Time to get real about rail and trail

Now that the smoke has cleared from the scorchedearth campaign for and against Measure D, the Greenway initiative, and it is dead and done for, let's have a coldand cleareyed look at the rail corridor whose imagined commuter train is exceedingly unlikely and at best a long way off. I didn't have a dog in that fight — I was against both yes and no options —so I believe I qualify as an informed yet disinterested (impartial) observer. I expect my ambivalence was shared by a lot of people who didn't have as much time as I did to interview advocates for both sides and study the arguments and supporting documents and sort out the claims and counterclaims. So they followed the folk wisdom, “When in doubt, vote no.”

Still, I was surprised by D's blowout defeat. With its bigbucks saturation media strategy —newspaper, online and television ads — the Yes Greenway crusaders seemed to have a significant edge in the propaganda wars. But such big spending also left them vulnerable to the perception that their cause was an elitist project of a bunch of wealthy swells trying to buy an election. So I bet there was a backlash against that (possibly unfair) stereotype. It was only an advisory vote anyway, not legally binding, with the Regional Transportation Commission still authorized to have the last word.

But since the RTC is made up mostly of elected officials, presumably they'll be moved to follow popular demand to keep the rail trail alive. People seem to like the idea of light rail gliding back and forth between Watsonville and Santa Cruz with a walking and biking trail alongside — the best of both worlds.

In your dreams.

Anyone who looks objectively at the reality of the proposed rail trail will be horrified at the hundreds of big trees to be sacrificed (consider all the gorgeous eucalypts along the corridor and imagine them and their carbon-sequestering shade whacked out of existence), the number of retaining walls built, the 30 bridges that would have to be reconstructed, the detours the trail would have to take through neighborhoods, the number of stops, crossings, parking lots, not to mention the price tag — in the hundreds of millions (at least) — and the cost of ongoing maintenance. That should be a wake-up call for anyone still dreaming, and anyone wondering who will pay for the budget overruns typical of such projects, as with Jerry Brown's bullet train from Fresno to Bakersfield.

As for traffic relief on our one and only freeway, if by the time in the futuristic future a rail trail is constructed, will cars still be our main mode of transportation? Someone should compare the cost of the rail trail with the cost of building a monorail that would actually serve commuters going over the hill, which is where most commuters are going —if they're not by then working virtually from home or stacked in multistory apartments in one towering downtown or another. Even now, a Watsonville to Santa Cruz rail trail would do nothing to relieve congestion on Highway 1.

The prospect of a commuter train on the rail corridor is vanishingly slim. But I've changed my mind about tearing out the tracks and “rewilding” the sections that are fairly wild already. Instead of going to the trouble and expense of removing and recycling the steel, just leave the tracks and ties in place to rust and rot, a 32-mile-long linear monument to obsolete technology.

The elected officials and institutional technocrats and eager-to-build-anything engineers who put all their chips on No Way Greenway must eventually realize that their dream is impossible and unaffordable and even undesirable for all the good it would do. Already dead on the ground for decades, the railroad should be left to the laws of nature as a break from civilization, a memento mori of the worst-laid plans, and of the millions wasted — and more still to be saved — on a chimera that will never be.