 I'll give you the sort of basic overview. I'm going to be taking you on a tour of what's been going on with intercity passenger rail developments both close to home here in California. Before that, some efforts and experiments in the U.S. and the rest of the world and how these all sort of come to a head, I think, in the medium term. California is definitely the place to be if you want to see what the new formula or new model railroad, as I've called it, for North American passenger service might look like. Whether you like it or not, and I think most of you like it, but maybe some don't, California is the innovator, the laboratory, and you're experimenting with trying to make passenger trains have a brighter future. So let's see where we've been. The U.S. has had a record, a pretty good track record, the U.S. has had a pretty good record of adopting transportation technologies that have been invented elsewhere, two major technologies, well, three really. The motorized steam engine, which you see here, the automobile and the jet aircraft were all invented outside of the United States, but yet the U.S. is known for making quick use of these. So here you see recreations of the first modern, recognizably modern rail operation, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway is on the left there, again a recreation of that, and a recreation within one year of that going into service. The Baltimore and Ohio was operating essentially the same technology, essentially the same type of service on the east coast of this continent. So the first sort of time period for adopting foreign technology to our transportation system in a big way was exactly one year, which is pretty good when you think about it, especially in the 19th century, early 19th century, how long it took to get things across the Atlantic. And I think Americans have been eager and quick to embrace new technology and new opportunities in mobility, because in this country even more than most, the association between physical mobility and social mobility has been widely accepted and embraced. The idea that tomorrow will be better for more people if they have more options and more choices on how to get around was borne out for a couple of centuries in this country. And of course, this part of the west coast was built and expanded over those years because of new transportation options, whether it was rail or ships getting the first settlers here. As you can see from this book illustration from the 1940s, when people thought about the future, they thought about more and different modes of mobility being added to the mix, whether it was streamlined rail, elevated expressways, helicopters, or even space travel. I'm going to need the laser pointer, so I might as well check if it's working. Let's see if that does it. I'll get it eventually. Anyway, so the automobile, as we know it, was invented in Germany and the jet aircraft also in a different Germany, one that wasn't particularly friendly to the U.S. at the time. But the U.S. was quite quick to embrace and adapt these technologies, even more than the steam locomotive, where the U.S. has excelled in taking transportation technology to the next level has been turning existing inventions that were designed for very specialized purposes, like fighter aircraft or a horseless carriage for rich people, and turning those into mass transportation, again, based on that principle that more physical mobility will help social mobility and create opportunities for people throughout the country. Henry Ford said lots of things which I probably wouldn't agree with, but I certainly agree with this quote that he put forward when people asked him about his role in innovating the automobile mass production system. They're really what he excelled at and what I think the American approach to transportation innovation has been to assemble the discoveries of others and make progress with them when the factors are ready to put those into place. And whether it's low-cost air travel or using automobiles as a form of mass transportation in this country, the U.S. has led the world and even in aerospace travel as well. So when we have this curve of adoption, we see that the U.S. has been an early adopter, whether it was the 19th century trains, automobiles, aerospace, but what I would call modern passenger rail, the late 20th century and 21st century reincarnation of passenger rail, whether we like it or not, are laggard in that area. That's kind of an outlier that I think needs some attention. We need to know why it is that this tendency that Americans have had for generations before to sort of adopt and adapt transportation technology to make it better tomorrow just didn't happen when it came to figuring out how to build better trains. So at first it looked possible that this pattern would continue. This is the inauguration of the Tokaido Shinkansen, the famous Japanese bullet train, which will be coming up to its 50th anniversary in October. I'm pretty sure it'll make the news at least backpages of the newspaper. In Japan it'll probably be a big deal. It was 1964. I believe they had an Olympics in Japan, and this was inaugurated. And it caught people's attention in this country and others around the world. And within one year, again we have that one year time lag, President Johnson, the last president before the current one to really have a sort of a passion or at least a high priority for figuring out better modern passenger trains at a national level signed the High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965. That appropriated $60 million, which I didn't do the math but is a lot more today in today's dollars, for demonstration for technology R&D and for demonstration projects to show what would be possible with bringing high speed passenger trains and maybe reversing some of the challenges that the rail industry was having in the mid 1960s, particularly around passenger but even freight. Well, it didn't turn out to be a high speed route to implementing that vision and program of the High Speed Ground Transportation Act. The only record really that the U.S. holds when it comes to high speed is the longest elapsed time between proposing bringing high speed rails to passenger service and actually deploying it. We've passed nine presidents and 24 sessions of Congress, but we can learn from that long slow march forward or I think we should try to anyway. We need to think carefully about what happened during those 50 years, both here and abroad. So let's begin by looking at what happened here. We did quickly build a train that could go very fast and this looks a bit like a cartoon type contraption. You'd see Wiley Coyote piloting, but it's still this piece of rail equipment actually currently is still the speed record holder in North America. It was set on July 23, 1966 in Bryan, Ohio of all places, a state that sent back their public stimulus money for higher speed passenger rail a few years back. I doubt the people who made those decisions even had a clue that their state is the place currently that has the speed record for this. This was a prototype. It was just made to test the idea that you actually could get a train going this fast on this continent, sort of like the Shinkansen. They took a surplus jet engine from a B-47, welded it to the top of a self-propelled RDC car and the people who piloted or drove that took a lot of risk to do that test because half of that car was filled with jet fuel and to make that engine work and if something would have gone wrong, no one would have walked away from that situation. So it was a bit of a risk and it did show that if you spiked down every switch, closed every grade crossing for 100 miles and put a jet engine on the train, you could get it going quite quickly. But this was enough to catch the attention of the aerospace industry and there was something that came out of this, the turbo train, which was built by United Aircraft, which was Sikorsky and I think it's now part of Lockheed Martin. They've sort of merged and expanded over the years but the aerospace industry found a more appropriate way to put a jet turbine inside the locomotive, not strapped to the roof and this train, the turbo train, actually was operational between New York and Boston between 1968 and 1976. It reached test speeds of 170 miles an hour on the northeast rail tracks and it's schedule between New York and Boston during those years when it made the schedule, which wasn't always, but when it was there it was the same speed schedule as the current fastest train in North America, the Amtrak Accela. So this did show that you could get the aerospace industry involved in building and designing a train that could go quickly using sort of modern technology in production. The other part of this demonstration program was a partnership for an electric high-speed train, which would be more similar to the Shinkansen and is the sort of grandparent maybe of the Accela of today or one of the descendants. This was the Metroliner and this was a partnership between the four big companies whose logos are at the bottom, two of which are still around today, the ones that didn't specialize only in rail, GE and Westinghouse and a rail company, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Bud Company, which was the builder of a lot of classic passenger train equipment in the late mid 20th century. They got together and showed that you could build an electric train that could go around 120 miles, 125 miles an hour on good days in regular service and this was also put into service on the part of the northeast corridor of New York to Washington that had electric traction in place and it offered a three hour trip from New York to Washington, which was a commercial success story. The Metroliner and its Progeny, the Accela today are the one part of the passenger rail system in North America that is consistently able to cover its costs. It showed that you could do that and back in the day there was a poster there that Amtrak could actually boast that it ran one of the fastest passenger trains in the world. This would have been about 1972 or 73 and we can't say that anymore but that was sort of the high point of this demonstration program, the Accela and the Metroliner. Meanwhile, other places that didn't get in on this first round of development and saw challenges which we'll get to in a minute in the rail industry wound up taking different approaches. Once Amtrak was put in place, California was probably the biggest proponent or active state in trying a more simplified approach, not trying to beat the Japanese speed records but to develop simpler versions of intercity passenger rail and Amtrak, California was a work in progress that has taken that path further than any other part of the US has. So California has invested more and more in its network which is illustrated here. You can see Santa Cruz, I can't seem to get the laser pointer going. Maybe this? No? Yeah. We're here right now and the Amtrak services go down the Central Valley as well as the coast but where Amtrak, California really developed some innovation was in intermodal connections which you have here as well. The idea that you could connect up and extend trains that ran in these corridors to communities like Santa Cruz by dedicated bus connections that met the trains through tickets guaranteed meeting was an innovation and showed that it wasn't all or nothing. You didn't have to have train versus road. You could get things working together. So that built the market for more in California and some of those buses go to other more tourist type train operations in Northern California. You have the skunk train up in Willets in Napa Valley. Couldn't get a picture of the Napa wine train with the Amtrak bus next to it but you can connect those up. I guess people could take the number 17 flyer bus down the highway here to ride some of your special train trips as well. So California developed really the second largest market for Amtrak outside of the Northeast through these steps, small steps but a lot of them over time and Amtrak had the Northeast legacy of that sort of infrastructure and technology demonstration program but they didn't quite reach the critical mass yet of what was going on in other parts of the world. When you think about what was missing from the ingredient we showed that we could build fast trains, very fast trains. We showed that we could build good connected service networks to serve corridors and markets between 100 and 250, 300 miles but the tracks were the limiting factor I think that to take America's passenger trains places that they've gone in other parts of the world now in Asia and in Europe the tracks have to be decongested in places where they're too crowded or upgraded as you might think of doing here where you've got a long legacy of sort of slow speed limited freight operations. When it's come time whether it's been the turbo train, the metro liner or the Ocella those high speed trains have never been able to reach their design potential because of the tracks that they operate over and when you get out into the longer haul systems, excuse me, the longer haul parts of the Amtrak system and even some of the corridors here there's a real congestion problem where there just isn't the capacity in a growing economy to move all the freight that those Class 1 railroads want to keep going across the continent and fit the passenger trains in so they usually wind up getting delayed and taking the side track. So the trick I think for us to think carefully about American experience and challenges is how to figure out how to build the infrastructure or rebuild the infrastructure in some places that would be needed whether it's for very high speed trains or even more conventional train service. And we have to recognize that the U.S. doesn't have a lot of experience at a public sector level in building or rebuilding rail infrastructure. The last time the U.S. national government got into building rail infrastructure it did it sort of as a silent partner. This is a map of the areas of the U.S. where land grants were given out to the private railroads, the Central Pacific, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific. And you can see large sections of California. That's not all the land in those sections that was given away but those are the zones where large amounts of land were transferred and that was a one-time gift if you will although the railroads would say that they earned it by developing the infrastructure and by offering special rates for mail and military transportation and public use of the tracks. That gets to be quite contentious but the point I guess is that it's been over a century since that model was used and it was a one-shot wonder. You can only give the land away once, pretty much. Once you've given it, that's it. And the railroads have a bit of a legacy baggage shall we say from that period. That's a cartoon from the gilded age of the the robber barons. When railroads had once you got away from navigable water in the United States along those corridors they had a monopoly and railroads you know got a bit high and mighty in that monopoly and lots of farmers and others felt that they were being taken advantage of and railroads also in this state and others had a bit of a corrupting influence on politics to keep those privileges going. Eventually like any sort of overreaching of those sorts of things there was a reaction and some might say an overreaction of federal regulation. The railroad industry was the first industry, national industry in the United States to be heavily regulated and that happened for a reason. It didn't just wasn't random that they got picked out. They had that monopoly and that was sort of a backlash which cost them a lot over time. And there still is a legacy from that you know it's a legacy in the English language. We're the only language where the idiom railroad is used as a verb which is synonymous to take advantage of someone. If you go to Europe or China and say you know talk about being railroaded they won't understand that use of the term. So that's from this part of that baggage that came out of the the 19th century approach and the relationship between governments and railroads have never exactly been the same. So even now when you're trying to negotiate it I guess it I heard it took 20 years to get your tracks back from the Union Pacific. You know there was some of that going on behind the the scenes. There's still that sort of adversarial legacy in place and that's something that needs to be fixed. And if you don't go beyond that and come up with a different model maybe one that can learn lessons from where the US went in terms of developing the rest of its transportation infrastructure you're not going to get as far. So when it came time to get beyond that rail monopoly besides regulating the rail roads to get them to stop misbehaving when it came time to build roads and other facilities the US took a different approach than land grants or one-time transfers of subsidies for private infrastructure. When it came to the air and road networks it was a public investment model that was brought forward. The US some people don't like the term but the US has been very much of a road socialist infrastructure policy when it comes to the the rest of its transportation system and this was a partnership that came out between levels of government between Washington DC and states and then local governments as well. It started in 1916 that was the first federal aid highway act that was put in place and it was an ongoing commitment to planning and financing these facilities jointly and keeping them in the the public sector and the interstate highway system was sort of the highest infrastructure outcome of that and again governments states which usually fight with each other found ways to work together to coordinate a national network of over 40,000 miles of of these in ways that California and Oregon and Nevada just have real trouble thinking about when it comes to passenger rail if it makes sense to cross state boundaries. That model was extended to regional airport development regional public transit development basically everything except for the rail infrastructure in this country was done through this public partnership between different levels of government and has worked reasonably well maybe it's not perfect and maybe one can do better but one has to recognize that there's lessons to be learned from this. The rail industry learned some lessons too that competing against publicly funded infrastructure when they were heavily regulated from their robber baron days was getting harder and harder and by the 1970s the US rail industry was heading into bankruptcy and the largest bankruptcy at the time in the United States it would be dwarfed by some of the more recent ones but at the time was the Penn Central which was the biggest railroad on the northeast part and the Midwest part of the US that spun off Conrail and Amtrak and led to a reinvention of the freight business and preservation let's say of the the passenger side and one of the reasons that reinvention happened with freight is because there was deregulation once government realized that the rail industry was not working and that it was on the hook for big subsidies for both Amtrak and even bigger ones at first for Conrail there was a move more open-minded approach to letting the railroads invent their own future and once deregulation came in in 1980 the freight railroads really changed their business model quite substantially before they used to be a universal mode of transportation carrying everything from the milk to individual parcels that you could go down to the station much the way you would send something by FedEx or UPS today commuter rail all different kinds of passenger rail that was left behind the approach for the reinvention of the freight business in the United States was niche markets heavy haul bulk resources was the beginning of that reinvention and then containerized freight moving long distances supplemented it and railroads are no longer trying to be all things to all people and they've really focused in on that which has implications for their tracks and their infrastructure first thing is you need a lot fewer tracks if you're not trying to be a universal mode of transportation so lots of tracks have gone away in the US rail network since the 1980s and single track lines have been kept where there used to be double track or sometimes triple track has gone to double most railroads have found ways to slim down their their infrastructure and as you're doing here other places have taken rails and turned them over to to trails there's 20,000 miles of rail rights of way that have been turned strictly into trails although if you those people read the very fine print in those agreements it does say that those trails can be reactivated and turned back into rails no one's had the political guts to try that yet in the United States and I think it's going to be very difficult if you do turn a rail right of way into a trail just because you have the legal possibility of reactivating it I'm not sure that it's likely that you'd be able to do that so those are big changes from and subtractions from the national rail infrastructure and then places like Monterey Bay here many short lines were created and developed some of them barely able to get over tracks that were overgrown along the way that looks a lot worse than what you've got on the left here and the major railroads transferred tracks sometimes directly to the private sector sometimes through public agencies like the one here and those short lines took niches usually specialized markets in those regions and operated over them so we had a real dismantling of the the rail network which used to sort of go everywhere and do everything and that changed the way the infrastructure was used but it also changed the economics I mean one thing we have to be proud of in this country is that we've come up with a freight rail system that is an economic success story in fact if you stop and think about it the freight rail operators in this country the only mode of transportation that's been consistently able to make money since 2001 think about the auto industry bankruptcies think about the airline bankruptcies now the highway trust fund is pretty much bankrupt in this country during that time you have to give credit to the freight railroads they've been able to cover their costs and reinvest billions into their freight infrastructure so that is a success story that we have on our plus side during that period while the rest of the world was inventing higher speed passenger trains and the people who are sort of into money pay attention to this you know Warren Buffett owns the one of the big Western railroads entirely the BNSF and Bill Gates is at one point he was the single largest investor in Canadian nationally certainly one of the big owners of stock in in that company if you want to make money the old joke in the airline business is if you want to make a small fortune in the airlines you should start with a large fortune and you'll get there fast in railroads it's the opposite people with large fortunes who want to make even larger ones are investing in that infrastructure because it's a success story but what that model took us down a different path than where Asia and Europe were going in building high speed rail lines of extended length and scope so let's take a look briefly at where they went there's sort of three different paths that have evolved in the 50 years so there's more than one model that works in different places for building high speed rail and there's three that evolved more or less in chronological order the exclusive corridor the hybrid network and then the comprehensive national network and each one became more ambitious in its own way of what high speed rail could do when it started out the high speed rail was running just between Tokyo and Osaka in Japan so just between here and here but then Japan is a fairly linear country with population concentrated on the main island although they are eventually going to extend it through a tunnel up to their north island as well but basically it's a dedicated single purpose high speed rail track that runs the length and of the country and is very actually it's the safest mode of transportation has been zero I repeat zero fatalities on the Japanese high speed rail system since 1964 that's a unique record and there's a reason for it because all the trains run at the same speed you know it's very easy to keep everything running safely if everything's running at the same speed they can run them three to five minutes apart and they don't get in each other's way it's very different countries like North America where you're mixing slower freight trains and trying to squeeze faster passenger trains around them there's reasons why the risks of that are higher and there's reasons why the Japanese decided they had the volume of passengers to just have a another layer of passenger rail operation on top of their freight they don't have much freight on rail anyway local commuter services on separate totally separate tracks so that dedicated Carter at first that's what people took away from the Japanese success stories it well you can only build high speed rail in places where you have cities of 10 million people and they're lined up you know every two to 300 miles that's really not what happens in other places even even other parts of Asia or Europe let alone North America so the people who are skeptical about this first model being introduced into North America had some some justification by saying this really is a different geography and mobility markets but the second model that the French and then the Germans adapted this is a map of Germany but there's similar you could look at France somewhat similar and other parts of Europe as well as called a hybrid network where you they develop trains that could run both on high speed trunk lines those red sections are the sort of bullet train equivalent speeds over 150 miles an hour and it doesn't show all of the conventional rail branches and networks that they can get on to but those trains are able to run to many cities in Germany that don't have much of the new high speed rail infrastructure by sharing the tracks that already exist and France also built its high speed GGV network initially between Paris and Lyon but then other sections where they would run partly on the high speed tracks and partly on existing infrastructure that was there so this this blending allowed for a much cheaper relative to just all bullet train from end to end infrastructure it allowed for blending of services you could mix and match there you see on the right the the high speed coming on its own trunk line at full you know 160 170 mile an hour speed and on the left it's coming into a junction city station where there's a commuter train right next to it and of course when the two trains arrive they'll have transfers for people are going to local destinations it'll be convenient to connect between them so that is the blended model that the Europeans took and are now actually scaling it to a continental model they're trying to connect up the high speed rail systems of northern Europe in France and Germany with the southern ones in Spain and Italy by building some linked connections but again blending and using existing infrastructure in parts so that you will have a network that goes all the way from Denmark in the north to Naples in the south does that mean people are going to take a high speed train from Copenhagen to Naples probably not just like you can take interstate 80 from the Bay area to the New York metropolitan area doesn't mean that most people do that the the average trip length on the interstate highway system by the way is under 200 miles so you know that that same logic could apply to the European high speed rail network it will cover thousands of miles but most people will use particular segments of it for a couple of hour trips and then we've got the third iteration of high speed rail model modeling if you will and that's the the Chinese who are thinking very big they are building the world's well they already have the world's largest in terms of length they have more high speed rail miles or kilometers in place than all the rest of the world systems put together and they're aiming for even more to come they are running the longest high speed rail services right now just in the last year there's been the inauguration of the big Beijing to Guangzhou which used to be called Canton in the south that's an eight hour trip it's about the same distance as Seattle to San Diego and when I looked it up on the schedule with a connection or two it's 35 hours on on Amtrak so that just gives you a sense they are looking they might think eight hours on a train to go over a thousand miles is still a long time but in China where you have a rapidly developing economy it's just great compared to spending they also used to have trains that took 35 hours and yet to sleep overnight and then spend part of the next day so it's a real boon and what the Chinese have realized for reasons that we could talk about in questions climate and energy issues going forward they want a transportation system that can move the majority of their population around their country without oil because these electric trains run on various energy sources some that we don't like like coal or nuclear but China is also building a lot of solar capacity out there so they have an open-ended energy system to move their domestic population for you know fairly long distance trips certainly ones that could fit both coasts of the US and the Midwest maybe not end to end although this morning I was talking I didn't include the slides here the Chinese I don't know if you caught last week or talking about an Asia to North America rail plan that would take them through a bearing tunnel which is only three times longer than the channel tunnel between France and the UK they have the money and the engineering ability to do this believe me they also have the ability to build trains high-speed trains it would take about two days to make that trip when you think those of you who may have flown Trans Pacific when you think about how much slower is that really from what you experience you probably spend a day with all of the travel involvement and then a day trying to recover from that kind of an experience if you had a two-day train trip where you had a little bed to sleep in along the way it may not actually be that much slower to get from you know the Bay Area to Beijing you know in 50 years time on that trans bearing high-speed train if the Chinese do take those plans forward but what that suggests is we've sort of had a divergence in North America we've changed our rail infrastructure to meet the needs of for-profit very successful long-haul heavy-haul freight operations while Asia and Europe have been perfecting ever more higher speed more more specialized technology to move passengers and these really are different engineering pieces of infrastructure now some people maybe some of you will say well that's great you know it's like summer from Mars and summer from Venus why not just have them both go their separate ways I think there's reasons why we may want to try and reconnect the the future lessons and maybe also for China to learn how to do some of the freight options better but the lessons are going to be sort of developed here in California if we are going to figure out how to reconcile modern passenger trains with the freight directions that North America has gone in it's going to happen in this state for since 2008 it's the first time that both a state and the national government have been committed to in a major way planning some sort of modern alternative passenger train remember in the mid 60s when President Johnson set up his demonstration program that was just a federal initiative and then when Amtrak came along that became the focus in Congress whether to keep Amtrak or get rid of it and there was never any time or money left over to talk about anything else really and then it was up to states like California to sort of figure out more local options and initiatives whether you voted for it or not proposition 1a the high-speed rail bond measure in 2008 and the election of the Obama administration put modern passenger trains on both the national and the state government's agendas for the first time really in a very long time even those land grants in the 19th century were federal only initiatives so we really haven't had unlike roads or transit or airports where it's always been a federal state team working on these transportation developments this is really the first time since 2008 where you've had both levels of government engaged and California has been the most engaged of all so it took four years to hammer out the financial negotiations and there's still legal issues and all sorts of contention about this but at least one milestone here is that for the first time there's been a commitment between the feds and California to split the cost of America's proposed first real new passenger rail track the line between Merced and Bakersfield in California and that's a the original 1916 highway assistance program was a 50-50 split between Washington and state governments and now we've got in 2012 sort of almost there a 55 state level and a 45 percent federal cost sharing of that initial investment and there's the the line and of course San Jose isn't on this one but we've got Gilroy nearby where the high-speed line will eventually reach to get to the bay area after this initial trunk line is set this is starting to look a lot like that blended rail model that the Europeans use to develop high-speed rail originally when the prop 1 a bond was passed I think the model was more an exclusive corridor like the Japanese pioneered and there's some people who are busy suing everyone and fighting that they still think that's the way to go and it's been a betrayal but the the point is that all three work you know that the mega model that the Chinese have the blended model that the Europeans have developed and the the Japanese corridor model each have their their potential the good news or the news for Santa Cruz County is that having a blended network which is where California seems to go where there's going to be sharing of track up into the bay area from Gilroy up to the Transbay terminal that leaves opportunities for connectivity and we're going to have to learn lessons on how to share to share with regional trains like the Cal train to share with the maybe not tracks but at least corridors is it possible for example to expand an existing freight rail corridor rather than blast a brand-new corridor through green fields or through other people's fields there's already plenty of people in the Central Valley who don't like the new alignments that are being built so there's going to be more lessons and experimentation trying to negotiate ways to share what's what's already available or in place I think and I think that I'm very excited that you know it's California that's going to invent the missing links to make this new model railroad as I call it it sounds like a Christmas train set or something but that's what it's going to be if it works it'll be a model that other others will want to copy California's first high-speed rail corridor will trigger a stampede maybe within the state and maybe with other states all trying to connect into this and replicate it if it works and I think Santa Cruz County is just one sort of county removed from being connected into this this very transformative piece of infrastructure so connecting the tracks you have here with this new model railroad could pay very big dividends the term that seemed to get everyone's attention this morning at the regional board meeting was leverage I mean here you have billions of dollars of federal and state money that's going to be spent to build this you know corridor that can get people from the Central Valley to Silicon Valley in an hour or so under two hours certainly that's going to be transformative you know all those people who are priced out of working in the Silicon Valley because they can't afford to live there and can't get there even from here it's getting tough you know all of a sudden places like Fresno and Merced and Modesto that have not have sort of been left behind by the economic growth on the coast of California will be plugged in and some people probably spend more time trying to get from one part of Silicon Valley to the other than people who are able who may be able to commute on this new high-speed rail network in 20 years time that's going to be transformative and will open up I mean if Silicon Valley has a sort of a price cap on how much it can do and how much it can develop in the high-tech sector just because of the cost of living there this will sort of take that cap off of it and being connected to that would be very powerful so you could have local trains connecting in these are pictures from France and Germany and those blended networks where you have regional trains that show up at places like Gilroy whatever these are French and German towns of that type and they pull up on one track and the high-speed rail pulls up on the other and people have a quick connection between them here I'll sort of close with showing that you can have a single track branch line just like in this county that's used actually by a high-speed rail this is the TGV that runs to Chamberee in the pre Alps as the French call them it's sort of the foothills of the Alps Chamberee has a population that's actually just a little bit smaller than the city of Santa Cruz at least according to Google when I looked it up the density is a lot higher they've built you can see the land use there the homes near the tracks and higher rise buildings in the background so it might be a different density but it's not that big a stretch to imagine a train that could come down at least some part of your line then get over to Gilroy or some other junction point with the California high-speed rail and then blast off to get you to Southern California or to the Bay area very quickly in the future not recommending that that's what you should do it's just to suggest that it's one of the options that could and should be on the table for your long term options for consideration it's definitely within the realm of possibility that's part of the lessons that we can learn from other parts of the world and if you want to read more about energy first transportation planning which was the model we put forward in our book that I wrote with Richard Gilbert that's the book I'm sure you can check it out of your library here or get it over the web and I'd be happy to talk with you about the issues that are on your mind after hearing these ideas thanks very much