In the North Bay, the SMART commuter rail line will begin work next week to extend service to the city of Healdsburg, with plenty of challenges, both in construction and in finding long-term funding.

As the largest city north of Santa Rosa, Healdsburg is generating considerable excitement among those who await SMART’s arrival. But first there’s a lot of work to do, starting next week.

“It starts with a topographical survey,” said SMART Chief Engineer Bill Gamlen. “Monday, we’ll be moving into geotechnical boring, where we’ll have a drill rig out on the site, and we are taking cores of soil samples. There’ll be a lot of things going in parallel. We’re going to be taking things apart, tearing out old track, taking out old bridges, tearing up grade crossings.  The bridge across the Russian River will be one of the first activities there.”

That bridge was built in the 1870s and will need a complete replacement to carry the weight of the modern SMART trains. The prep work will take about a year, with actual construction beginning next spring. The $270 million in funding for the extension is already in place and SMART expects to be pulling into the old Healdsburg station sometime in late 2028.

“We think it’s a big milestone,” said Gamlen. “You know, Healdsburg is a delightful place to go visit on the weekends, and even vacation there.  So, we see a lot of ridership heading up to Healdsburg, a destination, probably, more than an origination point.”

But that’s a problem, according to Mike Arnold, an economist and outspoken critic of SMART, living in Novato. Arnold said he thinks SMART will never be financially feasible because it doesn’t take people to any large urban job centers.

“The primary problem is the economics,” he said. “Passenger rail in suburbia just doesn’t get the ridership. And the reason is because there just isn’t a place for people to get to easily. There is no major employment center in either Marin or Sonoma Counties.  And so, therefore, when you take people to stations, how are they going to get where they want to go? The answer is, very few of them do, and that’s why they get very few riders.”

Currently, kids and seniors pay no fare, and Arnold said that means more than 40 percent of riders are riding for free. And he points to Hwy 101, where SMART was supposed to relieve traffic during morning commute times.  

Changes in work habits, brought on by the pandemic, have decreased the number of commuters, but Arnold said it has simply compressed the traffic jams into a smaller time period, with little impact from SMART.

“You’ve narrowed the peak,” he said. “But when you talk about peak-hour congestion at 7:30 in the morning, it looks like it hasn’t changed at all.  And the answer is, based on the count on the cars, it really hasn’t changed at all.”

The debate matters because in June voters will be asked to decide whether or not to extend, for another 30 years, the quarter-cent sales tax to continue funding SMART.  The current tax will sunset in 2029, shortly after the Healdsburg extension is scheduled to be finished.