SMART bomb: Wine country’s commuter-rail catastrophe
By D. Dowd Muska | June 5, 2026
BOOK REVIEW: “The Great Train Heist: The California SMART Taxpayer Rip-off”
They tried in 1990. It didn’t work.
They tried in 1998. Nothing doing.
They tried in 2000. Voters declined.
They tried in 2006. No dice.
But in 2008, advocates for a commuter-rail line stretching along Northern California’s coast from Larkspur to Cloverdale got their wish. Measure Q received the required two-thirds majority, thus imposing a sales-tax hike on two counties just north of San Francisco. Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) finally had a revenue stream.
Then what happened? Michael J. Coffino’s The Great Train Heist: The California SMART Taxpayer Rip-off (Skyhorse Publishing; 216 Pages; $32.99) provides a comprehensive, if maddening, answer. Hired by a “Sonoma County family with a multigenerational history and deep roots in the community,” the author was asked to “shine a light on the … story from conception to current operation, a story we believe the public deserves to hear.” His completed assignment is part policy analysis, part political intrigue along the lines of All the President’s Men.
As the 20th century ended, commuter rail experienced a boomlet. Nostalgia for trains, fears of “global warming,” and consistently worsening urban traffic justified a broad, if usually quixotic, desire to “do something.” San Diego’s Coaster, Seattle’s Sounder, Utah’s FrontRunner, the New Mexico Rail Runner Express, the Music City Star, Orlando’s SunRail — metro elites stumbled over one another to launch, in the Federal Transit Administration’s description, their own “electric or diesel propelled railway for urban passenger train service consisting of local travel which operates between a central city and outlying areas.”
SMART’s groupies sold their proposal with the standard pitches. Impressive ridership. Fewer automobiles on congested highways. Multiple environmental benefits. But Coffino’s research shows that right from the start, the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit District was a poor prospect for train travel. The proper density didn’t exist — “the counties of Sonoma and Marin do not contain a critical mass of residents faced each day with deciding whether to take their car or public transit to areas where a substantial concentration of employment, businesses and schools are located.”
Even potential riders who work in San Francisco face a daunting gantlet. The Larkspur station “is about a quarter-mile walk from the SMART drop-off to the Larkspur Ferry, requiring commuters to trek through a major shopping district, over a busy six-lane roadway (Sir Francis Drake) connecting Highways 101 and 580, and through the [ferry] parking lot.” In 2019, the Transportation Authority of Marin admitted that the “distance between the SMART Larkspur terminal and the ferry terminal may act as a barrier that could adversely impact … ridership since currently there are no known plans for public transit between the two terminals.”
As for “equity,” where to begin? The median value of owner-occupied housing in Sonoma County is $815,500, and the jurisdiction’s population is 85% white. For Marin County, the comparable figures are $1.5 million and 84%. A rail line traversing an affluent area, with a dubious connection to a central business district, has zero chance of success. And SMART’s metrics are downright dismal.
Service began three years late. Total expenditures were, of course, significantly bigger than anticipated — “an estimated $1.4 billion over 20 years.” And with sales-tax revenue slumping due to the Great Recession, completion of the full, 70-mile line was postponed, in favor of building a “phase one segment from Santa Rosa to San Rafael.” The Larkspur station wasn’t opened until 2019. Windsor didn’t secure a connection to the network until 2025. Healdsburg and Cloverdale are still waiting.
Ridership underachieved, of course:
SMART has failed to meet passenger projections. For example, in fiscal year 2023, SMART’s daily weekday average ridership was 1,987 (well below its goal of 2,500) and its comparable numbers for the weekend stood at 1,853. In fact, according to SMART, when compared with weekday rides, “weekend trains have about 55% more boardings on Saturdays and 45% more on Sundays,” which prompted SMART to add extra weekend trips to stoke the ridership numbers.
In other words, the evidence suggests that SMART has devolved into a recreational, publicly subsidized transit system for weekend enthusiasts as much as it is a weekday commuter system for working people transporting to and from employment destinations (with no meaningful effect, if any, on traffic congestion).
With higher-than-anticipated operational costs, “free rides and discounted rates,” and a paltry community of full-price customers, it’s hardly surprising that SMART’s farebox recovery ratios “have been in steady decline from the start,” dropping to a truly abysmal 6% in 2023.
Given the scary stats, voters in the district can’t be blamed for rejecting Measure I, 2020’s attempt to prolong SMART’s “sales tax collection period by 30 years.” (In June, they’ll face the proposal again.) But does the disenchantment run deep enough to go far further? Coffino writes that the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit District’s “enabling legislation included a separate chapter … that laid out a procedure” for a mercy killing “if things did not pan out.” The entity’s board “may call for an election to allow voters to decide whether to dissolve and unwind the district or voters may do the same via a petition that places the same measure on the ballot.”
Locals who read The Great Train Heist, and learn about “the utter pointlessness of rail service within suburbia,” will be eager to join a grassroots revolt against SMART. But they’ll be up against a powerful status quo that, in Coffino’s view, obtusely refuses “to reassess in the face of mounting evidence” the fact that the commuter line “is financially unjustifiable, unsustainable and misaligned with the region’s shifting transportation needs and demographics.”
It took a lot of time and effort to make SMART a reality. What’ll it take to put it out of taxpayers’ misery?
D. Dowd Muska is a researcher and writer who studies public policy from the limited-government perspective. A veteran of several think tanks, he writes a column and publishes other content at No Dowd About It.