Here's why I think SMART is likely to fail based on 30 years of commuting out of the North Bay to San Francisco. During that period I watched both patronage and service dwindle on the Golden Gate Transit commute runs. The primary reason was the steady loss of "salaryman" type jobs and to a lesser extent a spike in fares(kinda like the meteoric rise in cable tv fees). For example there used to be a whole contingent of SF Chronicle workers who rode the commute buses every day. Some of them even had to ride the "Awful 80" after hours. Those jobs and those riders are gone for good.

The second problem is class and demographics, which is politically correct to ignore. Winery owners are not going to abandon their Lexi to ride trains, except to go slumming. A significant part of the public transit ridership are people who do not have enough money for a car. Price matters more than SMART is recognizing.

Every day I see buses rattling by, mostly empty. Why? Because the fares are too high and the routes marginal. There actually was a service which succeeded by my standards(there were lots of passengers, even on Sundays). In the very early 80's, before the establishment of Sonoma County Transit, GGT was running the big GMC New Look buses on the 80 route down Santa Rosa Avenue every half hour. I remember riding packed buses on a Sunday. What was the key? A fare of 35 cents within Sonoma County. Needless to say that didn't last long as the outlying areas complained that all the money was being spent on the trunk route linking the three main cities of Sonoma County.

I'd just like to see the most flexibility built into the SMART scheme so that if and when NCRA-NWP is gone and Marin County has flaked Sonoma County can reconstruct something functional out of the what remains.