In our experience in this region--and I'm looking at it just in a large urban region--it has taken us close to ten years. You can do it in about seven years, but it takes closer to ten years to work through the complexities. The actual construction is probably the shortest part of that timeframe. The most difficult part is agreeing on where should it best go and then doing the analysis that you have to do there, and then working through the various competing interests that may be there and trying to resolve how to land on a corridor.
From our experience here just on rapid transit, or even on.... Well, Golden Ears Bridge is a good example. That's a bridge everybody wanted. Please get on with it, they said, and build it as quickly as you can. That took us about seven years from start to finish. That's a project that was an easy route. We moved it quickly.
In looking at this with high-speed rail, you'd need to do an assessment of your existing tracks and what you have. When you move to high-speed rail and the type of technology you're after, certainly with the experience in Japan when they first introduced it, they just created a whole new corridor to bring it in and to have the technology work. I think that would be one of the very early decisions: is there merit in looking at the actual alignment where the tracks are, or do you really want a change and look at a different corridor?
High-speed rail is a very different type of transport from the current rail service we have today, which in many cases is trying to service many communities in a corridor. There's a need for that, but when you move to high-speed rail, the real economies of that are being able to get it up to speed and move large distances quickly with relatively few stops. At that point within the corridor, we'd very likely be looking at very different alignments as to where you'd want to go and study that.
But, sir, I can't imagine that you could do anything from start to finish in much under ten years to bring this on and to put people on.