TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Mass transit has always played a part in spreading human settlements. In Taiwan, the arrival of a high-speed train service in 2007 has linked the various high-tech parks the government has created up and down the island.

That has made it easier for tech workers to shuttle between their offices/factories in rural areas to their homes in the cities. And it reminds me of the importance of BART, Caltrain and buses for serving those working in Silicon Valley and the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area (and wouldn't it be nice to have a high-speed rail that connects NorthCal to SoCal?).

The Taiwan High Speed Rail promises to take you from Taipei, the capital city in the north, to Kaohsiung, the second largest city in the country in the south, within 90 minutes (with stops along the way). The length: 345 kilometers.

That's fast. When I was living in Kaohsiung as a little girl in the 1970s and '80s, traveling between the two cities took four hours. The government then built a freeway to speed up the travel, but that didn't work well for long. More families started to own cars. A relative once told me that it took seven hours to drive from the north to the south.

My visit to solar companies this week has taken me from Taipei to Taichung in central Taiwan to Tainan in the south. Taking the rail was an enjoyable way to see some of the same lush scenery I remembered from childhood.

Many solar company have set up factories outside of cities, where there is room to expand their operations. Many of their employees live near where they work during the week, but head to Taipei or other places to visit families on the weekends.

By the way, workers of solar cell and panel factories typically work a 12-hour shift each day for two days, and then take two days off. It's a practice inherited from the semiconductor manufacturing industry. By law the employees would need to take a 15- to 20-minute break every few hours during the shift.