If this prepare is so SMART, why can’t I discover it?
That’s the query I requested myself at Larkspur, in Marin County, after arriving on the ferry from San Francisco one current morning.
I used to be on my option to Petaluma, and had been trying ahead to experiencing California’s latest and most spectacular ferry-to-train connection: the Golden Gate Ferry to the SMART prepare, the sunshine rail line working by means of Marin and Sonoma counties.
SMART, whereas little-known statewide, provides large inspiration for Californians who need extra infrastructure that connects us. It’s additionally a window on the place California continues to be rising — on our metropolitan edges, outdoors locations like Fairfield, Riverside and Escondido.
SMART opened in 2017, providing 43 miles of service from Marin’s San Rafael as much as Sonoma’s Charles M. Schulz airport. It was constructed for peanuts — simply $400 million. An extension south from San Rafael to the Larkspur ferry opened simply earlier than the pandemic hit, crushing demand for trains and ferries.
However ridership is rebounding. And SMART is working to broaden. It’s including a second Petaluma station and making a micro-transit service to attach its airport station to the precise airport.
SMART has begun development on an extension north to Windsor, although it’s paused that work whereas awaiting a California Supreme Court docket choice on the mission’s funding. Finally, SMART will take the prepare farther — to Cloverdale, on Mendocino County’s doorstep, 80 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
And SMART has studied a brand new line east throughout the North Bay from its Novato-Hamilton station to the Interstate 80 hall at Suisun Metropolis. There, SMART would share a station with Amtrak’s Capitol Hall service, which connects the state capital and San Jose. A brand new east-west North Bay hyperlink can’t come quickly sufficient. The state says California State Route 37, the world’s hottest east-west thoroughfare, might be “completely submerged” by 2040 due to storms and rising sea ranges.
With all these tasks, SMART is searching for to serve each guests to California, and Californians who could also be much less prone to dwell in the midst of our largest cities, however nonetheless need to be linked to them. Certainly, transit tasks like SMART and the ACE prepare, which runs by means of the Altamont hall and is being prolonged south and east by means of Modesto to Merced, are serving to to knit Northern California into what some wonks name “The Mega-Area.” That conception imagines the “Bay Space” reaching so far as Lake Tahoe or Fresno.
In fact, serving such a big space requires making good hyperlinks accessible to actual individuals. At Larkspur, SMART has work to do.
The expertise was mortifying as a result of I had been bragging about SMART to my companion that day, a Swiss-Swedish journalist-colleague. After a long time of touring the world by rail, he’s a prepare snob, and he started making little jokes as quickly as I turned left off the ferry, wandered to the sting of its car parking zone — and couldn’t discover the prepare. Unable to find the platform utilizing the navigation app on my balky smartphone, I began shifting towards a tunnel utilized by bicyclists and pedestrians. Nonetheless no prepare.
Finally we wandered to the appropriate facet of the car parking zone, crossed busy Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, and meandered round a curve in a smaller road, by means of two workplace parking tons, and up a slender driveway to achieve the prepare station. On board, the experience was wonderful, although my European buddy pressed a conductor on why the prepare runs on diesel, not electrical energy (the reply to the wisenheimer: to save cash in an America that doesn’t make investments a lot in trains).
