Seven or eight years ago, I wondered why a new commuter rail line was being built to connect San Francisco with towns 90 minutes north on Highway 101 deep into Sonoma County, Calif. As I rolled past a lot of small towns and multi-acre homes with grazing horses, I thought, "This is car country," and the train could turn out to be an underused waste of money.
After a more thorough look at the area over the years, however, I noticed more recently built subdivisions, new condos and apartment buildings. The county was booming. And the train system, as a whole, counted half a million passenger boardings through the first nine months of 2019, with 15 passengers or so getting on at about 8 am each weekday at stations as far north as Rohnert Park, Cotati and Petaluma.