SMART Continues to Win Huge Support — Including From Many Who Don’t Ride It
Up and down the North Bay, in towns with pear orchards or backyard chicken coops or caviar-tart restaurants, residents seem to agree on one thing: They love the SMART train.
That much was clear Tuesday, when more than 70% of voters in Marin and Sonoma County approved a measure to extend by 30 years a quarter-cent sales tax that provides about half the annual revenue for Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit. The election results showed people widely embracing the rail system even though relatively few of them ride the train to work.
For communities in Wine Country and along the Highway 101 corridor, SMART is more than a commuter rail. It’s also seen as a centerpiece of future development, including the massive downtown project envisioned for Rohnert Park, a high-profile luxury hotel in Petaluma and the proposed Esmeralda tech enclave in Cloverdale. More than a hundred homes are under construction next to Petaluma North Station.
What all of this shows is that SMART represents the art of the possible in parts of the region that were once viewed as rural backroads. As a boutique train — beloved for its ample bike racks and upholstered seats with tables — it will never move people at the scale of major metropolitan transit. Yet voters appear to view SMART as a sign of progress or prestige, and cities have leaned into the idea of concentrating growth around it.
“To keep up with the Joneses, so to speak, we needed some kind of mass transit that connected Marin and Sonoma counties,” said former Healdsburg Mayor Gary Plass. His city is the next stop in a forthcoming SMART expansion, expected to open for passenger service in 2028.
In the afterglow of the June election, enthusiasm ran high for the train, as though the vote were a foregone conclusion. But in the past few months, SMART had actually faced spirited opposition. One powerful and deep-pocketed family went so far as to publish a book to “shine a light on the SMART story,” deriding it as “one of the most catastrophic government transportation investments in U.S. history.”
Members of the Gallaher family said they spent about $350,000 on “The Great Train Heist,” hiring a professional writer and then publishing enough copies to distribute among government bureaucrats and local newsrooms. It marked their latest attack on SMART. The Gallahers also spent nearly $2 million on a successful campaign in 2020 to defeat an earlier measure to extend the sales tax.
Plass, who found a copy of “The Great Train Heist” in his mailbox earlier this year, said he understands some of the criticism.
Chiefly, he points to SMART’s overarching goal — really the goal of all transit systems — to nudge people out of their cars and alleviate freeway congestion. The rail agency’s numbers show ridership steadily increasing, with up to 5,455 people catching the train on weekdays and roughly 4,000 on weekends, according to General Manager Eddy Cumins. But that’s still a small portion of the two counties, and SMART’s farebox recovery is less than 10% of its operating costs, meaning that the rail line is largely subsidized by taxpayers.
Further, if the train line was intended to thin out traffic and carry passengers to jobs in San Francisco, Plass had to wonder why it was necessary to put more than a billion dollars on a 30-year rebuild of Highway 101.
Sonoma County Supervisor and SMART board member David Rabbitt expressed gratitude for the train as he sat in 101 car traffic Wednesday afternoon.
“The train offers an alternative to the freeway, which I’m on right now, unfortunately,” Rabbitt said with a wan laugh. “It’s very convenient. Kids take it to school. People take it to get to Giants games” by hopping on a ferry from the Larkspur terminal. Cumins, for his part, is confident that the rail could carry more riders. He’s set a “stretch goal” of 1.7 million in the next fiscal year.
“If we achieve that, it’s going to be a million more riders than we carried pre-pandemic,” he assured.
Just as important as the mobility benefits are the development opportunities that SMART presents, Rabbitt said. Vast, empty lots around the station could easily be built out. California housing laws have made it easier to build densely around transit, and people might like the idea of living near SMART regardless of whether they plan to ride the train, said Daniel Chatman, a professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley.
Tenants or homebuyers who fully intend to drive everywhere might still be tantalized by the “option value” of transit, Chatman said. Perhaps they think their kids might use the train or that it’s a fun novelty on weekends. Plass conceded that once SMART reaches Healdsburg, he’ll enjoy riding it with his girlfriend to grab dinner in Petaluma.
“We could have one of those deep conversations,” he said wistfully, imagining himself sitting for the better part of an hour, watching farm-checkered land roll by through the windows.
Besides luring tourists and daytrippers, SMART makes the North Bay seem more cosmopolitan, as Plass suggested. That alone could spur development. Chatman cautioned, however, that clustering homes and businesses within walking distance of train stations wouldn’t necessarily transform SMART into the type of mass commuting system that a lot of people could use. Marin County famously pulled out of a BART extension in the 1960s. SMART is quite different from BART.
“If we only permit development near stations for a rail system that’s carrying a few thousand passengers a day, the consequences are to increase the cost of development and the cost of housing,” Chatman said.
To be fair, many North Bay voters view SMART less as a catalyst than as a symbol of an inviting area. Farm-to-table restaurants sit among the feed stores and grain silos of downtown Petaluma, where city boosters await the planned Appellation Hotel. New apartment buildings have popped up around Railroad Square in Santa Rosa. Rohnert Park is pursuing an ambitious project near its SMART station, which will feature a hotel, manicured courtyards, high-end shops and 300 homes. The Eames Institute of Curiosity bought the former Birkenstock campus in Novato and plans to convert it into a mid-century art museum. Windsor transformed from an agricultural town into an affluent suburb where artisanal shops and tasting rooms dot the town green.
Soon, SMART will reach Healdsburg, a onetime outpost for prunes and lumber that’s become a foodie mecca and a booming real estate market. Plass sometimes humblebrags about the house he bought for $100,000 in 1981, a price that would be unfathomable today. Recently, a home across the street sold for $1.6 million, he said.
He can’t wait for the first SMART train to chug into town.