Is SMART the best use of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad corridor?
SMART’s proposal to operate self-propelled passenger rail cars on the existing NWP right-of- way is the best use of the publicly owned corridor for a variety of economic, environmental and technical reasons. A BART-style project (or a magnetic-levitation train or monorail, for that matter) would be vastly more expensive than SMART – probably more than $100 million a mile. Light rail wouldn’t be as efficient, and also would cost more. So would using buses or “dual-mode” vehicles that could run on or off the railroad tracks. SMART, at a cost of about $7.7 million per mile, is by far the least expensive of many options suggested for the NWP corridor, using proven and tested technology that can be up and running in about five years. For a closer look at the alternatives, see White Paper No.
