Whew! Talk complete. Amazing how much work a 12 minute presentation can be. Especially when you have no note cards – just an increasingly rusty memory.
You can see and listen to the talk here:
http://new.livestream.com/tedx/Rochester.
Go to session 4, and then go to the 36 minute mark. Runs about 14 minutes.
Thanks to all of our friends here who were so helpful as this thing took shape. And most of all thanks to my most wonderful Amy, who listened and critiqued and coached with such patience and forbearance.
Onward.
A Town Square 
Great talk! I like the approach of using local resources as well as public transport. Some seniors in Scottsville tell me that the current Genesee trail is on an old RR transport between Scottsville and Rochester which itself is on an old canal. I don’t know the details but I believe the RR story is correct. What happened? Who knows?
Daniel, thanks for taking a look! Yes, what you say is true. There was a time, even when cars were princes but not yet kings, when railroads crisscrossed the entire region, and the old rights-of way and roadbeds are all over the place. If you look at old plat maps and town maps, you can find them in what may seem like unlikely places.
By the middle of the last century, almost all of them were gone. But for a brief time, there was a choice – car or rail. Today, no choice.
And here’s one of my favorite statistics about that old rail choice. Once, you could enter an inter-city train in downtown Rochester and be in downtown Syracuse in 60 minutes. You can’t get there that fast today, unless you are risking a date with the troopers.
And so it goes.