Don’t look now but there are poachers in our midst, trespassers on foot and on bicycles, breaking the rules in broad daylight.

Leading them into temptation are several smooth new ribbons of pavement along the SMART train tracks in Sonoma County. That explains the steady, daily trickle of scofflaws ignoring barricades, stepping or rolling over orange mesh fencing in order to use the new path, despite the inconvenient fact that those sections aren’t yet open.

While Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit officials are “thrilled to see the community’s enthusiasm for the pathways,” wrote Allison Mattioli, a spokesperson for the agency, those sections “are still under active construction and are not open to the public at this time.” The email had the words “not open” in bold.

Three segments of SMART paths are close to being completed in Sonoma County.

One of them parallels the tracks from Southpoint Boulevard, near the Petaluma office of the Department of Motor Vehicles, north for 2.9 miles to Penngrove.

The next segment, which bridges a 2.8-mile gap in the path between Golf Course Drive in Rohnert Park and Bellevue Avenue in Santa Rosa, has been delayed by, among other things, the presence of California tiger salamanders, an endangered species.

A third stretch, the 2.6 miles from Airport Boulevard in northern Santa Rosa to downtown Windsor, is being built at the same time that the new train tracks are laid.

Closed though it may be, that stretch of path is already surprisingly popular.

“It’s so busy!” said Tim Zahner, who lives in Windsor and makes use of the new passage to get to his gym on Airport Boulevard.

There are times, he observed, when “we already have a Highway 101-type bottleneck issue on the path. It’s already full.”

When might the new segments be open?

“By the end of March,” Mattioli said.

The agency’s website had until very recently informed visitors that the “expected completion” of two of the three Sonoma County path segments would be “late Fall 2024.” Now, the website shows “early Winter 2025” and “Spring 2025.”

While disheartening to those passionate about the path and impatient for its completion, the delay comes as no surprise. They’ve grown accustomed to disappointment.

Back in 2008, both the Marin County Bicycle Coalition and the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition played important roles in drumming up support for Measure Q, the 20-year, quarter-cent sales tax that made the SMART project possible and forms the largest share of its operations budget. It also helps the agency compete for state and federal grants to bankroll rail and pathway construction.

The vision sold to voters at the time included a 70-mile rail line from Larkspur to Cloverdale — with a parallel bike and pedestrian path. But the Great Recession forced the agency to revise its plans, resulting in slower progress on rail construction. Assigned a lower priority, the multiuse path came together in fits and starts, as grant funds become available.

The outcry from cyclists and path advocates reached a fever pitch in 2020, after voters rejected an early extension of quarter-cent tax, dealing SMART a bruising public loss and a reckoning with some of its core constituencies.

“At every turn,” the Marin County Bicycle Coalition lamented in a 2020 newsletter, “SMART’s decisions have made it clear that it is a rail-first agency, and that the pathway should only advance when it does not impede or compete for funding with the rail project.”

The organization’s tune has changed since Eddy Cumins replaced Farhad Mansourian as SMART’s general manager in 2021. In addition to restoring train ridership to levels exceeding those seen before the COVID-19 pandemic, Cumins has taken the path off the back burner.

Since 2019, said Julia Gonzalez, SMART’s communications manager, the agency has invested approximately $50 million in path construction and maintenance.

It was not always thus.

Eris Weaver, executive director of the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, recalls voting for Measure Q.

“What we thought we were getting was a bike highway that would go the length of the rail line,” Weaver said. “It’s been 16 years, and that’s not what we’ve gotten. We still just have pieces.”

SMART’s trains operate on 45 miles of rebuilt and modernized track, laid by crews starting in 2012, with service beginning in 2017. By comparison, to date, 28 miles of path are now open. Gaps in the route have limited its usefulness for many potential bike commuters.

“I live in downtown Cotati and work in Santa Rosa,” Weaver said. “With the gap where it is” — the path dead-ends at Golf Course Drive in Rohnert Park, then resumes at Bellevue Avenue, nearly 3 miles north — “I don’t use it on my ride in because it ends at weird places.

“So I have to go out to Petaluma Hill Road, or there’s Stony Point (Road) Sometimes I take Santa Rosa Avenue,” Weaver said. “None of those options are particularly great.”

The completion of two segments in particular — north Petaluma to Penngrove, then Rohnert Park to south Santa Rosa — will be game-changing for bike commuters, making it possible, as Weaver noted, “to actually go from one city to another” without venturing onto surface streets.

SMART officials understand the public’s eagerness to break in those new trails, but emphasize that it’s not safe to do so at this point.

While most of the pathway “is all paved out,” said Bill Gamlen, SMART’s chief engineer, “there’s still a lot of work left to do” at numerous intersections — where the path crosses North McDowell Boulevard, Corona Road and Ely Road in Petaluma, for instance, then Scenic Avenue, Todd Road and West Robles Avenue in Santa Rosa.

Most of those crossing will require new traffic signals — equipment that “has a long lead time,” said Gamlen. It will take all of January to get those signals installed, tested and inspected,” he said.

“For us to be really safe, all those elements need to be in,” he said.

In Marin County, SMART recently completed a 1-mile path segment from McInnis Parkway just north of the Marin County Civic Center to Smith Ranch Road near McInnis Park in San Rafael. There is no other ongoing path construction.

Although the path is open to the public, an opening celebration that was planned for November but got rained out has been rescheduled for Jan. 25, Gonzalez said.

Another 5.4 miles of path along SMART tracks are planned for Marin. The remaining segments in the county are “gap closure” projects, including a 0.4-mile stretch from Hanna Ranch Road to Vintage Way in Novato, which is next in line for construction and fully funded, Gonzalez said.

“The remaining 5 miles are advancing through design, and being readied to pursue grant funding,” Gonzalez said.

The Independent Journal contributed to this report. Distributed by Tribune News Service.