Pardon the sophomoric pun; it’s inevitable given the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit District acronym. Measure R, at its core, is a sales-tax hike of $0.0025 for every dollar spent in Sonoma County and Marin County for twenty years. For the duration of the twenty years, this sales tax increase is to be used for subsidizing a passenger rail system from Cloverdale to Larkspur.

What Others Say

Before getting bogged down in the details of the full text of a measure, I rather like getting a feel for things by seeing what various interested parties think. Any ballot measure is the result of somebody’s labor, and there are bound to be good insights. SMART, and Measure R in particular, is no exception.

• Smartvoter.org has, of course, the full text of Measure R along with the arguments for and against, summaries, and such. This is the same information appearing in my sample ballot.
• The Press Democrat published the opinions of Michael Arnold (against) and Noreen Evans (for) in a recent editorial-page article.
• Gosmarttrain.com has a clear bias, but also contains a fair amount of detail regarding the proposed rail system.
• The East Bay Bicycle Coalition has an interesting article critiquing the particulars of SMART‘s specifications for trains to be used. This is not specifically regarding Measure R, but speaks to the competence of the folks running the SMART commission.

Points of Interest

(+) As any three-year-old can tell you, trains are cool. They’re big. They’re strong. They run on tracks. They have horns and whistles and stuff. Neato. I’m a grown man, but any honest assessment of a ballot measure to fund a train system would be dishonest not to take this into account one way or the other.

(+) As anybody who has tried to get from Long Island to Manhattan in a timely manner can tell you, trains are easy (this is also true of Japan, though I found Kyoto’s bus system to be far more useful than its little subway; Tokyo’s train system is simply awesome). If there’s a train running from where you are to where you’re going, it’s a pretty good bet that your trip is going to go smoothly. Heck, you may be able to take a nap or work through a sudoku.

(+) As anybody who has used Highway 101 between San Rafael and Windsor can tell you, that freeway is a parking lot. The Novato Narrows and Cotati Grade are particularly bad during both morning and evening rush hour.

(-) Sales tax in Santa Rosa is already eight percent. Eight out of every hundred pennies, people! That makes a Big Mac value meal at McDonald’s weight in at over five dollars. Cranking it up by another quarter-percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s how we ended up creeping so close to the double-digits in the first place. $668,000,000.00 is the projected intake over the twenty-year span of this proposed sales tax hike. That $668,000,000.00 that would otherwise be staying in Sonoma and Marin consumers, to be otherwise spent, probably locally, on the goods and services that make our economy run. That’s $33,400,000.00 per year on average. That’s enough to purchase approximately 6.5 million of those aforementioned Big Mac value meals, annually.

(-) The fourteen SMART stations are not located directly-adjacent to mass housing, workplaces, and housing. Most commuters considering the proposed system would turn a single commute by car into a triple commute: get to the train station, ride the train, get from the train station to work, then backtrack to get home again. My personal commute is East to West within Santa Rosa, and would not afford any incentive at all to use this system. My wife would be looking at a two-mile trip to the downtown Santa Rosa station, a ride up to the Windsor station, then travel three miles back to her office. This is unlikely to shave a lot off her daily commute time.

(+) Any retail establishment that caters to foot traffic will be in a better position to thrive once the stations open. Storefront real estate is at a premium where there is a concentration of foot traffic. Foot traffic happens when folks are actively getting from a bus or car to a rail platform. Even a relatively light passenger load would create business opportunities not currently present.

(-) Noise pollution is a pain. By this, I mean the requirement to sound a horn at road crossings. SMART should end up with well over 100 such crossings, and with trains running every thirty minutes, this could be a serious irritant to businesses and residences up and down the line. Apparently the horn requirement can be waived at particular crossings. The decision to do so would be left to the local jurisdictions.

(-) Only 5,300 trips are expected on a daily basis by 2010. That’s not much of a dent in the daily commute.

(+) Should businesses establish more workplaces in the immediate vicinities of the various stations, a great many more passengers could be accommodated than currently projected. Putting additional cars into service is far easier and faster than expanding road capacity.

(-) California cannot build anything on a budget. Anybody who thinks that SMART is going to have cost over-runs under 150% are kidding themselves.

(+) California cannot build anything on a budget. Anybody who thinks that building additional freeway lanes from the San Francisco Bay to Cloverdale is going to happen in a timely for fiscally-responsible manner are kidding themselves.

(+) The SMART system will be subject to an annual audit to get an accurate assessment of how the money is being spent.

Further Consideration

Not all of these points of interest were created equal. The inherent scalability of passenger rail is a big point for me as the area grows. In 1980, Santa Rosa had 82,658 residents. Twenty years later, in 2000, it had 147,595. At a similar rate of growth (78% over a similar timespan), Santa Rosa will have about 272,000 people in it when this measure expires (based on a current population of 153,158). That’s 130,000 more people on the roads, buses, and whatever other transportation mechanisms are handy at the time. A train system run with any degree of competence should be able to accommodate that kind of growth.

The issues of train stations not being right next to places of business, play, and housing strike me as somewhat transient in nature. Those 130,000 people that may or may not arrive in Santa Rosa over the next twenty years may well take their commutes into account when house-hunting and looking for jobs. As it stands, 64% of Sonoma County residents live in cities along the SMART route. This is due, in part, to the presence of a convenient North-South highway corridor. Only 47% of Marin residents live in Novato, San Rafael, and Larkspur, but Marin isn’t exactly a huge factor in my personal decision-making.

The bicycle path incorporated into this plan means little to nothing to me. Bicycles can already use surface streets, and I know somebody that frequently commutes from Healdsburg to Santa Rosa on the existing transportation infrastructure just fine. I didn’t list it as a point of interest intentionally; it isn’t of interest to me.

The Prognosis

The timing on this measure is excellent, as public sentiment in Sonoma County has been leaning rather heavily towards the tree-hugging / environmentalist / hippie / progressive end of things politically, and with oil prices behaving as they have for the past decade or so, many are eager to seek any means they can to “stick it” to the petroleum industry. A lot more than the projected 5,300 riders are going to have to vote “yes” to push this though (2/3 of the vote is required to pass a hike in the sales tax), but this is an area that has been voting overwhelmingly in favor of candidates and ballot initiatives that are perceived as forward-thinking or Earth-friendly. The inclusion of mandatory bio-diesel compatibility for the vehicles themselves introduces an aspect of trendy buzzword eco-appeal.

I’ll be voting “Yes” on this one, knowing full well that it will take only a minority of “people love their cars too much to ride the train” curmudgeons to gum up the works here. I understand that a fair amount of folks down in Marin have indicated that they’ll be voting “no,” so this one will probably come down to a coin toss. Opposition to any tax increase is natural, but there is no vigorous “no on Measure R” campaign currently in operation with less than a month to go, and it will all come down to voter turnout.

The bright-eyed idealist in me, which hasn’t quite been ground into the dirt by years of exposure to life’s realities, looks forward to a SMART system that can one day include branches heading to Bodega, Sebastopol, Sausalito, and Sonoma, providing sensible loci for development.