Close to Home: European railway lessons for SMART

Mike Arnold’s Close to Home column offered little to the reader other than sour grapes (“SMART still falling short of its promises,” Nov. 27). It would be more constructive to discuss how SMART can be optimized by applying rail best practices from Europe.

Increasing crowding on San Francisco-Larkspur ferries shows that there is strong and growing demand for express transit in the Highway 101 corridor. Once SMART has its full complement of operations personnel and vehicles, it could serve many more passengers. Plugging schedule gaps and increasing peak period capacity will make a big difference in ridership.

SMART needs to apply best practices from Europe to the Highway 101 corridor. For example, in Switzerland and other European countries, trains and buses run on “clock headways,” i.e., trains arrive and leave at the same time every hour on the hour, seven days a week, regardless of whether service runs every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes or hourly. Even service as infrequent as every two hours or only a few times per day is scheduled at the same times past the hour.

Passengers can easily remember clock headways, which also make it easy to organize regional networks. One can travel hundreds of miles across Switzerland with minimal delays, even if several connections are required. Moving from commute to all-day service typically increases ridership significantly, as trains better fit the travel needs of many.

The Swiss National Railways and its rail and bus partners have perfected “timed transfers” based on clock headways. They provide cross-platform connections at key stations where trains and buses connect, usually with less than five minutes of delay at each transfer point. Transit travel times between these timed transfer points have been optimized to allow connections at the same times past each hour, facilitating transfers and minimizing connecting time delays.

While the San Rafael Transit Center offers timed transfers between buses, SMART‘s current schedule frustrates bus-train and train-bus transfers. In San Rafael and at other transfer points, trains often miss bus times by a minute or so. The Train Riders Association of California has uncovered an apparent system design error by SMART. TRAC calls for studying fixes that would enable simultaneous SMART and bus departures, with sufficient margins allowing reliable connections.

A well-integrated feeder bus network is essential in maximizing ridership. Improved bus facilities are needed to allow cross-platform connections as close as possible, where such facilities either do not exist or are an unreasonable walking distance from train platforms.

New stations may also be needed. A River Road SMART station in Fulton, including a bus loop adjacent to the train platform, could dramatically reduce transit travel times to and from Russian River communities, with new timed connections with SMART.

Similarly, a quarter-mile elevated extension of SMART from its Larkspur station to an elevated platform above Golden Gate Transit’s ferry dock would provide an attractive ferry feeder service. While potentially expensive, it would appeal to ferry riders who generally shun buses, thus relieving the current parking crunch.

A ferry-SMART direct connection potentially could attract several hundred thousand new trips per year from San Francisco, with its new uncongested, non-highway access to Wine Country. Tourism revenue could support additional service, stretching current operating subsidies much further.

In conclusion, with sufficient investment over the long run, SMART ridership could increase by an order of magnitude, becoming a heavily-used, key transit service in the Highway 101 corridor, as originally envisioned.

Michael D. Setty is editor of California Rail News and has 40 years of transit industry experience, including nearly two decades as a member of the team that developed the Vallejo Ferry. He lives in Napa.