Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (thing)

The Sonoma-Marian Area Rail Transit is a commuter rail line that currently goes between the Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa and the Larkspur Ferry Terminal on the San Francisco Bay. The line has been in operation since 2017, and while it now has about 45 miles of active route, an expansion northward to Cloverdale will expand that to 70 miles.

As it now runs, the line has a commuter rail type service, with morning and afternoon service, with trains running between 30 and 90 minutes apart. There is a three hour block of no trains in the morning, which differentiates this from metro or light rail type service, which tend to have continuous service all day. Currently, the route takes a little more than an hour between the north and south terminals. There is also only Saturday, but not Sunday service, although more might be reinstated after the end of the pandemic. The route very closely parallels US Highway 101, which is where the region's largest cities are.

Between the two of them, Sonoma and Marin Counties have around 750,000 people (not all of whom live directly on this route, although the majority of them do). This is a relatively small percentage of the Bay Area's population, around 10%, but it is still a lot of people. Although not everyone in the two counties works somewhere in the larger cities of the Bay, enough people do that it has caused transportation problems, as the rural and small town areas have become exurbs of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. Thus, the creation of this commuter rail, meant to alleviate traffic hams across the Golden Gate and Richmond-San Rafael Bridges. Of course, people who are taking the commuter railroad to San Francisco or Oakland have to still complete their journey by other means, including ferry.

The San Francisco Bay area is one of the most mixed area for mass transit in the United States. On one hand, there is probably more political will there for mass transit than in most cities, and there is also more density than in most parts of the US. Along with a lot of money. But on the other hand, the terrain is very difficult, with a mixture of steep hills and bodies of water. Although the rail line is convenient between Santa Rosa and San Rafael, it is not easily interoperable between the four other rail jurisdictions in the San Francisco Bay area: San Francisco's MUNI light rail, the regional BART subway line, the San Francisco-San Jose Caltrans heavy rail, or the Amtrak capital corridor to Sacramento and Reno, Nevada. Although I think this line is good at what it does, and I want to ride it (if only for the joys of sightseeing), it shows how challenging the engineering and jurisidictional problems are of creating regional public transit.