Good evening. My name is John Leopold. I'm County Supervisor. I'm lucky enough to represent Live Oak. Welcome to the Simpkin Swim Center, and thank you for coming out tonight to spend a little bit of time on a beautiful evening to talk about what the future might look like in the rail resources we have here. Guys get a show of hands. How many people here came here on two feet or two legs? How many people came here on two wheels? All right. That's me too. How many people came here on four wheels? All right. Well, I'd like to have us one day. I'd like to have us say one day that you can't hear. I'd like to have you say one day that you came here by train because the tracks are right outside. You know, our community has been talking about rail for quite a while. I won't start again. Our community has been talking about rail for a long time. The county has a rich history in rail service. The Regional Transportation Commission spent about 20 years talking about rail, or almost 20 years, before we made the move to actually secure funding. And with the help of hundreds of people who came out to public hearings, we were able to go to the state of California and get revenue from Prop 116, which the voters here in Santa Cruz passed along with the voters in the state of California. And since 2012, we've owned the Santa Cruz branch rail line 32 miles from Davenport to Watsonville. And in November 17th of that year, we had a rail celebration. And I'm not sure how many of you participated, but we had hundreds of people out here as one of the whistle stops for the train coming through our county. As we've done meetings both about the rail line and the trail next to the rail line, hundreds of people have participated. The Regional Transportation does a lot better work when you come out to get involved. And I'm very happy that our Executive Director, George Dondaro, who's been talking about sustainability for a number of years, has identified Anthony Pearl as a good speaker and someone who could talk to us about this. I just want to say that George has led our commission in terms of a new focus, and our most recently adopted Regional Transportation Plan is based around the concept of sustainability. That's a new way for us to look at transportation. And I'm very pleased that our Regional Transportation Plan looks at automobiles, bicycles, walking, and rail. And that's also very new, at least in the five years that I've been a county supervisor. So I think you'll enjoy hearing Anthony. He spoke to our commission this morning. He encouraged us to be leaders, and I think you being here tonight shows that you're community leaders on the issues of transportation. I'll be listening for a little while in the back, and then I have to go to another meeting. But I appreciate that you're taking the time, and thank you for coming out. And with that, I'll introduce George Dondaro, the Executive Director of the Regional Transportation Commission. Thank you, John. Well, welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming out tonight. I think you're going to find us to be a very interesting evening. A little bit of housekeeping first. When you came in the door, hopefully you got signed up to receive emails about future events regarding rail in the county. If not, please make sure you do on your way out. It's the best way to stay in touch with us and for us to stay in touch with you. Question cards are available if you didn't get one. Our staff is around the room, has some, and Karenna, hold up your staff that have cards. Let people know who you are, okay? So if at any time you may not have one now, but sometime during the evening you might. Restrooms are out the door to your left. Make a big U-turn. There's some pink signs to get you directed there. Drinks and snacks are at the table in the back. Please help yourself anytime if you need a little refreshment to stay awake. But hopefully that's not going to be a problem tonight. RTC has spent about a dozen years in the process of purchasing this rail line. And at some point the policy discussions about how to use this rail line were sort of set aside. For a variety of reasons that I don't need to go into tonight. We also spent the last two years completing our regional transportation plan, which John just mentioned. And this RTP for the first time did, among other things, set goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We'd never done that before. We were required to do that by the state, but we did do that. We also included performance measures, which will help us gauge our progress in the future as to how well we're doing to meet those goals. It also included passenger rail in the mix of future mobility options in the county for the first time. And that's because we own the rail line now. In past years we did not. It was really hard to plan what we were going to do with something that we didn't own. Also recently we've completed the rail trail master plan, which is at the table near the back. And many of you participated in the development of that. That was another two year effort. So RTC has done and will continue to do some very high quality planning. And sometimes people don't appreciate the value of doing good planning. And it's a really important process because it's a time for our decision makers, our elected officials, and you to come together and agree on what projects we're going to prioritize for the future of transportation in this county. So all this good planning is hopefully going to produce some good fruit. And tonight we're taking another step in that direction to talk about passenger rail service. And also we are beginning this one year study of the feasibility of passenger rail service, which is another reason to get on our email list. We think at different times over the next year you might want to know about chances to weigh in or when the commission is going to discuss it, when presentations will be made, and when there's a series of public meetings that will also be held for your benefit. So I guess it's an understatement to say there's been no shortage of opinions on how this rail line should be used. But what I found sometimes in the discussions is that the larger context is missing. And so from those discussions. So tonight we hope to explore a little broader context in which to consider questions about future uses of the rail line and what is happening globally and in California in the world of passenger rail. So we're very pleased to bring you a respected author, consultant, researcher, and professor of urban studies and political science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. I met Anthony Pearl in 2010 at a conference in Washington, D.C., soon after his latest book, which had just been published in its second edition. And he'll mention that later. His academic record is very impressive and his practical experience is also quite notable. He was for over four years served on the board of Via Rail, which is the Canadian equivalent of Amtrak. He led the rail group of the U.S. Transportation Research Board, which is a division of the National Research Council. He chaired the Transportation Research Board's Committee on Intercity Passenger Rail. And he's advised governments in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, and the U.S. on transportation and environmental research and policy development. So after his presentation, we'll have plenty of time for your questions. So please give a warm welcome to Anthony Pearl. Thanks, George. And thank you all for coming out tonight to hear some thoughts and spend some time thinking about passenger rail options. Now to get this going, let's see. Well, it's showing up on the machine. Maybe the projector needs to be. In any case, 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. Screen, okay. Let's see. Yes, there we go. So 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 born 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 US at the time. But the US was quite quick to embrace and adapt these technologies even more than the steam locomotive where the US 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. 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 US has led the world and even in aerospace travel as well. So when we have this curve of adoption we see that the US has been an early adopter whether it was the 19th century trains, automobiles, aerospace but what I would call modern passenger rail the sort of late 20th century and 21st century reincarnation of passenger rail we are whether we like it or not a laggard in that area that's kind of an outlier that I think needs some attention we need to know why it is that you know this tendency that Americans have had for generations before to sort of adopt and adapt transportation technology to make a 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 back pages of the news paper 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 dollars which I didn't do the math but is a lot more today for 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 US 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 23rd 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 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 its 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 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 is a commercial success story the Metroliner and its Progeny, the Accela today are the one part of the passenger rail system in North America and it 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 and well you can see Santa Cruz, I can't seem to get the laser pointer going maybe this, no? yeah, it's, we're here right now and the Amtrak services go down to Tampa 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 and I guess people could take the number 17 flyer bus, thank you 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 and 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 slow speed limited freight operations when it's come time to whether it's been the turbo train, the metro liner or the Assella 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 US doesn't have a lot of experience at a public sector level in building or rebuilding rail infrastructure the last time the US 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 US 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 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 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 they 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 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 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 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 railroads 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 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 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 these 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 that 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 in 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 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 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 U.S. 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 infrastructure and as you're doing here other places have taken rails and turned them over to trails there's 20,000 miles of rail rights of way that have been turned strictly into trails although if those people read the very fine print in those agreements it does say that those trails can be re-activated 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 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 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 are 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 Warren Buffett owns 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 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 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 of the country and it's the safest mode of transportation there's been 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 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 in 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 another layer of passenger rail operation on top of their freight they don't have much freight on rail anyway local commuter services on totally separate tracks so that dedicated corridor at first that's what people took away from the Japanese success stories you can only build high speed rail in places where you have cities of ten million people and they're lined up every two to three hundred miles that's really not what happens in other places 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 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 it's called a hybrid network where they develop trains that could run both on high speed trunk lines those red sections are the sort of bullet train equivalent speeds over a hundred and fifty miles an hour and it doesn't show all of the conventional rail branches and networks that they can get onto 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 TGV 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 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 high speed coming on its own trunk line at full hundred and sixty hundred seventy 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 average trip length on the interstate highway system by the way is under 200 miles so 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 modeling if you will and that's 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's systems put together and they are 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 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 they looked it up on the schedule with a connection or two it's 35 hours 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 you had to sleep overnight and then spend part of the next day so it's a real boon 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 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 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 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 the bay area to Beijing 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 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 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 it's like some are from Mars and some are 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 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 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 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% federal cost sharing of that initial investment and there's 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 used to develop high speed rail originally when the Prop 1A 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 point is that all three work the mega model that the Chinese have the blended model that the Europeans have developed and the Japanese corridor model each have their potential but 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 trans bay 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 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 already available or in place I think and I think that I'm very excited that 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 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 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 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 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 may be able to commute on this new high speed rail network in 20 years time that's going to be transformative and we'll 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 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 Chambere in the pre Alps as the French call them the foothills of the Alps Chambere 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 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 well thanks very much, Anthony that's very inspiring and if we don't have at least a few questions tonight I'll be very surprised for those of you who came in excuse me, if those of you who came in late we are asking you to put your questions on a card if you don't have one our staff on the outside will be glad to give you one so let's try and get those questions up 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 there are still tunnels on your line I think the places that are going to be really hard hit by climate change super storm type effects will be places like New York City and others that have a lot of underground electric railroads there's still one tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn that's being rebuilt and the line is closed from the super storm Sandy I think that was two years ago now you have a coastal rail line that's above ground well you may have washouts and bridges to worry about but those can be put back into place actually more easily than highway redevelopment I mean 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 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 sort of flooded without it being completely destroyed thank you 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 counter part of the high speed rail is going to develop figuring out how to run they're electrifying the Caltrain between San Jose and the Transbay 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 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 get 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 sure 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 do that on the equipment that is crash worthy that can handle withstand higher impacts 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 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 crush zones at either end the vestibules the washroom you don't want to be in there at the wrong time if it's the crash zone you can 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 have a community 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 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 they came back and said well that's the norm any time they expand or enhance the rail system they just have more 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 this is 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 maglevs they're being run with conventional rail the Chinese figured out a couple of things the maglev got about a 50% energy penalty when you double the speed when you get up to sort of aviation style speed on a maglev they 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 the 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 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 that they could not take something like that and bring it into the heart of central city because people on an elevated platform imagine it would be like an aircraft coming by at 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 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 trussles, 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 want a sealed 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 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 US 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 Republic and they're looking at two-day trips to go from the west coast of the US 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 perfect hydrogen fuel cells 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 and 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 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 and I think other places will want to follow California's lead like they have in many other innovations in the US would a light rail system like London Docklands driverless and partially elevated for level crossings etc work for us here what about privacy concerns for adjacent residents sure this morning I mentioned the scene from the Blues Brothers movie they're next to the Chicago L in that apartment and it comes by on the bed shakes 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 Sky train and it's all elevated because there's no driver so you can't have people wandering in front of the train 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 for economic activity you can't outsource the drivers and the money that you spend on them will stay in your local economy I think 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 within transportation 101 the Who Framed Roger Rabbit movie and the question I ask 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 steam roll 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 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 has an electric and wiggle and stuff but the trains aren't moving fast when that happens so that would be something you would definitely if the higher 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 like water fiber optic et cetera within the rail corridor well sure you know corridors are extremely valuable for multiple uses because it's so hard to make more of them out there anytime you try and build high tension wires, pipelines anything in new build situations you're going to get years sometimes decades of protests legal challenges et cetera and 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 to have more capacity to move electricity efficiently around the US the US 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 which they build for free along the way for your trains to run on maybe give you a break on the power as well if there's a conflict 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 along the 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 suspects, the usual suspects tie it up in court the more the inflation factors will kick in I think they're counting on 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 Amtrak's been around a while now and I wrote a book before this one called The Marchers 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 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 better train model that works and then we can sort of evolve Amtrak because the original design life of the organization 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 between Southern California and the Bay Area but I think you know 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 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 one last question Anthony save this one for the very end did you have model trains as a kid I've never been that dexterous with my hands and I tell people that 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 thank you