Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to add a comment on this.
As we have developed our long-range strategy, what we've tried to focus on is analyzing the situation as it is today, which is our starting point, and then we look forward and ask where we want to be in the future.
While I've mentioned primarily environmental benefits and some of the economic benefits, one of the things that we have concluded, and one of the reasons we're moving in the direction of more public transport in our region, is that we will be unable—or it will be extremely expensive—to meet the mobility needs of a million more people. We're estimating that with a million more people could come another 600,000 to 700,000 vehicles, if that is their primary mode of travel.
We recognize that the automobile will always be needed. What we're looking at is saying, however, that it's not necessarily needed for all trips. Ultimately, we would like to see zero emissions--to reduce to smaller and zero emissions--but what we're looking at it for is for longer trips, for longer commutes, in our case, or for inter-city travel. Do you want to pour more money into highways, which are extremely expensive to build and have a very large footprint when you put them in place, or would you like to try to move people to a tighter, narrower footprint and something that may be more economical in the long term, whereby the automobile becomes something that you utilize for shorter trips?
You won't necessarily change what people are doing today, but if we are looking out 10, 20, and 30 years--and I think that at a minimum we need to be looking two decades and beyond for truly realizing the benefits if we are to move into investments into high-speed rail--then we'd have to say that we have things today, but perhaps we can build and change the direction we move in, not displacing what we have or impacting some of our industries, but complementing them as we move forward.