When riding a bike along West Cliff, from Natural Bridges to Main Beach, there is a difficult decision to be made. Ride on the pathway, frequently calling out “on your left” while overtaking pedestrians, and occasionally abruptly slowing down when encountering pockets of congestion, or travel in the roadway, too narrow for separated bike lanes, and bike in the middle of the lane and become a car?

Throughout Santa Cruz County, there are many full width bike lanes, adjacent to sidewalks. They mostly feel safe. Examples include much of Soquel Avenue and Soquel Drive, and Water Street.

But this, to me, is the biggest conundrum of the rail/trail vs. Greenway controversy. The existing new segments of the rail/trail are narrow, mixing bikes and pedestrians. The Greenway proposal was for a much wider trail, with separated bike and pedestrian paths.

The dream train is a single-track railroad, adjacent to a narrow path. I am curious if the proponents of the train imagine no southbound trains in the mornings, and no northbound trains in the evenings, to facilitate the maids and restaurant workers commuting from Watsonville to cater to our aging population. Or perhaps we could use eminent domain to expropriate private properties to allow intermittent doubled passing tracks.

And there is also the issue of fences. I will admit that many times I have, to avoid the State Parks fee, parked in the Coronado Street neighborhood, above Park Avenue, to access the unimproved trail, across the tracks, and down to New Brighton Beach, as many others do. But with the rail and trail, this would not be possible because of the requirement of building fences separating the tracks. Does the California Coastal Commission need to sign off on this?

And also park access will be compromised. Live Oak Avenue and El Dorado Avenue provide convenient foot trail access for the neighborhood, across the tracks, to Arana Gulch, and Simpkins Swim Center.

The RTC construction update for the North Coast segment to Davenport has planned improvements at Panther and Bonny Doon beaches. Unmentioned is access to Three Mile, Four Mile and Laguna Creek beaches. Hopefully there will be fence gaps there. It would have been nice if they had planned for a train station at by far the busiest beach, Four Mile. And maybe even had the imagination to put a Santa Cruz stamp on the project by including surfboard racks on the trains? “Next stop, Four Mile Beach.”

Many times recently while driving, I grew cautious as adjacent kids and adults were whizzing along, biking. They were going much faster than I anticipated. Of course they were on e-bikes.

This further changes the equation of mixing pedestrians and bikes.

I find it ironic that the years-long Murray Street bridge and bike lane retrofit, is taking place beside an adjacent, unlikely to ever be used, railroad bridge.

Despite high speed rail becoming common in Europe and China, the ongoing Merced to Bakersfield (SF to LA, ha ha ha) high speed rail debacle, and the Marin regional SMART train’s massive cost overruns (by the way, they “ripped out” and replaced the tracks, and also replaced all the wooden ties with concrete ones, after rehabilitating the railway bed), illustrate that many hurdles exist here to latch on to the promise of a local commuter train.

The Santa Cruz railroad tracks were first laid in 1876, 50 years before indoor plumbing was common. Change is ever present. We won’t be using Joby to commute locally soon, but the chances of utilizing 19th century train tracks, which bypass the commercial corridors of Santa Cruz, seems far fetched to me.

Perhaps we should tap on the brakes until our vision and funding is coordinated with reality.

Brian Sugrue moved to Santa Cruz in 1977, and is now retired, having worked building cabinets, doors and windows his entire career.