Quick Take
The Regional Transportation Commission’s vote for the interim trail marks the first real movement on the corridor after a decade of drift, writes Doug Erickson, founder and executive director of Santa Cruz Works. Confronted with hard economics and engineering limits, the commission acknowledged that the “ultimate trail” was never feasible with current funds or timelines. The interim trail — buildable, fundable and immediately useful — aligns policy with reality and public demand. It doesn’t end the rail debate, Erickson writes, but it ends the stalemate, giving Santa Cruz a practical path forward at last.
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Public policy rarely arrives with a clean narrative arc. It tends to stagger forward, pulled by competing constituencies, half-finished analyses and the simple human fear of choosing one future over another.
The recent Regional Transportation Commission meeting vote on the interim trail was exactly that kind of moment: imperfect, overdue, but unmistakably a pivot in the story of Santa Cruz County’s rail corridor.
For the first time in more than a decade of drift, the commission aligned itself with what the community has been saying with remarkable consistency: build a safe, functional trail now, with the resources we actually have, and keep options open for the future.
What shifted?
It wasn’t ideology. It was gravity. Economic gravity. Engineering gravity. The unavoidable math that has haunted every conversation about Segments 9 through 11 along the corridor.
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The “ultimate trail” configuration – a paved bicycle and pedestrian path built parallel to the existing railroad tracks – never penciled out: not with the funding we have, not under the timelines imposed by state and federal grants, and not within the physical constraints of the corridor.
The longer the county clung to that vision, the more paralyzed the process became.
The interim alignment breaks that paralysis. It’s not a consolation prize. It’s an acknowledgment that the corridor must serve people before it serves abstractions.
It gives residents in the mobile home parks long-overdue clarity. It acknowledges showstopper issues like the Capitola trestle and Beach Street. It protects funding that would otherwise evaporate. And it permits staff to design something buildable, instead of contorting themselves around engineering impossibilities.
You can hear, in the conversations leading up to this vote, a familiar tension that runs through California public policy: the instinct to preserve optionality at all costs. Many commissioners felt compelled to restate their allegiance to a long-term rail concept, not because the economics support it, but because abandoning it outright would trigger a different regulatory and political battle. That posture keeps grant eligibility intact, but it doesn’t change the underlying facts.
The interim trail – a temporary version of the Coastal Rail Trail built directly on top of the railroad tracks – is the only project aligned with real timelines, real budgets and real public use.
What makes this moment notable is that the RTC chose to act even with that tension unresolved. The vote was not unanimous, and the opposition still insists the corridor can do everything for everyone without trade-offs.
But the commission’s majority acknowledged what planners, analysts and — most importantly — residents have been saying for years: the status quo is untenable, and doing nothing is a decision with its own costs.
Then there was the unexpected wrinkle: Commissioner Gerry Jensen’s request for staff to assess allowing people to walk and bike across the Capitola trestle. It is, as policy gestures go, small. But in the politics of infrastructure, symbolism frequently precedes substance. Opening the trestle, even temporarily, would signal that access and connection — not nostalgia or theoretical future systems — are the priorities guiding the corridor’s evolution.
For many in the community, it’s the strongest hint yet that this board is finally seeing the corridor not as an idea to be protected, but as a civic asset meant to be used.
This decision doesn’t end the county’s division over the corridor. Some commissioners will continue championing a rail future that asks voters to ignore the $4.3 billion cost (for starters), the engineering and the 20-year timelines attached to it. Those debates aren’t going anywhere.
But they no longer hold the trail hostage.
And that is the quiet but profound shift. For the first time, the interim trail is not theoretical. It is something staff have been directed to advance quickly, something that preserves nearly $100 million of existing grants, something that can be built within the decade rather than imagined into perpetuity.
After years of delay, the Dec. 4 vote doesn’t bring closure. It brings momentum. In public policy, that is often the more important gift.
Santa Cruz finally has a path forward. Now it can ride and walk.
Doug Erickson is the executive director of Santa Cruz Works, a regional nonprofit that empowers local businesses and entrepreneurs through skills-building, funding, jobs, networking and events. Erickson worked in tech for 35 years and founded Fleetwood/Surftech – a windsurf company – that grew to No. 2 in the world. Erickson is a UC Santa Cruz graduate.