it being completely destroyed. Thank you. Questions are rolling in here. With short haul between stops and no high-speed rail potential which I think maybe you might question how do we adapt existing railroad to support short haul commuting? Sure. Well, those blended networks are able to mix short trains that serve local stops and trains that go through at higher speed. That's going to be part of the innovation that the Caltrain part of the high-speed rail is going to develop. Figuring out how to run their electrifying the Caltrain between San Jose and the Trans Bay Terminal and they're going to run even more frequent Caltrain services which have local stops that would be similar to what your distances are in this corridor as well and they're going to figure out a way to thread the high-speed rail service at least every 15 minutes for an hour through that corridor as well. That's going to be an innovative approach with infrastructure and operations. We're going to learn how to do that whether you would transplant that directly to the line that you have here in this county, I don't know. But I think that you should definitely be starting to build local rail service with frequent stops that can go at least to a connecting point to start so that you've got the opportunity to connect in with that network. You have the chance to get your local rail going at least as far as Gilroy, hopefully, where the Caltrain service currently goes. That's the first sort of connecting aim you should have, whether people will ride it all the way up to San Francisco or not is another question. But you'll be able to get all sorts of trips from this county into Silicon Valley through that option. Okay, we've got quite a few here. Do you think it is likely that federal regulations will change in the near future to allow shared use of light rail type DMUs with occasional freight on regional rail lines such as ours? Well, the current solution to that, which may or may not work for you here, is known as temporal separation in New Jersey and even down by San Diego, there are light rail, diesel light rail, and electric light rail operations, transit operations that use these tracks and at night in the off hours is when the freight operates. That might not thrill people who live along the rail corridor to have freight trains running at night, but that's the easiest way to start doing this. If you're going to run the trains at the same time on the same tracks, I think you're going to have to spend more on equipment that is crash worthy, that can handle withstand higher impacts. You know, those Japanese trains, there's a reason why they've had zero fatalities. They never crash into each other because they're all going the same speed and they don't have freight trains that they're going to crash into either. My best hope is some of my work in Washington showed that there is research going on that the U.S. government is supporting on so-called crash energy management systems so that you don't have to add tons of steel to just make the train sort of crash-proof that it can sort of hit a very heavy object and not be deformed at all. That requires a lot of weight. But the crash energy management option might say, well, you have crash zones at either end, the vestibules, the washroom, you don't want to be in there at the wrong time if it's a crash zone. But there are ways to sort of take parts of the train and have them sort of take the brunt of that kind of impact. That might be if the engineering designers out there come up with good crash energy management zones, that might be the solution to allow lighter weight passenger trains and freight to operate. But that's probably about five years away. Okay, here's one that we get asked often. I think you did start to address it towards the end of your talk. But how does Santa Cruz County population density compared to other communities with passenger rail service? Well, as I showed you, compared to that French town of about the same size, you're half the density. So that means that you're going to need to do some development. But the good news is that trains tend to be place makers. Unlike airports and highway infrastructure, people actually don't mind living close, like within walking distance of a train station. So as you develop this rail corridor, and as long as you have the land use right around the stations, you will increase density. It's just a law of nature, if you will. Wherever you've developed rail, one of my students went over to Japan and looked at how they do rail-oriented development. And he came back and said, there, that's the norm. Any time they expand or enhance the rail system, they just have more development around those stations. So I think that your development efforts of this rail line will actually build the density that could then take you to the next level with more intercity and higher-speed trains. Okay. You touched on this this morning. Talk about China's maglev train. Is it the future of intercity rail? Well, the Chinese took every technology they could get their hands on and bought it and put it on their test benches and reverse engineered it to see what they would work with. And those 1,000 to 1,200-mile runs from Beijing to Guangzhou are not maglev. They're being run with conventional rail. The Chinese figured out a couple of things. The maglev has got about a 50% energy penalty. When you double the speed, when you get up to sort of aviation-style speed on a maglev, the biggest problem is air resistance. And unless you're going to go even wilder in your engineering fantasies and create sort of vacuum tubes that those trains can go through, you're going to spend most of the energy that's being used, just getting through the atmosphere at ground level. There's a reason why planes like to go as high as they can. It's thinner up there and they don't use as much fuel at high altitudes. Maglev will be elevated, but it's not going to be elevated that far to get rid of that. And even in China, some people say, well, they're able to just tell people what to do and build things whether people like it or not. Even they found when they built their maglev link from Shanghai Airport to Pudong, which is about halfway into the center of Shanghai, they could not take something like that and bring it into the heart of a central city because people on an elevated platform... Imagine it would be like an aircraft coming by at, you know, 12 or 20 feet above the ground. The noise is unbearable and the wind and air effects are too much as well. So the Chinese figured out that maglev was just an energy hog and unsuitable for being built around built-up areas unless you put it all in tunnels along the way. So they decided not to go forward with maglev and build those high-speed conventional rail lines, which are at 186 miles an hour able to handle these long-distance trips, as I suggested. Okay. This is relevant, I think, to our branch line. Does the high number of trestles, grade crossings and shared road rail right-of-ways limit the potential for high-speed rail? Maybe it does. I mean, the more crossings, the more sort of interaction with the road and other people wandering around, you know, biking and walking along the tracks, the harder it's going to be to run more trains faster along it. So the question is how many crossings and which sections can you work with? Is it possible to consolidate? You don't need an entirely sealed corridor like the Japanese model if you go for the blended system, but the higher the speed, generally, the fewer interfaces you're going to want to have with other modes of transportation. So that you kind of have to build into your medium-term plans as you expand the speed and or throughput on this. But those are trade-offs that can be managed incrementally. You know, you can sort of start at one speed with one set of crossings, and then you can work your way up over time if it seems appropriate. Okay. Don't the huge distances in the Central U.S. preclude having a real national rail system? Well, certainly not for freight, but I think if you meant passenger, you know, again, the Chinese are looking at two-day trips from China to Europe going through, you know, Mongolia and the Central Asian Republics, and they're looking at two-day trips to go from the west coast of the U.S. to China. That may take them a few more decades to go forward, but that suggests that, you know, there's room for a day plus, you know, a couple of nights or, you know, almost two-day trips that would work on this continent as well. I'm not saying that should be the priority. It depends what you think the future is going to be like. If you think that we're going to, you know, perfect hydrogen fuel cells or cold fusion and have unlimited energy or biofuels will work for aircraft, then maybe we don't need a plan B for a national rail passenger system. The more you think that energy and climate is going to need more efficiency in moving people in freight without oil, as the book suggested, the more you want to keep those options open. So Amtrak from San Jose North to Seattle is horribly slow. We talked about this this morning, I think. Yes. How can this be improved? Is it necessary to go with high-speed rail? Would it be cost-effective to build passenger-only lines that are not slowed by freight? Well, it's about figuring out how to expand the track capacity. You know, maybe it's not going to be the Chinese style bullet train. You know, it would be maybe five hours from here to Seattle if you did the full Chinese style or the dedicated corridor. But you could add more tracks for conventional rail and have the ability to sort of speed up the existing trains in rough proportion to that investment. That's why I said the solution is really figuring out a new model to build tracks in this country. I mean, the Merced to Bakersfield trunk of the California high-speed rail that's still being fought about, if it's built, that's going to be the first passenger rail track, new passenger rail track in this country for intercity purposes that's been built in over a hundred years. We just haven't built any for a very long time. So it's time to start thinking about other places to build that and how to do it. And that's why having a model that's invented here will spread if it works, I think. It'll spread to other parts of California. It'll spread to the West Coast, and I think other places will want to follow California's lead like they have in many other innovations in the U.S. Would a light rail system like London Docklands, driverless and partially elevated for level crossings, et cetera, work for us here? What about privacy concerns for adjacent residents? Sure. This morning I mentioned the scene from the Blues Brothers movie where they're next to the Chicago L in that apartment and it comes by on the bedshakes and the whole apartment is disrupted. That's what people think about when they think about elevated rail going by. And it isn't quite that bad, but those issues do exist. Vancouver has an automated light metro system, too, the SkyTrain, and it's all elevated because there's no driver, so you can't have people wandering in front of the train. So there's no crossings. It's totally separated. And those areas that the train runs along are dead zones. People don't want to develop and live along those elevated tracks. The station areas get development. People are happy to be walking distance from the station, but we haven't figured out a great use for the land under the tracks or next to those tracks. So I would say that keeping the trains at ground level has its advantages, even if you still have to have drivers. That's good local economic activity. You can't outsource the drivers, and the money that you spend on them will stay in your local economy, I think. Okay. Does the auto industry fight this resurgence of rail? Didn't they buy out trolley cars early on? Well, the auto industry certainly had a history of misbehavior in transportation policy. The first class that I always start my students with in transportation 101, and I showed them the Who Framed Roger Rabbit movie, and the question I asked them is, why is it that Americans can only discuss these issues in the context of a fictional cartoon setting? Why can't we sort of look more coldly at what really happened? There were some bad things that went down with taking down the interurban and the streetcar systems. I think the auto industry has its own problems right now. They've been bankrupt recently, and some of them aren't doing so well again. So I don't think they're quite the monolith that will steamroll any developments in this area the way they did, say, in the 1950s. Can we protect trains from serious earthquakes? Well, the Japanese, again, perfect safety record and even more earthquakes than here, unfortunately, for everyone. They've had terrible tragedies because of earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, but there was no fatalities on their high-speed system. There's sensors in the ground, and there's enough time, not much, but a few seconds. Once the sensors go off, the power gets cut immediately. Since it's an electric system, it's very easy to do unlike an independent diesel system where every operator would have to shut down. They just pull the switch, the power goes off, the train stops, and then the tracks shake and wiggle and stuff, but the trains aren't moving fast when that happens. So that would be something you would definitely... I'm sure the high-speed system in California will have that type of sensor technology built into it to automatically stop the system. And if you do that right, it's quite safe. Would you speak about the utility transportation concept including electricity, water, fiber optic, et cetera, within the rail corridor? Well, sure. Cariders are extremely valuable for multiple uses because it's so hard to make more of them out there. I mean, anytime you try and build high-tension wires, pipelines, anything in new build situations, you're going to get years of times, decades of protests, legal challenges, et cetera, out there. So you have this rail corridor and you're looking for money. Where's the money going to come from to redevelop it? Well, if you can find people who want to move electricity, water, other fluids through pipelines underneath it, you've got a way to raise revenue to help rebuild that infrastructure. I was saying to one gentleman before the lecture, this could be a way to get a free electric rail system. We're going to need, if we have a smart grid system, there's going to be need to have more capacity to move electricity efficiently around the U.S. and the U.S. electric grid needs a lot of upgrades that way. I think it would be a lot easier to electrify your rail corridor by having some electric utility build the transmission lines and then just have a step down line, which they build for free along the way for your trains to run on and maybe give you a break on the power as well. So you could imagine things like that happening and you should definitely be thinking about multi-use. The more you can put into that corridor that's compatible and safe, the less you're going to need to tear up your open spaces in other parts of the county to put in that infrastructure. So it's another way, it's a bit like density and development. By having the density concentrated around train stations, you're preserving open space in other places rather than spreading it evenly everywhere. So same thing with these utility corridors. Okay. Two class questions. Did you say that 130 miles of high-speed rail track can be built in the Central Valley for 5.8 billion? That's what the current budget is. And of course the longer the usual suspects tie it up in court, the more the inflation factors will kick in. I think they're counting on tying it up long enough so that it's hopelessly over budget along the way. But yes, 130 miles for 5.8 billion is the current plan. That's to build the electric infrastructure. That doesn't include the trains that would run over it. But that's the plan. And what's the annual cost to taxpayers to subsidize Amtrak? It's in the billion dollar a year range, give or take. And, you know, Amtrak's been around a while now, and I wrote a book before this one called New Departures, where I called Amtrak a name that not everyone liked. I said it's a policy blocker. Amtrak was never really designed to solve a problem. It was kind of designed as a stopgap to avoid solving a problem because people couldn't agree on what to do about the decline of the passenger rail system. They still can't agree, so Amtrak is sort of chewing that billion up every year. And it's added up. I mean, you actually could have built some high-speed rail in the U.S., but that would have involved letting go of a lot of other train operations. But as long as the debate every year is about, do we keep Amtrak or do we get rid of it, we'll never get to this new model railroad because that's what really is the alternative. You need, instead of having all Amtrak or no trains, the future, I think, that California might show people as well. You can have a better train model that works, and then we can sort of evolve Amtrak. Amtrak was meant to last five years. That was the original design life of the organization. It was supposed to be a transition mechanism. It wasn't supposed to be here, and it really has struggled, and we've all paid for that one way or another. Funding question. Can Prop 1A funds pay for a spur from Santa Cruz to Gilroy? I'm pretty sure that they can't. There's not going to be enough of that money to build even the parts that they said they wanted to between Southern California and the Bay Area. But I think, again, talking about leverage, it's getting the sort of close by infrastructure that those billions and federal money are going to go into. And the big question would be, you know, sort of connecting up with it. Maybe you won't be doing it with a bullet train initially, but more like a light rail connection, and then sort of see where that goes over time. And one last question, Anthony. Save this one for the very end. Okay. Did you have model trains as a kid? I've never been that dexterous with my hands, and I tell people that, you know, well, that's why I was always interested in the real ones, because it was sort of a scale that I could handle working with. So that's my story, and thanks so much for coming out, everyone. All right. Thank you.