The SMART way: What Sonoma/Marin’s experience with passenger rail means for Santa Cruz County

I’m riding a train, northbound, through Sonoma County. I gaze out the window as the low-angled golden afternoon light illuminates the blonde, oak-strewn Coast Range hills. The vineyards in the foreground suddenly give way to a broad pasture, and then I see him. It’s a cowboy, white Stetson, leather vest, riding at full speed atop a handsome steed, parallel to the train. And maybe 20 yards to the cowboy’s right is another horse, this one smaller and unbridled, also running at a gallop, its mane waving in the breeze. 

Then, five seconds or so later, it’s gone. The scene was so absurdly picturesque, I laugh and look around the train car at the other passengers as if to say, “Hey, anyone else notice we just passed through the title sequence of ‘Lonesome Dove’?” No one seems to have noticed. 

This is the SMART train — that stands for Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit. If SMART had hired Ralph Lauren’s ad director with instructions to spare no expense to impress an out-of-town visitor on the general fabulousness of the SMART train, they could not have done better than this typical weekday afternoon. 

I’m here zipping through the marshy fields south of Petaluma because back home in Santa Cruz, the county’s Regional Transportation Commission has pointed to the SMART system as a model for what it would like to see one day running from Santa Cruz to Pajaro. The SMART train is clean and quiet and comfortable, and in the intoxicating moment of the dashing cowboy and the galloping mustang, it’s easy — too easy — to slide into a dreamy state of desire. Yes, please oh gods of public transit, let this happen back in Santa Cruz.

But the pleasantness of the ride is, at least in part, due to the fact that the train car is not crowded. I’m sitting, in fact, in a diner-style booth, a four-seater with a table, and I’m sitting alone. The car is a little more than half full. And therein lies the slippery paradox around this train that will resonate in Santa Cruz County in the months and years ahead: Yes, this train is a nice experience, wonderful, considering the alternative of freeway driving. But is it necessary?

The comparison between the two systems is imperfect. But it’s close enough to wonder if SMART’s experience over the past 20 years provides any kind of road map for what Santa Cruz County might expect in the years ahead, and what from the story of SMART might be of value to Santa Cruz County’s voters and potential train travelers from Sonoma/Marin’s experience.

Of course, my experience on a two-day trip riding the SMART line is purely anecdotal, and maybe it means nothing. In fact, the local folks who run the SMART system say that ridership has never been higher than it is right now. In SMART’s recently published strategic plan for the next five years, it states a goal of reaching 5,000 daily boardings. In stats provided by SMART’s general manager, Eddy Cumins, this summer the system has already gotten past 4,500. 

The enticements to ride the SMART train are considerable, and not really something likely to translate well to Santa Cruz County’s experience in designing its system. The line runs 48 miles through Marin and Sonoma counties — more than twice the length of the Santa Cruz County line — connecting several urban centers such as Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Novato and San Rafael. At Larkspur, the line’s southern terminus, passengers can step off the train and take a ferry across the Golden Gate to San Francisco, not far from Oracle Park. Indeed, SMART directly appeals to baseball fans to take the train during Giants day games. 

After more than a decade of planning and construction, SMART launched in the summer of 2017, and the rollout of its 14 stations has been gradual since then. The opening of the Windsor station, the northernmost station on the line, was just a few weeks ago. North of Windsor, there are plans to open a station in swank Healdsburg and even beyond that in Cloverdale, almost to the Mendocino County line.

But SMART is also facing a reckoning. The system’s operating costs come largely from a local sales tax (one quarter-cent), a revenue stream set to expire in 2029. SMART’s advocates have already lost one vote on extending the sales tax, in 2020, when the rail line’s ridership took a pandemic nosedive. The 2020 vote required a two-thirds majority, a threshold the vote missed by 12 percentage points. A new ballot measure, expected in 2026, will come from a citizens initiative process that requires only a simple majority. 

SMART supporters are generally optimistic that the sales tax will be extended, but of the possibility that the tax measure fails, general manager Cumins told me, “I hate to even think about it, but we have to. You could go back to the ballot in ’28, and if you failed again, well, we’re done. And at the end of the day, that’s the hard truth about it. If there is no sales tax, there is no other funding source that can fill that gap.”

The SMART experience

The town of Windsor, about 10 miles north of Santa Rosa, boasts a downtown that feels like a movie set of a quaint, homey yet elegant Northern California community. As if this breathtaking town, situated around 4.5-acre town green, were lacking any amenity for the Good Life, on the last day of May, SMART officially opened its Windsor train station, just a stroll from downtown. 

I met Windsor residents John and Louise on the platform of the SMART station. They were on their way to lunch in Novato, more than 35 miles to the south. If SMART didn’t exist, there is no way they would be doing this trip. The retired couple were simply bedazzled by the SMART train. 

“We voted for the original referendum,” said Louise of the 2008 vote to establish the rail line. “It took us 18 years to get to this point.”

“We didn’t think we’d live to see it,” added John.

The SMART train is free for anyone 65 and over, or under 18. I talked to dozens of people on the train and on the platforms about their experience with the train, and a large number of them fell into one of those two demographics. 

One senior called the train a “godsend,” while her companion vigorously nodded beside her. I chatted briefly with Danny, another senior, on his first ride on the train. “I can’t stop grinning,” he said. 

If you’re between the ages of 18 and 65, then your fares are set according to the zone system — the rate you pay depends on how many zones you cross. The minimum you would pay, staying within one zone, is $1.50. Fares are collected through the Clipper card system that a rider scans at her origination point and again at her final destination. SMART employees traverse the cars during the ride, scanning riders’ Clipper cards to ensure they’re paying customers. (The train also uses an e-tickets system to collect fares.)

It’s a truism in public transit that passenger fares amount to only a small percentage of a rail line’s operating costs. In the case of SMART, it’s about 6%. That means increasing ridership doesn’t necessarily have a big impact on a rail line’s financial situation. Generally, public transit is considered a public benefit and it is subsidized by taxes, paid largely by people who don’t necessarily ride the train. In Sonoma and Marin, the system has explicitly enhanced the lives of some of its residents. 

In Cotati, I sat for a bit with Jan, a senior citizen, born and raised in the area. “I take the train every Monday from Petaluma to Santa Rosa,” she said. “Sometimes we plan our day on what to do around the train stops.” She also occasionally takes her grandchildren down to Larkspur, to take the ferry and spend the day in San Francisco. “I’m surprised more people don’t use it.”

The not-so-SMART view

Even eight years in, the embrace of the SMART system in Sonoma and Marin counties is far from absolute. The 2020 measure to extend the sales tax did fail — though local media accounts report that the No side of the vote was lavishly bankrolled by a single developer who spent nearly $2 million to defeat the measure.

One of SMART’s most vocal critics has been Mike Arnold, a Ph.D. economist living in Marin who did his undergraduate studies at UC Santa Cruz. Arnold has in fact been active in the burgeoning debate about the rail proposal in Santa Cruz County.

“Passenger rail is extraordinarily expensive. It’s expensive to create. It’s expensive to operate,” said Arnold. “The only situation where it makes any sense is the suburban commute from a central city — like the Long Island Railroad or Metro North out of New York, the one out of Chicago, out of Philadelphia. Those are big and they have huge expenses, but they’ve got so many riders that the cost per rider is reasonable.”

Arnold used to live in the New York metropolitan area and took advantage of rail travel to commute to and from work. It was a useful and efficient transportation experience, he said. In places like Sonoma County and Santa Cruz County, he said, there are simply not enough commuters to justify the expenses of a rail line.

“Santa Cruz does not have the population or the density to rationalize the investment in a passenger rail system,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

Of course, population and density are numbers that are subject to change, and what’s true about population ratios today might not be true tomorrow. It’s possible that passenger rail lines can anticipate growth in a certain area, and even influence it. Still, it’s important to keep in mind what SMART’s ridership goal of 5,000 means in light of the combined population of Sonoma and Marin counties, about 730,000 people. (And the ridership number counts “boardings,” which in terms of commuters, and even day travelers, means two boardings per person. In that math, SMART’s ridership accounts for less than one half of 1% of the counties’ combined population.)

The primary justification for both the SMART system and the emerging rail system in Santa Cruz County is to somehow improve traffic congestion on the main freeways serving the areas. If there is any broad agreement in either community, it is that congestion on the freeways is awful and is gradually getting worse. Highway 101 in Marin and Sonoma carries roughly 100,000 vehicles per day, many of them backed up during long stretches of the day at the infamous Novato Narrows. Only when, in the minds of individual travelers, the inconveniences of driving outweigh the inconveniences of a train system — getting to and from a station, paying fares, waiting for trains, conforming to ride schedules — will public transit be viable and cost-efficient. 

The dream has become the reality

Even the train’s supporters concede the enormous costs in money and time that come up with SMART and transit systems in general. Chris Coursey is a Sonoma County supervisor, former mayor of Santa Rosa and a former employee of SMART.

“It takes longer and it’s more expensive that you expect it to be,” said Coursey. “Those are just the realities.”

The dream of the SMART system existed long before the first train pulled out at the first station. Coursey, in fact, began his career as a newspaper reporter for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. 

“The first story I wrote about SMART — well, it wasn’t called SMART then — was in 1990,” said Coursey. “The Golden Gate Bridge District had taken ownership of the rail line all the way up to northern Sonoma County, and the idea started to take shape from there.”

In 2008, local voters first passed the sales tax measure to fund the rail system, and almost immediately the housing-boom recession hit the economy. “So we started out in a giant hole,” said Coursey.

Just a couple of months after SMART first began operating in 2017, the North Bay, and particularly Santa Rosa, experienced what was considered at the time the most destructive wildfire in Northern California history. Then, a few years later, came a worldwide pandemic. Through all these traumas, SMART has somehow kept moving forward.

“COVID pretty much zeroed out ridership for every transit system in the country,” said Coursey. “But since then, [SMART] has had the highest or the second-highest recovery of any commuter train in the country. Our ridership has gone through the roof.”

I wish I could say I saw a lot of evidence of that rise in ridership. On my last day in the North Bay, I took the train all the way to its southernmost point in Larkspur in the late afternoon on a Friday, hoping to be in the midst of the hurly-burly of the day’s peak-time commute. Riding back to the north, just after 5 p.m., I was shocked to see that the volume of riders on the train wasn’t that much greater, that there were still empty seats and still plenty of no-fare passengers on the train. 

I talked to a couple of commuters who lamented the chaos of driving on 101, and who had figured out a routine riding the train that worked for them. I found one man named Ryan, perhaps 50, standing in bicycling clothes next to his bike. He said he spent 27 years commuting by car on Highway 101, and four years ago made a commitment to take the train every day he was called into his office. Riding his bike to the station, taking the train, then riding his bike home from his end station, he said, actually takes 15 minutes longer than his drive took. 

“But it’s worth it, for my health, for my peace of mind,” he said. “And I’ve even met friends on the train.”

That’s great for people like Ryan, but not for everybody, argued Mike Arnold.

“SMART’s an utter failure,” he said in an exasperated tone. “That’s why they lost the tax extension measure [in 2020], because taxpayers got tired of paying for empty seats.”

SMART general manager Eddy Cumins countered that SMART’s best days are still ahead of it, and that the system is making life better for people throughout the North Bay. Cumins said SMART’s boardings per year passed one million in 2024 and it’s a number that’s still climbing. 

“I tell people we are providing an alternative to that traffic on 101,” Cumins said. “And even if you’re someone who can’t ride the train because it doesn’t work in your life, at least we’re taking some of those people off the road. So, without a doubt, it has had some impact on congestion.”

SMART was conceived, planned and built in a pre-pandemic world in which traditional work patterns still prevailed. In the wake of the pandemic, Cumins said, when more and more workers have flexible schedules and are even choosing to stay at home to work, SMART’s orientation as primarily a commuter line could change as it works to balance the needs of increasing numbers of older adults taking shopping trips, students going to and from school, and even tourists visiting the area’s many attractions.

“As we grow ridership, we now want to focus on the needs of the whole community and not just commuters,” he said. “We absolutely want to be there for the commuters, but people are making all sorts of trips and I think the world has absolutely changed since COVID. Most people aren’t going to the office five days a week anymore. But they’re still making trips. I know it sounds generic, but it’s true, especially for smaller systems like ours. Our secret sauce has been figuring out what’s best for the whole community.”

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