By Doug Erickson
In politics, narratives matter — but eventually, infrastructure must be poured, bridges must be built, and roads must function.
Santa Cruz County’s rail trail project was born from an appealing narrative: Combine clean transportation, climate action, and equity into a single corridor that accommodates both a new rail line and a bike-and-pedestrian trail.
A decade later, the result is an emblem of the dysfunction that fuels distrust in progressive governance — and a cautionary tale for Democrats across the country.
Back in 2012, Santa Cruz County’s Regional Transportation Commission purchased a dormant 32-mile freight rail corridor stretching from Davenport to Pajaro for $14.2 million. With help from state funds through Proposition 116 — a 1990 bond designed to support clean transportation — the RTC committed to preserving the rail line, ostensibly for future passenger service. The plan: Keep the tracks and build a trail beside them.
On paper, it sounded visionary.
In practice, it’s been a slow-motion disaster.
As of 2024, only three miles of trail have been constructed. A short 0.7-mile section currently under development — from Bay Avenue to the Wharf — is costing $16 million. That’s more than five times the typical $3–4 million per mile that similar trails cost nationwide. And these are the easy segments. The more challenging terrain — through Capitola, Live Oak, Soquel, and Aptos — includes steep embankments, encroaching development, coastal cliffs, and degraded infrastructure.
And then came the bridge estimate: $1 billion.
That’s not the cost for the train. That’s just to repair or replace 33 aging bridges and trestles to make the corridor safe for future rail use. This figure excludes the cost of new trains, laying new tracks, building stations and parking, installing safety features like quiet zones and crossings, or annual operating and maintenance costs.
Even before those are considered, Santa Cruz County has no agency with the technical or financial capacity to operate a passenger rail system.
Worse still, Santa Cruz’s experience with the trail so far suggests that projected costs dramatically understate the final price tag. Initial estimates for the trail in 2014 came in at $126 million. Today, the realistic figure is closer to $500 million — a 4x multiplier.
Apply that same multiplier to the train portion, and the outlook becomes staggering: the $1 billion bridge cost could balloon to $4 billion; add another billion for everything else, and Santa Cruz faces a $5 billion rail project.
This is in a county with no dedicated rail agency, no committed federal or state funding, and a local sales tax already near the 10% statutory ceiling. A major sales tax increase — requiring a state exemption — would be the only path forward, and political appetite is thin.
Still, the project remains alive, defended in the language of climate justice, transit equity, and sustainability. To challenge it is, in some circles, to challenge progressive values themselves.
That’s the problem.
The rail trail is increasingly divorced from the transportation needs it was meant to address. Highway 1 remains clogged during commute hours. The Santa Cruz Metro bus system — already underutilized and facing structural deficits — is the county’s only real transit operator. Ridership is primarily students traveling to UC Santa Cruz and commuters to San Jose via the Highway 17 Express. The proposed train, by contrast, would run just 22 miles between Santa Cruz and Watsonville — far from Silicon Valley, and even farther from where most jobs are located.
A 2015 independent study by respected transportation firm Nelson Nygaard found 32 geographic obstacles in the corridor. It also found that a continuous, wide, multi-use trail without rail would cost far less, serve more people, and be more effective in reducing car trips — particularly for short, local travel.
The official feasibility study, commissioned by the RTC, estimated just 5,500 daily train riders by 2035 — fewer than many urban bike trails currently see. Worse, the “last mile” problem would remain unresolved: Train stations would be far from homes and job centers, making multimodal commuting impractical.
In 2022, local advocates put Measure D on the ballot to realign the county’s vision: Railbank the corridor (preserving the legal right to build a train in the future) and prioritize a wide trail that could be completed now. The Democratic political establishment pushed back hard. Former Governor Jerry Brown, architect of California’s much-maligned high-speed rail project, recorded robocalls against it. Measure D failed.
And yet, the money to build and operate the train will never come. Politicians privately admit as much. But rather than confront that reality — or risk alienating activist bases — they allow the performance to continue. In doing so, they provide a playbook for the very resentment that fuels MAGA politics: The perception of a progressive elite more invested in optics than outcomes, ideology than infrastructure.
This is not just a Santa Cruz story.
The same dynamic animates other Democratic strongholds — from San Francisco to New York — where costly, slow-moving projects are justified in language untethered to results. It is not enough to be on the right side of history if you’re also on the wrong side of competence.
Santa Cruz’s rail trail didn’t have to become a cautionary tale. With honest planning, realistic goals, and a commitment to delivering results, it could have become a national model. Instead, it now threatens to be another data point in the story of how good intentions, when poorly executed, drive voters to the arms of those who promise less but deliver more efficiently.
Democrats ignore this lesson at their peril. The public will not support ambitious policy agendas if they don’t believe their leaders can build a mile of trail — on time, on budget, and on purpose.
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Doug Erickson lives in Santa Cruz and has been executive director of Santa Cruz Works since 2019.