ROAARRR, right on (Grand Fenwick does have the only Q-bomb). Apparently he never bothered to look up George Hilton, PhD (I tried to add a Wikipedia link to his entry earlier, but this bbs language can't handle some of the characters in the link). The link can be found by entering "George Hilton" in the Wikipedia search box. This gives two names; click on the one which has "historian" in it.

Among other things, he wrote the Cable Car in America (he said he walked all the lines) and earlier the Electric Unterurban Railway in America with John Due. I've heard him speak several times over the years, and from converstations afterward, he isn't pro-freeway. However, more than anything else he is a pragmatic realist, and many erroneously take this to be pro-auto and/or freeway.

When the GGB&H (or whatever Marin County types) hired him to do a study on rail transit for Marin-SF, he recommeded busses as being the cheapest in the way of capital investment and operations (which would have to be subsidized by taxes of some sort of another). His comment was that the people who hired him really wanted him to validate their pet train ideas, so they dismissed his report as humbug. That was some 30+ years ago. Since then the GGB&H has been running busses all over for several decades, even over the Richmond-San Rafael bridge to the Del Norte BARTD station. Where is SMART today?