Share your ideas of where we go from here. Scroll down to share a comment.
Earthquake
This year an earthquake rocked the county’s transportation planning world. A consultant estimated that it would cost $4.3 billion to build commuter rail on the rail corridor. This figure is nine times larger than the $478 million estimate for commuter rail published in the Transit Corridor Alternative Analysis in 2021.
This news puts the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) at a crossroads. In December, the RTC will decide whether to invest in rail transit, by funding an environmental impact report. Their decision hinges on whether they believe the project is financially feasible.
To help the RTC make the decision, the commission hired a consultant to figure out how much local revenue (in addition to state and federal grants) would be needed to build and operate the project. The consultant estimated the amount of a future sales tax measure that would be needed to build, operate and maintain the project. Because the amount of state and federal grants is uncertain, the consultant produced estimates for two scenarios: one where 20% of the revenue would come from a local sales tax and one where 50% local revenue would be needed. Under the 20% scenario, a county sales tax of 1.5% would be needed. Under the 50% scenario, a 2.25% sales tax would be needed.
For comparison purposes, the Measure D transportation sales tax of 2016 was a 0.5% sales tax. It barely received the required 2/3rds vote to pass. There is no one arguing that a sales tax 3 to 4.5 times the amount of Measure D could pass in the context of a well-funded opposition.
Back to Basics
Given the unlikelihood of passing a local tax measure for rail, we need to refocus. Let’s start with discussing our basic values. What is transportation for? And what principles do we want it to embody?
Today’s transportation planners remind us that transportation is a means to an end. The end is our access to the places where we meet our needs. If access is the goal, we realize that it’s not just motorized transportation that we need. Strategies that increase access can actually reduce transportation demand: like locating housing that’s affordable near job centers and locating jobs near existing (relatively) affordable housing; like locating recreation and shopping opportunities near home; like locating job centers on transit lines.
This suggests that a transportation planning agency should be involved in urban planning and housing policy (which is why the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission is concerned with both). If the value of access prevailed in our county, it would be inconceivable for the County to accept a Kaiser application to build a medical facility with 300 employees at a location over a mile from the nearest bus line and for our transportation agency to remain silent on the proposal. (Kaiser withdrew the application.)
We need to evaluate transportation investments on their ability to improve access, as well as how well they serve our values of social equity, health, and environmental and financial sustainability.
Social Equity
In Watsonville, 31% of the population are not drivers (youth; disabled; and households with no car). Our auto-dependent transportation system fails these people. And it fails to make transportation affordable for those who do drive a vehicle. For Watsonville residents, transportation consumes an average 20% of household income, whereas in San Francisco where public transit is good, the average household spends 9% on transportation. A worthy social equity goal for our County is to make alternatives to auto transportation competitive with auto travel.
Health and Environmental Sustainability
It is abundantly clear that our society’s dependency on the automobile is a huge factor in changing the climate. In addition, it is harmful to our health. According to California’s Office of Traffic Safety, Santa Cruz County ranks 11th out of 58 counties in rate of serious injuries and deaths. We rank 2nd in rate of injuries and death to bicyclists and 5th in rate of injuries and death to pedestrians.
When we spend more of our local transportation dollars on highways and roads than transit and safe streets for active transportation, we undermine our health, enable urban sprawl, and accelerate towards the climate cliff.
Financial Sustainability
I believe most of us would agree that a beneficial transit project becomes a harmful transit project if the financial strain results in cuts to existing transit. A case in point was the BART extension to Oakland Airport. In 2009 transit advocacy groups TransForm and Urban Habitat filed a complaint against the BART extension, stating that the price tag was several times what voters were told nine years earlier; that additional debt would hurt BART’s financial health; and funds would be better spent supporting AC Transit at a time when routes were being cut. As an alternative, the groups advocated for a bus shuttle from an existing BART station to the airport. Now BART reports that they are “facing a fiscal cliff,” and other Bay Area transit agencies are expecting to slash routes in 2026 due to Governor Newsom’s withdrawal from his agreement to a $750 million bridge loan.
Effective Transit
Christof Spieler, in Trains, Buses, People says we need to have the right conversation about transit. “We need to talk about what matters:
– To focus on the quality of service, not the technology that delivers it.
– To understand that the transit experience depends on buildings and streets and sidewalks as much as it does stations and trains.
– And above all to talk about getting transit to the right place”
Expanding on his last point, Spieler writes,
“DART, serving Dallas, has built the largest light-rail network in the US. But despite being expansive, it reaches remarkably few places. It skips a dense concentration of jobs in Uptown, barely serves the city’s biggest medical district, stops outside of walking distance of several universities, and misses Love Field’s airport terminal by half a mile. As a result, it carries half as many people per mile as San Diego, Phoenix , or Houston.” Spieler explains that DART purchased freight rail right of way and “built its lines straight down those pre-cleared paths” and missing out on getting people where they want to go.
What next?
Several years ago the RTC invited transit planner Jarrett Walker to give a talk. It’s worth watching the video. After comparing our transit service with our population and job density Walker concluded:
“One of the things I want to leave you with very clearly, and this is not the fault of anybody at METRO Transit, who are doing what they can with what they have, is that you do not have very much transit for a county your size.
“And the debate before you is not just the exciting debate about what your infrastructure should be…You have a very real immediate debate over whether you want to begin providing competitive transit service.”
We still have not had the discussion that Walker proposed. What if the RTC invited Walker back to lead a discernment process about where we go from here?
I think there are reasons to doubt the sticker price. It works out to almost $200M/mile, comparable to the actual current costs of building HSR in the Central Valley, with its huge precision infrastructure, grand stations, and vast land acquisition.
So it’s worth digging into the design and considering alternatives from small (design for lighter rail) to major ( consider a different alignment for a big part of the route, such as the median of Hwy 1)
Never take the first offer!
I agree. This number is pure BS to me. There will be a cost of upgrading the tracks to stage two from one, and that’s all that’s really needed. No overhead wires if Tig-Ms are employed as trolleys.
Bruce — the issue isn’t just the sticker price; it’s what the corridor legally and physically must be built to support.
This corridor isn’t a blank slate.
The RTC owns the right-of-way, but a common carrier freight operator (St. Paul & Pacific/Progressive Rail) retains freight rights. Any passenger project on the SCBRL therefore has to meet FRA railroad standards or secure an FRA-approved exception. The ZEPRT draft explicitly assumes freight and passenger are “temporally separated” (freight at different hours), which still keeps us under FRA jurisdiction and its design/operations rules.
SCCRTC
“Design for lighter rail” isn’t a free option on a freight corridor.
On shared corridors, FRA requires one of the following: (a) fully FRA-compliant passenger equipment and protections, (b) temporal separation with strict, enforceable procedures, or (c) an FRA-approved risk-mitigation plan/waiver. All of those carry cost, schedule, and ongoing compliance overhead. You don’t get European-style “tram-train” without clearing these hurdles.
eCFR
+2
eCFR
+2
Why costs look “HSR-ish” without the grandeur.
ZEPRT’s own documents note the corridor’s tight right-of-way, bridges/trestles, bluffs, wetlands, in-street track, and many at-grade crossings, plus minimum clearances and separations required by FRA/CPUC. That’s exactly the cocktail that drives per-mile costs up even for a modest commuter system. Calling for a Hwy-1 median re-alignment just trades one set of expensive constraints for another (new structures, interchanges, access, and environmental work).
SCCRTC
Service plan reality (stations + headways) still undershoots the need.
The draft concept models ~22 miles, nine stations, single-track with meets, 30-minute headways from 6 a.m.–10 p.m., and 40–45 minutes end-to-end Santa Cruz↔Pajaro. With stations so sparse and several inside the daily bottleneck (Mar Monte → State Park), many riders still drive into congestion to board—erasing the mode-shift win.
Your Watsonville commuter example proves the point.
Given the 30-minute headways and 40–45 minutes run time (before first/last mile), a Watsonville worker aiming for an 8:00 a.m. start in Santa Cruz effectively needs the 6:00 or 6:30 a.m. train to have any buffer. Miss one and you’re instantly 30 minutes behind—precisely why intercept location and frequency matter more than the wheel type.
“Can’t we get around the freight standards?”
There are only a few paths, and each has big trade-offs:
A) Temporal separation (ZEPRT’s current assumption): Freight and passenger don’t operate on the same track at the same time, under a documented FRA plan. You still live under FRA and need procedures, oversight, and potentially PTC/interface protections where applicable. This doesn’t make it “light rail”; it just time-shares the freight railroad.
eCFR
B) FRA waiver for non-compliant/light equipment: Possible, but case-by-case, lengthy, and contingent on alternate safety programs and risk controls. Not something to bank a countywide capital program on.
Federal Transit Administration
+1
C) Railbank / terminate freight rights: Legally complex (STB process), politically fraught, and not free—often requires resolving/compensating freight easements and addressing shippers. It’s been studied and publicly debated here; it’s not a quick “workaround.”
SCCRTC
+1
D) Build a fully separate passenger alignment (e.g., Hwy-1 median): Removes freight entanglement but explodes new-build costs (structures, access, utilities, environmental), and it still doesn’t fix the Mar Monte → State Park choke unless you intercept trips upstream.
Bottom line: “Never take the first offer” cuts both ways. We shouldn’t accept a first cost estimate blindly—but we also shouldn’t pretend a “lighter” design magically applies on an active freight railroad. Under today’s rules and the ZEPRT concept, we’re paying freight-rail prices to serve a handful of stations that many people still have to drive into a 6-mile bottleneck to reach. Until we intercept trips before that segment and deliver more frequent, door-to-door-competitive service, changing the vehicle won’t change the outcome.
You’ve pretty clearly laid out that we are not having a conversation about where people need to go, how many of them, when, and how they are going to get there. Committing tremendous amounts of money to any project seems premature. Can you even fantasize how such a conversation might take place?
Excellent point, Jozseph the missing conversation is origins and destinations. Until we map real trip pairs (Watsonville→SC, Live Oak→UCSC, etc.) and their time costs door-to-door, we’re all talking in abstractions. A community-based “access audit” think Walker-style workshops using travel diaries and time bands could make that conversation concrete. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the foundation for deciding what mode makes sense where.
I also think there are reasons to doubt the accuracy of the cost estimate, but from a different angle.
(Brace yourselves for a TL;DR reply, but there is no other way 😉
The current cost estimate has generous contingencies added. Cut those down and you could save billions!
But, according to the RTC, those were straight out of the planning standards for that type of facility. Historically, estimates at this stage of planning (15% – barely started) are rarely (never!) too high. In fact, they tend to go up by the time construction is complete, often by very large factors. To think that this project would be different is a very long, very foolish bet.
The final cost of construction is what matters. Completion of construction for this project, should it ever get to that point, is probably 15 to 20 years off. Anyone want to bet that the costs won’t escalate during that time? How much will they be then? 2x higher? 10x higher?
Labor comprises over 50% of a large infrastructure project’s total construction cost. Labor expense is sensitive to the cost of living in an area. It’s going to cost a lot to attract the engineering and construction talent here. They will be coming from elsewhere. Caltrans explained that to the RTC when costs went up for the Hwy 1 Aux Lane project. The consultants also mentioned it in a recent RTC meeting. There’s no way around that.
Terrain, both natural and man made, has a big impact on the cost of construction as well. Lots of aging bridges and trestles, lots of at grade crossings in residential neighborhoods, and miles of track laid on crumbling coastal bluffs and through sensitive wetlands makes for an expensive project. There is no way around that.
The estimated cost per mile of a rail project to be built on a corridor that has sections in flood zones, along crumbling coastal bluffs, through residential areas with numerous at grade crossings and then onto the street in a tourist area that is jammed with vehicles, pedestrians and a recreational train 3 months a year is going to be substantially higher than it would be on a rail corridor through interior valleys. That should not surprise anyone. There’s no way to change that.
To chase around for consultants that will give you a lower estimate now to smooth some ruffled political feathers and make the project look like it will cost less would be easy. No doubt you would find some who will if you pay them enough. But that’s just another estimate. It’s the final cost that matters.
We can change the type of rail service to get the costs down!
Nope. There’s currently no one that will pay for it.
The current plan for the ZEPRT is for Intercity rail. That’s what the federal government (FRA) and the state (CalTrans) are interested in building and what they will pay for. Light rail, commuter rail, regional rail systems are all off the table. They’re the only ones paying for rail systems at the moment and there is no way to change that.
The ZEPRT project is already in the FRA’s CID program. It will progress to the next planning phase once the RTC hands off the PCR to the FRA. That launches the Service Development Plan (SDP) which will be done by CalTrans using the FRA’s framework. They’ve delayed doing that for over 9 months now.
The FRA’s CID program is the only identified path forward for the system. That program was designed for the larger agencies to take over planning, relieving the RTC from all but a few support roles. The FRA also takes over paying for that planning. It’s a good deal for the RTC, and it’s the only deal available (which makes it even better). There’s no way to change that.
The SDP will also include revisions to the current, exaggerated ridership estimates as well as the current cost estimates.
HDR, their consultants, will be busy doing the Climate Resiliency Study for the corridor, with some ideas on how to stabilize cliffs and elevate tracks in a few spots. Those were not considered in the current cost estimate and it seems a little late to be starting those now. Any bets on how those will impact the cost estimate?
The crossroads the RTC has bumbled into was caused by ad hoc, poorly informed decisions made many years ago, a lack of institutional experience with projects of this scale, and, I hate to say this, what appears to be self dealing.
Their current budget for the next planning stage mentioned in their original plan, Preliminary Engineering and Environmental Analysis (PE&EA) has run dry. Now they are trying to scrape grant money from other local projects and borrow money against future Measure D revenues to carry on with that planning stage. Why?
The PE&EA planning stage is not necessary at the moment – the FRA will do the actual PE&EA work if and when the ZEPRT project is selected to advance to step 2 in the Corridor Identification and Development program. They are currently at step 1. There is no way to change that. It’s the only game in town.
The RTC claims that doing a preliminary version of the PE&EA now will improve the project readiness and help it advance in the CID program. Maybe. Frankly it’s very likely that there will be some major issues with the rest of the project – costs, benefits, risks and complexity – that will make it less competitive. Having a head start on an environmental report is not going to overcome those.
The RTC’s current plan makes no sense, other than to keep their shop in the rail planning business. Doing the PE&EA now on the local’s dime is an unnecessary, wasteful bet on a long shot.
I realize this sounds harsh. The Project Concept Report was done to establish whether the concept was feasible. Now they know. The current position the RTC is taking seems way out of line.
this is fantastic, data-rich analysis. You’re right that contingencies aren’t arbitrary padding; they reflect risk, terrain, and cost-of-living realities.
Your point about the FRA’s Corridor ID framework is crucial, the RTC’s push to self-fund PE/EA work before the FRA takes over seems misaligned and fiscally reckless.
I’d argue the responsible move is to pause new local spending on rail-specific studies, complete the FRA handoff, and redirect local capital to projects already shovel-ready, trail, bus, and multimodal safety.
Rick — excellent framing of where things stand. The $4.3 billion number was an earthquake, but it’s also an opportunity to reset around outcomes, not modes.
From a field-level view, our chokepoint isn’t Watsonville to Capitola—it’s roughly six miles from Mar Monte to State Park Drive, where we lose 30 minutes every morning. The nearest station to most commuters south of there is Watsonville—11 miles in the wrong direction—and the next stations sit inside the jam. With only nine total stations, most residents would still sit in traffic to reach a platform or have to backtrack, which erases the benefit of mode shift.
Door-to-door travel time, not technology labels, should guide our investments. If you have to drive into the same congestion to catch the train, the train can’t win. That’s why intercept location, service frequency, and first/last-mile access matter more than steel wheels.
The good news is we already have a 24–36 month “win set” available:
Build the spine: Fully fund Coastal Rail Trail Segments 8–11 — immediate, all-ages access and safety gains.
Fix the corridor: Advance Soquel Drive Multimodal — a high-impact student/worker route.
Protect what works: Maintain Bike Safe / Walk Safe funding and close known high-injury gaps.
Transit you can actually catch: Express buses with signal priority, queue jumps, and a park-and-ride north of Mar Monte that intercepts trips before the choke.
Given the scale of the new rail estimate — and a modeled need for a 1.5–2.25% county sales tax (three to four times Measure D) — the practical path forward is active transportation, reliable buses, and access-oriented land use, not another environmental impact report.
Let’s have the access-first conversation Jarrett Walker proposed — grounded in where people actually go, and how soon we can make those trips better.
Metro, Metro, Metro … Yes! Other than feet, the next most flexible form of transportation for the public is the bus system. Bus stops are already here. Their roadways are already built. Everyone – except real far away rural areas – has access to a bus stop, actually multiple bus stops!
This has been a sad and unnecessary saga. A train has never been feasible on the corridor. This was known from studies as far back as the last century and was obvious to some supervisors when we acquired the corridor. The 2016 UCIS study found, among other things, a train would do nothing to alleviate traffic on Route 1 and would be expensive to ride.
Technology advanced with the introduction of ebikes adding to the utility of paved off-road infrastructure. Data from far better demographically positioned communities like Marin /Sonoma came in showing cost overruns, poor ridership and massive deficits. The RTC response was to double down on the strategy now shown to be a failure. In the mean time they wasted a huge portion of the Measure D funds slated for the continuous 32 mile trail on track maintenance and repeated studies. They caused massive environmental damage by unnecessarily industrializing the parts of the corridor where they put a trail next to rather than in the place of the tracks. All studies showed these tacks would need to be removed and in some places located in a different portion of the right of way if a modern train were to go in.
Somehow here in supposedly environmentally aware Santa Cruz the vision of a world class trail on a smooth train level grade running among the shore, through forests and bypassing cars in urban areas never captured public imagination. Instead a story of you can have it all, both train and trail took the lead. Even after engineering showed important portions of the “trail” needed to be on streets, mobile homeowners evicted and all the historic rail bridges would need to be torn down, the reality of train OR trail never sunk in. It is easier to sell the public on an attractive fantasy than a clear but less expansive reality.
Finally there is the body count, the dead and disabled pedestrians and bicyclists deprived of safe passage through the county. I am one of those who is still here to tell the tale, you’ve probably seen the makeshift crosses placed next to the tracks by families of other victims. Last year I was among the over 100 KSI (police speak for killed or seriously injured) in the county. I happened to be riding my non-electric bike parallel to the rail corridor from Live Oak to Rio Del Mar – what would be a great off road run – when blasted into by an inattentive diver who jumped out of her car, looked down on me with my banana shaped leg and exclaimed “I didn’t see you”. I will live with the difference between no trail and maybe train for the rest of my life.
It is time for our leaders to face reality. There will be no billions of dollars of someone else’s money or debt to be paid off by our children to build let alone run a slow train from Watsonville to Davenport. We can still have an amazing and in places pastoral transportation corridor with world class views for new and old human and electric powered technology. Let’s embrace, then celebrate the possible!
Rick, are you finally agreeing that you now recommend using the rail corridor for active transportation?
You wrote: “When we spend more of our local transportation dollars on highways and roads than transit and safe streets for active transportation, we undermine our health, enable urban sprawl, and accelerate towards the climate cliff.”
If you generally agree that a within-suburban train in a small mostly rural county with two low population cities is infeasible with low ridership projections, then what should we do in the coastal rail corridor? The ZEPRT report shows a train, by every metric (cost, ridership, terrain, etc.) is not feasible. And by leaving tracks in place a trail isn’t affordable either. So we get…neither?
Doesn’t it make sense to invest more money into the equitable transit we already have – Metro – on existing infrastructure we don’t have to build from scratch (roads)?
I’m not sure why you stop short of lumping active transportation into the transit bucket. As a fellow bike rider who rides for nearly all of my movement needs like so many others, next to Metro biking is the most equitable and cost-effective way of removing cars from roads. All of the data supports this.
When RTC planners told me they were including making the Branch Rail LIne compatible with the goals set forth by the CA State Rail Plan, I knew that would drive costs up.
A key cost component is replacing several bridges to conform to FRA standards.
The only thing I can imagine that would enable the RTC to cut the associated costs is to disconnect the BRL from the national rail network, perhaps near where the line passes under Hwy 1 – kind of the last point where there is significant potential for freight traffic. (Such a line interruption could be short enough to allow cars to be craned across from one line to the other, enabling Roaring Camp to bring in new locomotives or components, or to bring in automated track-laying equipment.) If disconnected, the line falls under CA PUC jurisdiction, instead of FRA. While that may present opportunities to restrict vehicle weight and reduce reconstruction costs, and opens the door to alternative vehicles not currently considered by the State Rail Plan, it also would probably make us lose eligibility for State funds earmarked for rail. However, federal funds for transit would still be applicable.
That said, it seems like, compared to the latest estimate, there is probably more bang for the buck in putting in some alternative transit designs, such as podcar/monorail, an elevated system that would have the additional advantage of being extendable beyond the rail right-of-way as funds become available, and ultimately creating a more comprehensive grade-separate transit network – what we will need to get away from our current auto-dependent system.
Monorail or anything above ground is going to be very, very expensive. I don’t understand all this kurfluffle regarding freight and passenger rail: the RR line from Tamien Station in San Jose south to Gilroy is jointly shared by Caltrain and Union Pacific. UP owns that length of track, and to the south to Salinas for that matter. North of Tamien, Cal Train owns the tracks, and the line has night time freight only.
Regarding stops along the branch line, nothing is needed more than what constitutes the various bus stops in the county. No parking lots are needed except at the terminus north or south, or what exists already, as in parking lots near to Capitola Village. The tracks need to be upgraded to Class Two, but I would propose Class 3 for the stretch from Highway 1 in Watsonville to Buena Vista, so higher speeds can be attained in that stretch where there would be no stops. Heck, the whole line was once Class 4 when passenger rail did run on the tracks with freight as in 100 years ago!
Finding Our Way Together: A Community Discernment Process
VALUES
The RTC can get the community discernment process rolling by proposing a set of values for our transportation system, for example: expanding people’s access to jobs, school, shopping, recreation, and social life in a way that values social equity, health, and environmental and financial sustainability. In service of the values, the RTC can articulate some principles of transportation planning that have been found to serve the values, like:
Frequent and safe transit that takes people where they want to go
Safe streets for bicyclists and pedestrians
Land use decisions that encourage walkable compact development rather than sprawl and auto dependency
Protect and increase the supply of affordable housing near jobs to reduce demand for motorized transportation
Once there is consensus on values and principles, the technical consultants can offer a palette of options for community evaluation.
FACILITATION
John Maynard Keynes is said to have remarked, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?” In spite of what seemed obvious to Keynes, psychologists have demonstrated that a lot of the time facts don’t change people’s minds. Our confirmation bias filters out facts that don’t support our conviction. A good facilitator can help people get past their confirmation bias by 1) recognizing common ground around values and 2) leading people towards strategy decisions (like investing in rail; trail only; bus; or Personal Rapid Transit) through a fresh examination of how each strategy performs on meeting the values. A facilitator encourages the group to be passionate about values, but let go of prior attachment to strategies.
I saw this work when serving on the professionally-facilitated Santa Cruz Water Supply Advisory Committee. We experienced a successful consensus-building process among committee members who started with polar opposite views on desalination.
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE
It was a technical consultant who provided the Water Supply Advisory Committee with a strategy that resulted in consensus. It wasn’t the strategy that the Water Department had planned for over a decade. The RTC needs to stress to the consultant that we want impartiality and vigorous community engagement. We don’t want the consultant to get the idea that the RTC desires a particular outcome.
I think the adherence to freight standards and creating an overbuilt system as specified by HDR is too costly. As they say, “An elephant is a mouse built to government standards.” Comparable systems are coming in at 1/3 to 1/4 of the per-mile cost of ours.
Also significant is the fact that we are part of the CorridorID program, which makes us a preferred site for Federal investment. This wasn’t yet true when the County embarked on the ZEPRT analysis. For projects of this nature, 80% of the cost is typically covered by the Feds and 50% of the remaining (for a total of 90%) by the State, leaving 10%. 10% of $4.3B is still a lot, but 10% of $1B-$1.5B (what it should cost) is about the cost of a section of highway widening.
Alternatives such as podcars and monorails are likely to cost substantially more because of unprecedented scale and complex engineering. Check out the podcar type project proposed between Tamien Station in San Jose and SJC airport for costs and distances as an example.
Maybe the rail alignment needs to leave the corridor at Aptos and proceed up the freeway median without stops or stations until Watsonville, leaving the remainder of the corridor south of there for the trail. Since freeway widening from State Park to Freedom is in play, this could be part of that.
There is no active freight on the RR line. And freight and passenger rail have co-existed together. The RR south of Tamien Station in San Jose to Gilroy are BOTH used by Caltrain and Union Pacific, as at that point, the tracks are owned by UP, the tracks to the north to San Francisco by Caltrain.
I rode the Tig-Ms back in 2021. Maybe you didn’t. If you had, you would have been able to deduce that operating such a vehicle on the tracks would not require much in the way of spending other than upgrading the trestles and tracks itself to the 25 mph class, Class 2. The $4 billion price tag is bogus. I’d bet we could have light rail in this county for a quarter of that cost. Also, if the tracks were upgraded to Class 3 between Highway 1 in Watsonville and Buena Vista, therefore letting a Tig-M operate at a greater speed, up to say 40 mph, there would be more reason for people living in Watsonville who commute to Santa Cruz to take it rather than drive. This would be particularly true of Cabrillo students.
Finally, light rail would particularly relieve traffic on busy weekends, which is all year round now. All the potential stops along the tracks are at places frequently visited, whether the Boardwalk, the shopping area near Swift Street, downtown, Yacht Harbor, Simpkins Swim Center, 41st Ave and it’s shopping areas, Capitola Village, three state beaches to the south, including the very popular Seacliff, near to where I live.