The vision sold to voters at the time included a 70-mile rail line from Larkfield to Cloverdale — with a parallel bike and pedestrian path. But the Great Recession forced the agency to revise its plans, resulting in slower progress on rail construction. Assigned a lower priority, the multiuse pathway came together in fits and […]
The vision sold to voters at the time included a 70-mile rail line from Larkfield to Cloverdale — with a parallel bike and pedestrian path. But the Great Recession forced the agency to revise its plans, resulting in slower progress on rail construction. Assigned a lower priority, the multiuse pathway came together in fits and starts, as grant funds become available.
While disheartening to those passionate about the pathway and impatient for its completion, the delay comes as no surprise. They’ve grown accustomed to disappointment.
“At every turn,” the Marin County Bicycle Coalition lamented in a 2020 newsletter, “SMART’s decisions have made it clear that it is a rail-first agency, and that the pathway should only advance when it does not impede or compete for funding with the rail project.”
When they’re completed, “by the end of March,” according to SMART, the long-awaited sections will be a game-changer for bike commuters.
Leading them into temptation are several smooth new ribbons of pavement along the SMART train tracks in Sonoma County. That explains the steady, daily trickle of scofflaws ignoring barricades, stepping or rolling over orange mesh fencing in order to use the new pathway, despite the inconvenient fact that those sections aren’t yet open.
A third stretch, the 2.6 miles from Airport Boulevard in northern Santa Rosa to downtown Windsor, is being built at the same time that the new train tracks are laid.
“It’s so busy!” said Tim Zahner, who lives in Windsor and makes use of the new passage to get to his gym on Airport Boulevard.
“I mean, they were pissed.“
The coalition’s tune has changed since Eddy Cumins replaced Farhad Mansourian as SMART’s general manager in November 2021. In addition to restoring train ridership to levels exceeding those seen before the COVID-19 pandemic, Cumins has taken the pathway off the back burner.
Since 2019, said Julia Gonzalez, SMART’s communications manager, the agency has invested approximately million in pathway construction and maintenance.
Eris Weaver, executive director of the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, recalls voting for Measure Q. “What we thought we were getting was a bike highway that would go the length of the rail line. It’s been 16 years, and that’s not what we’ve gotten. We still just have pieces.”
SMART’s trains currently operate on 45 miles of rebuilt and modernized track, laid by crews starting in 2012, with service beginning in August 2017. By comparison, to date, 28 miles of pathway are now open. Gaps in the route have limited its usefulness for many potential bike commuters.
Three segments of SMART pathway are tantalizingly close to being completed.
One of them parallels the tracks from Southpoint Boulevard, near the Petaluma DMV, north for 2.9 miles to Penngrove.
While Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit officials are “thrilled to see the community’s enthusiasm for the pathways,” wrote Allison Mattioli, a spokesperson for the agency, those sections “are still under active construction and are not open to the public at this time.” The email had the words “not open” in bold.
The agency’s website had until very recently informed visitors that the “expected completion” of two of the three Sonoma County pathway segments would be “late Fall 2024.” Now, the website shows “early Winter 2025” and “Spring 2025.”
Don’t look now but there are poachers in our midst, trespassing pedestrians and pirates on bicycles, breaking the rules in broad daylight.
Lower priority from inception
The outcry from cyclists and path advocates reached a fever pitch in 2020, after voters rejected an early extension of quarter-cent tax, dealing SMART a bruising public loss and a reckoning with some of its core constituencies.
After challenging the workers to “give me one good reason why I shouldn’t” ride on the new pavement, the trespassing cyclist rode away.
“A bunch of Ghilotti [Construction] guys yelled at me to get off” that stretch of the pathway, a man who did not provide his name recalled on a recent Friday.
Back in 2008, both the Marin and Sonoma County Bicycle Coalitions played important roles in drumming up support for Measure Q, the 20-year, quarter-cent sales tax that made the SMART project possible and forms the largest share of its operations budget. It also helps the agency compete for state and federal grants to bankroll rail and pathway construction.
There are times, he observed, when “we already have a Highway 101-type bottleneck issue on the path. It’s already full.”
Closed though it may be, that stretch of pathway is already surprisingly popular.
When might the new segments be open? “By the end of March,” according to Mattioli with SMART.
It was not always thus.
The next segment, which bridges a 2.8-mile gap in the pathway between Golf Course Drive in Rohnert Park and Bellevue Avenue in Santa Rosa, has been delayed by, among other things, the presence of California tiger salamanders, an endangered species.
