07/29/2015
I'm getting a little frustrated with all this bad talk about the Rail line. Didn't we already figure this out?
Opponents of the Rail Trail paint a scary picture of the transportation future if we proceed to build a passenger rail service alongside a bike trail in Santa Cruz County. Big loud belching trains barreling through our quiet neighborhoods, costing scary amounts
of money, and doing nothing to address the problem of a road system that cannot meet future demand.
This picture isn’t the only one that can be painted. Imagine instead light rail trollies chugging along, connecting our neighborhoods and cities to each other. You can take your bikes on the trollies easily and then take clearly marked, safe bike paths to your final destination. Imagine being able to get from Capitola to Santa Cruz in fifteen minutes, on the trolley or on your bike, during summer – and not having to find a parking place. Imagine thousands of tourists doing this. Imagine telling visitors, “Park your car, you can get everywhere on the trolley or by bike.”
Imagine how many cars this system will take off our roads. Sixty trains a day, opponents scream. Or you could say, one every fifteen minutes, each one carrying sixty people, taking forty cars off the roads, thousands of cars every day. Thousands more when you add those on bikes on the Rail Trial that is planned alongside the rail line. This is the transportation future already being planned and built – and that opponents are trying to stop dead in its tracks.
They are even saying that passenger rail service will stop the Rail Trail – when the exact opposite is true. A quarter of the Rail Trail has already been funded and design is underway. To tear up the Rail Trail Master Plan now will threaten these projects and
delay any new ones. The Rail Trail will be delayed for a decade or more as we throw away plans already adopted by the county and cities and develop new ones.
And what is the alternative to developing this Rail Trail with passenger rail service? We could spend $600 million to add a lane to Highway 1, when we know it will be the same traffic jam when it’s done as when it began. Opponents like to imagine
some magic technological solution, everything from driverless cars to George Jetson’s jet pack, but we have in hand a solution that has worked all over the world: a road without cars, a road just for trolleys and bikes and walkers that runs through the heart of
our county. A road within a mile of half our population and 92 parks and 44 schools.
Let’s build it!
This is something we can do now that will forever make our county a better place to live, that will give our children a safe way to ride to school (and eliminate the daily traffic jam in front of those 44 schools). We have already begun to build this system. The
rail line has been purchased. A quarter of the Rail Trail is already funded. We are now studying the best way to provide passenger rail service.
Opponents want us to stop all this progress right now – without providing an alternative beyond the Jetson jet pack dream. They paint a scary picture that isn’t the only way to provide passenger rail. We have an opportunity now to do more than just
say no. We have an opportunity to build a future transportation system that will meet our needs and make our lives better. Let’s paint the picture of our future that we want.
