Every weekday, more than 10,000 people get into their cars and drive from their homes in Ventura County to their jobs in Santa Barbara County.
The 30 miles from Ventura to Santa Barbara usually takes an hour in rush-hour traffic and longer if there’s an accident or construction or rain on the freeway. For long stretches of that drive, cars inch along Highway 101 right next to the train tracks, which are typically empty.
For decades, transportation planners have wanted to get commuter trains running on those rails, similar to the Metrolink trains that connect Ventura and Los Angeles counties. They succeeded only for two years, from 2018 to 2020, when Amtrak ran a morning rush-hour train that was beset by scheduling problems and delays and was canceled shortly after the pandemic began…