photo credit: City of Santa Rosa
Map with photos of detour routes for cyclists and pedestrians traveling on Jennings Avenue where 
it intersects the SMART tracks near the Santa Rosa North station.

A long-awaited crossing of SMART train tracks in Santa Rosa cleared a crucial hurdle this week. 

Jennings Avenue is a lower-trafficked residential street which largely parallels the heavily-used Guerneville Road.

Jennings is bisected by the SMART tracks near the Santa Rosa North station.

The lack of a street-level crossing has meant cyclists and pedestrians are pushed onto a circuitous, and potentially dangerous, 1/2 mile detour to Guerneville Road to access neighborhoods east of the tracks.

Over the past decade, residents like Steve Birdlebough have pushed for the city to open a pedestrian crossing, one that would streamline travel for nearby residents accessing schools, work, and local shops.

"I realized that lawyers take a long time, I was one once, to work through these things," Birdlebough said.

The city has been bogged down in a convoluted planning process for the short crossing - about 50 feet across the tracks - since 2015.

That's when officials with the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit agency fenced off an informal crossing.

Santa Rosa has gone back and forth with the California Public Utilities Commission, and the SMART board, with the city and transit agency struggling to agree on where legal liability will lie for the project or if there's an accident on the tracks.

Now Santa Rosa's city council has signed off a revised agreement that's seen as more fair, according to assistant city manager Jason Nutt.

"We do feel that the document, it gets us into construction and provides us with a reasonable level of protection," Nutt said to the council at a recent meeting.

That agreement will see Santa Rosa shoulder the cost for design, permitting, construction - estimated near 4 million dollars - and testing.

SMART, in turn, will put out the bids for construction, manage and inspect the project; and it will take on liability in cases of negligence or misconduct by the agency or its employees.

The revised agreement for the Jennings Avenue pedestrian crossing is expected to go before the SMART board on December 17th.

The crossing could open in 2027.