The Roaring Camp website presents a letter that says that passing [the] Greenway initiative on the June ballot would be the end of the line for their business. I trust them to know their business. I’ll be voting against Greenway, and to preserve Roaring Camp.
Greenway isn’t about building a bike trail. We are already building a trail. Greenway is about ending passenger rail in Santa Cruz County. Greenway doesn’t oppose Roaring Camp, but their ballot measure is flawed and needs to be rewritten. If you support Greenway, you should vote no on this measure and wait for a chance to pass an improved Greenway measure next election.
Ultimately, I’d like the pro-rail and anti-rail sides to compromise on a plan that achieves local and regional passenger rail service on the branch line and a great bicycle-pedestrian path as soon as possible without any increase in local taxes. Roaring Camp must be onboard with any plan we design to move forward.
Neil Waldhauer
Santa Cruz
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This is already happening with the compromise solution the RTC is going ahead with. Some portions of the Branch Line will be railbanked to allow some portion of the rails to be taken out and then pave over for the trail. This is to create a more safer continuous route as opposed to dangerous off-path onto city streets. Let’s keep up!
The compromise was already in place with trail and rail. Now an elite group opposes the rail and if it is torn up will most likely never be replaced due to the expense. Best to re-cycle and re-use the sorely needed rail line. The plans will cease for Our trail and rail if the greenway initiative were to happen. This is why I will say no to measure D. There is not a continuous route anyway as stated above. Whichever happens requires the crossing of many busy streets, especially in mid county. I wish greenway would stop this mistruth among many.
“Ending passenger rail”? There is no passenger rail, but an awful lot of money has been wasted on studies of passenger rail which have shown that if you take off your rose colored glasses, will be a total failure at solving *any* problems other than burning lots and lots of money. A single track system like this will be extremely limited in its capacity with no way to expand and scale up, unlikely it could serve even 1000 round trips/day while highway 1 currently carries a average daily load of 96000 cars EACH WAY in the Soquel to 17 stretch per Caltrans stats.