The $4 billion rail project: Glory train? Or trip to nowhere?

When it comes to Santa Cruz County’s hotly debated proposed passenger rail system, known officially as ZEPRT, the one resource in short supply is certainty.

Almost everything about the project — how much it will ultimately cost, when it will be operational, whether it even happens — is a guess.

Except one thing. This is certain: Mike Rotkin will never get to ride it. 

Rotkin, the longtime political activist and five-time mayor of Santa Cruz, died on June 18 at the age of 79. He deserves no more fitting epitaph than: He was in the middle of everything. That includes the hugely controversial rail project that he helped oversee as a commissioner on the county’s Regional Transportation Commission until just a few weeks before he died. 

For the record, Rotkin was a stalwart supporter of both the local rail project and railroads generally. “It’s the history of America,” he told me one sunny afternoon earlier this year at 11th Hour Coffee on the Westside. “Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Washington, Atlanta — all those cities were built around their train stations.” 

An old man nostalgic about the charm of trains? Not exactly stop-the-presses news. But Rotkin wasn’t merely lost in the romanticism of the bygone Age of Rail. His mind was on the future as well: “Look at Europe, look at Japan, China. Look around the world. Rail is the most efficient form of transit in terms of both energy and human use.”

Our conversation took place long before the RTC released a sneak-peak “executive summary” of a comprehensive report due later this summer. Within that executive summary was a price estimate for the Zero Emission Passenger Rail and Trail (ZEPRT) project: a staggering $4,283,100,000. 

That price tag is bringing a fresh urgency to big, critical questions about the project, which is already hotly controversial: Where’s that money going to come from? What problems will it solve? Will anyone over 50 even live to see it? Is it really worth the expense, the time and the hassles of construction? Is it realistically doable?

Behind those immediate questions are even larger ones. Given the rapid development of a handful of relatively new technologies in transportation — e-bikes, driverless vehicles, air taxis, bullet trains and any number of far-out ideas still in the conceptual phase — is a limited rail line the best option to address the county’s transit problems? Will it solve, or at least mitigate, any of the real-world frustrations that county residents experience every day in getting from Point A to Point B?

In short, should we be doing this? 

Riding the math train

Count Manu Koenig as a no to that question. “The primary goal with this entire study process was to determine whether or not this project is feasible,” said Koenig, the county’s District 1 supervisor, in a mic-drop moment at the June 12 RTC meeting, “I think we have our answer. It’s not.”

To arrive at that conclusion, Koenig rode the math train. At the meeting, he first asked the RTC’s executive director, Sarah Christensen, her opinion on how much of that $4.28 billion price tag would have to come from local sources. (The prevailing assumption of such giant public-works projects is that federal and state grants cover most of the cost.) Christensen answered 20%, “if not higher,” adding that a commitment to a higher number makes a grant request more attractive to the feds and the state.

Koenig took that number, added other costs, such as interest rate on loans, and came up with a figure of around $100 million a year (that’s a minimum; costs could land closer to $140 million) that the county would have to come up with, in capital and maintenance costs, from sales tax revenues. (The RTC has no authority to levy a, say, property tax increase.) In the end, said Koenig, such a burden would mean an increase in the county sales tax of between 2 and 2.75%, potentially making Santa Cruz’s sales tax the highest in California, which he called a “pretty crushing amount.”

For some, given all the other expenses that county is going to be on the hook for in the coming years, that should be the end of the conversation. But, in 2022, Santa Cruz County voters rejected a proposal to abandon the rail project in favor of a trail-only option by a 3-to-1 margin. That means the political support for the rail was strong in 2022. Now that we know the cost, will that support erode?

Obviously, the $4.28 billion price is just an estimate. But there is considerable wiggle room built into it. Up to 30% of that price is for what’s called “contingencies,” a standard line item in capital cost estimates for big public works projects that is designed to anticipate unknown costs, a hedge against later sticker shock. That means the real cost of a finished rail line as proposed could be considerably less than that price, or considerably more. 

“This is the way projects are developed,” Christensen told me. “It’s really a snapshot in time, and there’s a lot of unknowns in the future. People can poke holes in it all they want. But it’s a dynamic environment, and it’s our best guess at how much this project is going to cost.”

On top of costs, the ZEPRT plan is rife with complex engineering and regulatory issues, from the replacement of bridges and trestles, to right-of-way and land-use issues, to mitigations against disruptions to residents that live next to, or even within a few blocks of, the train corridor (complications that will be addressed in more detail in the full report to come, from RTC and its consultant HDR Engineering Inc.).

What’s the frequency?

To get a fuller understanding of just how complicated this project is, I contacted transit consultant Jarrett Walker, author of “Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives.” Walker is not only a nationally recognized authority on transportation, he knows Santa Cruz County well, and has even spoken in RTC forums. He’s also done what many locals haven’t even done: He’s walked the rail-trail corridor.

Walker told me a key number to consider is not just the price tag, but the frequency at which the train will run daily. The ZEPRT plan calls for a 30-minute “headway,” which means one train traveling in your preferred direction coming by in 30-minute intervals. If a train cannot offer rides as frequently as the bus system does, he said, practical usefulness of the train for everyday commuters could suffer.

“The frequency is really, really important,” said Walker. “It’s absolutely fundamental.” 

If the Metro bus system can offer 15-minute frequencies along the same general route, Walker said, a train that comes every 30 minutes will not be a significant alternative for many commuters. In estimating yearly operating expenses, the executive-summary report also considered a 60-minute headway, which would cut those expenses in half. But a train every 60 minutes, said Walker, “is beyond useless.”

Rail inherently has what’s known as the “last mile” problem. Ideally, train users might be able to get across the county quicker and more comfortably than by car on a clogged freeway or surface road, but how are they traveling to the train station, or from the train station to their final destination? The proposed rail line, for instance, doesn’t come close to two of the county’s major destinations, Cabrillo College and UC Santa Cruz. 

Pro-rail advocates tend to see the rail as a kind of “spine” to an overall transit system that has plenty of shuttles and buses that make the trip from Cabrillo or UCSC to the closest train station. 

The futurist vision

The notion of the rail as the transit system’s spine underscores how transit systems work together, and how pointless it is to consider a rail system in isolation from the other transportation options available. And, in the future, there might be many more options for the casual traveler. Just as communications were turned upside down two or three decades ago by the advent of the internet, GPS, smartphones and other technologies, transportation could be poised on a similarly transformative era. (The differences are immense here: In the former case, the only thing on the move were the digital 1s and 0s of communication messaging; in the latter, you actually have to move human bodies.) 

In the past decade, electric cars have experienced a boom. E-bikes, an exotic technology not too long ago, are now common enough to be unremarkable. Self-driving vehicles are in the early stages of what could be widespread availability and acceptance. Even the tech of personal “air taxis” is being developed — indeed, right here in Santa Cruz. With a time horizon of 20 to 25 years into the future, is the ZEPRT project reckoning with these new ways of getting around and the new environment they would create?

Jarrett Walker is not a fan of such crystal-ball gazing. “The futurist angle on transportation,” he said, “has given us a little bit of insight and a whole lot of hype and distraction. On balance, I think more hype than insight.” 

New ways of transport aren’t always inevitable; I can remember feeling the gloom of how the Segway might destroy the pleasures of walking on West Cliff Drive, for example. Turns out the Segway was not the wave of the future.

“The futurists always want you to feel helpless in the face of whatever technologies that are coming,” said Walker. “I want people to feel empowered to make choices.”

Obviously, a fully functioning crystal ball would make the decisions on whether to invest in the rail project easier. But neither voters, political leaders, urban planners nor even transit specialists can fully anticipate what’s to come. “A lot of our transportation planning and engineering methodologies are built on the belief that the future is a long, straight road in the Central Valley,” said Walker. “No, the future is more like Highway 9 in the forest, and we can’t see around curves.”

What we can see locally is several major housing projects going up across the county — most of which are a short distance from the proposed rail corridor — soon to be ready to welcome new residents that will need transportation options as well. We can see a rapidly aging demographic and that older, post-retirement people are going to have different transportation priorities than younger workers. What we can see is the long arc of the cost of living, which includes the cost of building projects like this one, going in one upward direction. We can see an unused rail line that runs from one end of the county to another that is a great resource, and a great opportunity — for something.

But no one can be certain exactly how the ZEPRT train will be used once it is built. Pro-railers tend to talk about that one bartender or service worker living in Watsonville who could use the train to get back and forth to their job in Santa Cruz. That’s a compelling story, and a common one. And that person could certainly use a rail line. But for another resident, let’s say an elderly person who wants only to get from her house to her doctor’s office and back, the train will be of limited use, if any at all. 

Again, Walker has little use of such anecdotal arguments. 

“It’s understandable,” he said, “that we want to tell stories that humanize a project by imagining particular kinds of people. But there’s actually a danger in thinking that way. When I see planning being done that way, it tends to lead to services where too few people have been visualized too specifically, and therefore the service is too micro-designed, and this happens all the time. So the thing I really have to emphasize is high transit ridership is diverse transit ridership, and the more diverse the ridership is, the more dangerous it is to fixate on any one person’s story because, because that’s going to lead you away from planning for the diversity.”

The road ahead

Those who support the rail will often talk about the need to build a community that is not so centered around car culture, where the automobile doesn’t dictate the shape and design of a community’s public spaces. Those against the rail project and who want only a trail would likely agree with that sentiment. But that almost utopian idea of upending car culture in favor of a community of trains, buses and e-bikes puts a lot of pressure on any one project, no matter how expensive it is. 

What’s fascinating is how a public works project can lead to a community engaging in a lot of soul-searching to determine what kind of place it wants to be and what kinds of things it wants to preserve. That’s what Santa Cruz County is in the middle of right now, partly because of the ZEPRT project. This project will continue to bring county residents face to face with limitations — limitations on budget, limitations on legality (in determining property rights along the right of way), and even limitations on geography (the main artery from Santa Cruz to the Bay Area will continue over the Santa Cruz Mountains on Highway 17, and no rail project is going to change that).

Tragically, Mike Rotkin won’t be around to see what happens with this project. But, borne of five decades of political life, he had an idea of where we all might be headed.

“I don’t think we’ll have a big thumbs-up or thumbs-down moment, at least not immediately,” he said. Rotkin predicted that once the final report is released, the RTC will either embrace the idea and move forward, or punt and put the whole plan on ice. 

“I don’t think anyone is going to kill it dead-dead,” he added. “But they might say, ‘Well, this is great idea for the future, but let’s put it on a shelf for now.’”

Even after learning of the project’s price tag shortly before his death, Rotkin did not give up on his support for the train. He saw the county’s right of way on the rail line as a precious resource, and this moment as the only opportunity that Santa Cruz County would ever have for viable mass transit.

Rotkin was no newbie in the transportation field. He had served on the board for Santa Cruz Metro for years, and transit was at the center of his activist vision. Not long before he died, Rotkin told his close friend Mark Stephens, “We’ve just got to do this. I’m not going to give up on that train.”

“It wasn’t about the train for him,” said Stephens. “It was for society. It was for his community.”

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