The high-speed rail vision is of Bay Area grandparents on family visits to Disneyland. The system would fail based only on those relatively infrequent end-to-end trips.

The reason for building high-speed rail is to protect our Bay Area economy. Per Caltrans, 133,000 daily vehicle trips were averaged during 2016 peak months on Interstate 580 at Highway 205 headed into Silicon Valley. Highway 152 averaged 47,000 daily vehicles during peak months. Many fearsome 18-wheel trucks joined the vastly overcapacity daily migration connecting the Central Valley’s affordable housing to Silicon Valley’s irresistible job market. That trip (2-4 hours each direction) is dangerous, time consuming and emotionally debilitating. Burning $3-4 per gallon gasoline (more in the future) also depletes a family’s fiscal well-being and adds dramatically to climate change.

Compare that 4-8 hours per day dead-time fighting traffic when, in 2026, a daily commuter catches the electrically powered Silicon Valley Express train in downtown Fresno and, no matter the weather, arrives 51 minutes later at the San Jose Diridon Station. A world-class, electrically powered distribution system including BART, Caltrain, the Capital Train, Altamont Corridor Express, VTA Light Rail and sustainable buses completes the trip to Bay Area businesses increasingly clustered in transit villages — think Google — around rail stations. That’s less than a 90-minute trip, including connections, during which the commuter can catch a nap, eat breakfast, start work electronically, and arrive relaxed and ready to win the international geo-economic competition. The return trip delivers the commuter home, after electronically finishing work on the train, rested and ready to hug rather than grumble at the family.

Many of our wonderfully progressive employers subsidize employees’ transit use and might be expected to do so with the high-speed rail trip tickets. The alternative is automobile fuel, wear and tear costs, accidents and emotional strain borne by the poor auto commuter.

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Report: I-580 express lanes reduce congestion, speed up traffic Which would you choose? Six or more hours a day fighting dangerous traffic? Rapidly increasing auto costs? Adding to pollution problems with the prospect of arriving at an indeterminate time by car on highways that cannot be effectively expanded because of permanently constrained urban choke points? Or arriving reliably in less than half that time while relaxing on the world’s safest, fastest, cleanest and most efficient transportation?

Though nice, high-speed rail’s objective isn’t to take the kids to Disneyland but to efficiently bring employees to work and clear roads to move products to market. Only a small fraction of those daily Central Valley trips need to ride the train for profitable operation, as is the case with most of the world’s high-speed rail systems.

The Bay Area and Los Angeles both need relief from the crushing Central Valley commute. But detractors say we can’t afford the $64 billion or so to save our economic engines of the nation from stifling terminal gridlock. But 16 of the industrial and many of the emerging countries of the world have operating high-speed rail systems with double that number in development. How can Spain and Turkey, among the poorest countries, afford major high-speed rail networks while the richest state in the richest nation cannot? California obviously can afford and must proceed with high-speed rail or expect to lose the concentration of intellectual and economic capacity that is respected around the world.

Rod Diridon, Sr., is the chair emeritus of the California High-Speed Rail Authority.