This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Business & Tech

Commuter Rail Does Little for Property Values Without Healthy Ridership

If Novato residents train themselves to use SMART, the system will begin to pay for itself.

Everyone’s talking commuter trains lately, from Sonoma County to Silicon Valley. Some communities have them but might lose them while others — including Petaluma — were promised new train stations only to see their plans evaporate in a cloud of red ink.

For Novato, the news is good — not great, but at least good. All of their Atherton Avenue rail dreams will not come true at once — some will be deferred, hopefully not to dry up like a raisin in the sun. In light of rail woes elsewhere, Novato can only celebrate the news that the proposed North Novato SMART station is the top priority to restore out of the $88 million in cuts approved by the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit Authority on April 20.

All spring the story was grim in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, where the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board, facing a $3.5 million budget shortfall, considered shuttering Caltrain stations in Burlingame, Santa Clara and other cities before choosing instead to raise fares and parking fees as the start of a plan designed to keep all 86 of their trains running. Caltrain is the only transit system in the Bay Area without a permanent, dedicated source of funding. Instead it depends on revenue from local transit agencies such as SamTrams, MUNI and Santa Clara’s VTA, plus fares and parking fees.

Interested in local real estate?Subscribe to Patch's new newsletter to be the first to know about open houses, new listings and more.

Even with this year’s budget crisis under control, Caltrain riders can likely look forward to similar crises every year. That's not so in Marin and Sonoma counties. The problem there is technically similar to the ones down south: that proposals and budgets created prior to the present recession may as well have been written on napkins. They're irrelevant to today’s economic realities.

However, SMART is in a building phase. Where CalTrain is subtracting existing hardware, SMART is trying to figure out how much they’ll be able to introduce.

Interested in local real estate?Subscribe to Patch's new newsletter to be the first to know about open houses, new listings and more.

But let's get down to business: What does this mean for Novato real estate?

It’s assumed that commuter rail increases property values, but a series of studies done by St. Louis University bring something interesting to light: the positive effects of light rail are tied directly to ridership. It’s not enough for the trains to run on time; someone’s got to be riding them.

Given that information, it’s not surprising to learn that the St. Louis University study found that light rail increases the value of properties in San Francisco but has no impact in Sacramento and San Jose. San Franciscans have been riding MUNI and BART for several generations, whereas Sacramento’s light rail and the Santa Clara Valley’s VTA trains are not yet completely woven into the fabric of the culture.

Interestingly, Portland, a city whose traditional of commuter rail is approximately the same age as San Jose’s but whose open-armed embrace of trains has become a national story, saw an increase in property values along the rail routes.

While the news from SMART is good — yes, it looks like Novato will have a commuter train running through it by 2015 — it’s way too early to know how the proposed station in Hamilton will impact local property values. Novato residents will have to train themselves to ride the train before they’ll see any benefits —  beyond, of course, the Zen state one realizes when he ditches the early-morning 101 commute for a comfortable, unhurried train ride.

SMART predicts it will eliminate 5,300 daily car trips from North Bay roads. Just depending on business commuters, however, will not elevate the train’s impact to the point where it will become enough of a way of life to become a value-add to local real estate.

The clock is ticking, Novato. You have three years, four at the outside, to teach yourself to take the train to nearby cities. Once you do, you’ll see that train begin to pay for itself.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?