Observer,
Excellent commentary. Traffic bad up through Windsor. Healdsburg gets some, but nothing like the Petaluma and Santa Rosa and Novato areas do. Buses are adequate to deal with people commuting from Cloverdale to Santa Rosa or Petaluma. Would a train be more convenient for the dozen or two dozen Cloverdale citizens who could use train service? Sure. But it's not worth the several hundred million dollars it would take to get up there to serve them. SMART has yet to prove to it's stakeholders that it can provide commute service on the half hour. Let them show they can do that with the present system and then think about investing in adding 25 miles of track to the system. How can the public know, given SMART's record of not meeting expectations and forecasts generally being way over-optimistic, that SMART can even afford to operate the additional track at all?

Of course the SMART/NWP moonies see red when you bring this up. One of them said that because Cloverdale built a train station to nowhere 30 years ago, they are owed a SMART railroad to service it, but this guy, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, doesn't realize SMART isn't even going to use the 30 year old never-used station. A new 5-8 million dollar platform would have to be built for SMART, as at all other stations.

Another guy said SMART must be built to Cloverdale, regardless of whether it was feasible or advantageous to the functioning of the railroad as a true commuter line, because Cloverdale needed to be developed in order to reduce development pressure at all the other stops on system, to which the railroad itself has brought basically an ever-present momentum to develop the areas around the station with high-density neighborhoods.

So that's what anyone who hopes for a functioning commuter railroad is up against.