Matt Farrell, the pitchman for Friends of the Rail and On-Street Bike Network (OK, actually it’s FORT — Friends of the Rail and Trail, but that last epithet is mostly aspirational), must think we Santa Cruz residents fell off the Brussels sprouts truck yesterday.

Mr. Farrell (Guest Commentary, “Rail and trail a commitment worth the cost,” April 9) continues to attempt to sell us a passenger train by telling us that the down payment of a billion-with-a-B dollars (just for the bridges, no other amenities) isn’t that much money when viewed as our “legacy” for the future. (We all understand “legacy” to mean “not in my lifetime” or, in this case, possibly not in the lifetime of anyone alive now.)

He suggests airily that we’ll only need to come up with maybe 20% but never mentions that actually that’s 20% of the entire bill (of maybe $4 billion? for the complete train set — new tracks, stations, road crossings, fences, property acquisition, inflation and cost overruns … ). And we can get that from Uncle Newsom and our rich Uncle Sam — who, by the way, just cut off funding for the (“failing”) state bullet train. Now having also rescinded funding for high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston, Santa Cruz County rail doesn’t seem promising.

And speaking of money, here’s something Mr. Farrell never mentions: Operating costs, which we county residents will pay entirely with our own taxes, whether we ride the train or not (fares are only about 5-10%). But let’s face facts: the legacy scenario Mr. Farrell describes places actual operation of a passenger train so far in the future we don’t really need to care, do we?

Here’s the con: County voters should remember Mr. Farrell’s FORT as the folks who sold us the original rail-with-trail concept to defeat 2022’s Measure D. Remember “We can have both! A train AND a trail!”

Well, the “no” voters are waking up to discover that we’re approaching getting neither: Legacy or no, passenger rail is not just unaffordable, and the likelihood of getting funding is vanishingly remote.

Further, it’s now clear that the trail in planning (at 3-4 times the cost estimate of every other community’s rail trail in the nation) is simply 50% green-painted bike lanes on busy streets — that is, no longer a rail trail at all. (Apparently, this is Mr. Farrell’s definition of “world-class.”)

And here’s a news flash: at a Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) meeting earlier this year, staff proposed borrowing funds, in part to pay for this bloated bike path caricature (with its legacy rail infrastructure) in a move in which debt service over 20 years will eliminate all Measure D transportation funds for building any more trail to connect to Watsonville. So much for FORT’s “we can build both!” and equity transit, huh?

Here are some other “optimistic” generalizations from Mr. Farrell: 40 minutes on the train between Santa Cruz and Watsonville? And how long from your house to the station, and from the station to your work?

And as for clearing out Highway 1 traffic, previous rail studies have stated explicitly that this will not happen. In fact, local traffic is likely to get worse as four trains an hour go by 70-some cross streets. Mr. Farrell, who, I’m sure, has carefully read the previous rail studies, may have overlooked this point in his enthusiasm for the project’s concept.

Representing FORT, Mr. Farrell wants to convince us that the county can squeeze 10 pounds of rail and trail promises into a 5-pound bag.

It simply can’t be done. But the longer Mr. Farrell and his organization fast talk us that this is all part of a great long-range plan, the more likely we are to end up with nothing more than the world’s most expensive third-rate bike lane on our already busy streets. And the pipe dream of a train will recede even decades farther down the tracks.

Nadene Thorne is a Santa Cruz resident who has written frequently in these pages about rail and trail planning.