San Bernardino County’s current crop of governmental decision-makers entrusted with overseeing transportation issues have made what appears to be an historic commitment to suspend the potential for extending the Los Angeles County light rail system eastward for what is likely to be at least two generations.
While urban planners working from the latest and most complete available data consider electric-powered dual track high-passenger-capacity light rail systems to represent the soundest bet to alleviate commuter gridlock that has been the bane of Southern California life since the 1960s, local transit officials, oriented to passenger rail travel by means of the long-existent and sparsely used MetroRail system have become adamantly resistant to committing future county residents to the option of traveling by train. Adding to that determination is the initial expense of securing the right-of-way for and building the two-track system, previous San Bernardino County failure to get on board with Los Angeles County’s more enthusiastic embrasure of the light rail system and the resultant unwillingness to trust San Bernardino County officials with the funding authority to bring a light rail project to fruition in their jurisdiction.
In the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and into the 1950s rail travel in Southern California was a reality, as the Red Car Line stretched from Santa Monica next to the Pacific Ocean on the west to Redlands and Mentone in the east. The Red Car Line featured work stations with desks and typewriters for those with clerical jobs to stay abreast of their daily tasks while they were traveling to work as well as a post office to dispatch their completed assignments to their intended destinations. In the 1950s, however, the advance of the automobile culture in America knelled the demise of the Red Line in Los Angeles and the greater Los Angeles Area as was the case with rail commuting systems in more than a dozen major metropolitan areas throughout the country.
The first incarnation of the National Highway System, which included the Interstate 10 Freeway, was completed during the Eisenhower Administration. The 10 Freeway, which crossed into California from Arizona and ran through Riverside county into San Bernardino County and through Los Angeles County all the way to its terminus in Santa Monica became the mainstay for those commuting westward to work through the heart of Southern California in the morning and home at the end of the workday. Within ten years of its completion, however, it became jammed during both the morning and evening rush hours on weekdays. In 1969, the completion of a second east/west freeway through the region, the State Highway 60 Freeway, relieved that congestion somewhat, but only temporarily. By the mid-1970s, the Southern California freeway system was mired in gridlock once more.
Despite the region’s freeways having come to resemble, during increasingly longer stretches of the day, parking lots rather than highways, the explosive growth of Southern California and what was then its 150 cities continued unabated. In the 1970s, four new cities incorporated in San Bernardino County, joining the eleven that already existed, and in the 1980s, five cities and one town incorporated.
In 1989, a collective of the county’s politicians and both county and city staff members in a cooperative effot coordinated the placing oa a half-cent countywide tax override on that year’s ballot, ultimately designated by the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Office as Measure I, the proceeds from which were, the measure’s sponsors said, to be devoted to defraying the cost of road improvements throughout the county. Measure I passed, whereupon the county’s existing joint powers planning authority – referred to as San Bernardino Associated Governments or its acronym SanBAG, headed by a board consisting of all five county supervisors and a single representative – either a the mayor or a council member from each of the county’s cities – was empowered by proclamation to serve as the county’s transportation agency and oversee the spending of Measure I tax revenue.
In a fateful move, the SanBAG board opted against simply allowing the Measure I money that was coming in to accumulate over a period of three, four or five years into pools large enough to eventually fund individual transportation projects at various places around the county. Instead, in order to initiate transportation projects at multiple spots around the county immediately so as to fulfill the commitments they, as the champions of the tax measure, had made to the county’s voters in promoting Measure I during the run-up to the 1989 special election, borrowed against the future revenue. By taking out loans or engaging in bond financing, the SanBAG board furthered its individual members’ personal political objectives of demonstrating to their constituents their effectiveness in impacting public policy, at least in the short term, thereby boosting their electability in elections that followed. Nevertheless, by not adopting a pay-as-you-go approach to completing the projects ultimately funded by Measure I in favor of borrowing to pay for the projects up front and servicing the debt thereafter, SanBAG in the long run ended up utlizing half or more of the Measure I money that came in to pay interest on those loans, greatly decreasing the spending power of the collective transportation infrastructure deal the county’s taxpayers had bought into by approving Measure I.
Measure I money was used to augment state funding to speed up completion of the extension of the 210 Freeway from Glendora, where it previously terminated, east to the former I-215/State Route 30 interchange in San Bernardino. In 2003, a 20-mile egment east from Glendora to Fontana was completed The remaining section east of I-15 between Fontana and I-215 was opened on July 24, 2007. With each of these improvements, there was a temporary improvement in the flow of traffic in the immediate area, though overall, traffic jams experienced by daily commuters from the Inland empire/San Bernardino county to the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area on a daily basis continued unabated.
In what had been widely heralded as a revival of the commuter rail system that had once existed in Southern California in the form of the Red Car Line, in 1992 the Metrolink San Bernardino Line began running between Los Angeles Union Station and San Bernardino. For a time well travelled by a portion of the population in San Bernardino county anxious to bypass the gridlock on the I-10 and I-60 freeways, Metrolink ultimately failed to sustain itself as a realistic commuting option for those traveling between San Bernardino county and the megalopolis to the west because of essential conceptual and practical flaws.
Metrolink, which runs on east and west bound tracks that accommodate traditional freight-moving trains and connects Union Station and the San Bernardino Station, a distance of 57.6 miles, offering 22 trips in each direction on weekdays between the hours of 3:41 am and  4:23 pm, with limited connections to a Metrolink station at the University of Redlands. The commute between San Bernardino and Los Angeles takes between 1 hour and 44 minutes to 1 hour and 51 minutes under normal conditions. Trains depart from San Bernardino to Los Angeles during the 3:41 am to 4:23 pm daily timeframe on average once every 34 minutes and 38 seconds.
The earliest weekday departure from Los Angeles Union Station on the Metrolink San Bernardino Line is at 6:38 am, arriving at San Bernardino–Downtown around 8:29 am. The latest weekday departure from Los Angeles Union Station on the Metrolink San Bernardino Line is at 9:38 p, arriving at San Bernardino at 11:29 pm. There are 20 departures from Los Angles to San Bernardino per day, with the average trip duration on 16 of those being one hour and 51 minutes. On threeof those trips the average duration is two hours and 36 minutes and one averages three hours and 36 minutes.
In Los Angeles County, the Gold Line light rail system was created. Consisting of a dual track utilizing light rail cars, it now involves a southern extension which connects from Union Station through Little Tokyo to Long Beach, a Downtown Los Angeles segment connecting at Union Stsation to the city’s internal metro lines, a Central segment running through Downtown Pasadena, South Pasadena, and Northeast Los Angeles, including Highland Park and Heritage Square.
Most significantly for San Bernardino County, the Gold Line has a northern segment, which runs from Union Station to Pasadena, Arcadia, Monrovia, Duarte, Irwindale Azusa Pacific University,/Citrus College in Azusa, Glendora and now Pomona. It is being extended to Claremont.
With departures every eight to 11 minutes, the Gold Line has 928,600 weekday boardings, including 221,444 weekday riders on tht portion of the system running from Union Station to Pomona.
At one point, there was mutual resolve to extend the Gold Line into San Bernardino County, a goal being to extend the line first from the Claremont rail station to the Montclair Transit Center and then to Ontario Airport, ultimately out to San Bernardino, Redlands, Yucaipa and then into Riverside county to reach Palm springs, berhaps by the turn of the Century in 2100.
In 2015, San Bernardino Association of Governments had committed to completing the first phase of the Gold Line into San Bernardino County, obtaining a $41 million State of California Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program grant to go toward the completion of the line extension to Montclair.
When the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2028 Summer Olympics to Los Angeles in 2017, this boosted the incentive to extend the Gold Line eastward to Ontario Airport, what was, at that time, believed to be a realistic deadline.
That same year, SanBAG had rebranded itself as SBCTA, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority.
In 2019, then-San Bernardino County Transportation Authority Chief Executive Officer Raymond Wolfe had become convinced that rail lines did not represent a viable solution to the region’s transportation dilemma. Wolfe believed that a combination of factors, including land acquisition costs for the rail line and the very poor train ridership figures demonstrated by the existing MetroLink commuter rail system in San Bernardino County, augered against San Bernardino County investing in the Gold Line. At the October 10, 2019 meeting of SBCTA’s 12-member transit committee, Wolfe made his case for abandoning the project to complete first leg of the Gold Line’s progression out of Los Angeles County to Ontario Airport, consisting of constructing the dual tracks one-and-a-quarter miles from Claremont to the Montclair Transit Station. Eight of the transit committee’s members – Third District San Bernardino County Supervisor Dawn Rowe and Rancho Cucamonga Mayor Lloyd Dennis Michael, then-Big Bear Councilman Bill Jahn, then-Yucaipa Councilman David Avila, Highland Councilman Larry McCallon, Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren, Colton Mayor Frank Navarro, and Rialto Mayor Deborah Robertson – voted to back Wolfe. Only Montclair Mayor John Dutrey, Ontario City Councilman Alan Wapner and Chino Hills Mayor Ray Marquez opposed his plan to scrub the county’s support of the Gold Line.
By the committee’s vote, San Bernardino County relinquished the $41 million State of California Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program grant.
In the aftermath of that vote, the Metro Rail Construction Authority and its contractor, Kiewit-Parsons completed the 1.9 mile extension of the Gold Line from Azusa to Glendora and embarked on the $1.5 billion effort to extend the dual-track light rail line to three stations lying further east on the Metro A Line, those being San Dimas, La Verne and Pomona.
Ridership on the heavy rail transportation system, MetroLink, remained poor and declined, exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. After the end of the coronavirus crisis, the number of MetroLink passengers did not return to their already-weak numbers. Simultaneously, as the residents of the San Gabriel Mountains Foothill Communities learned of the Gold Line, its use magnified.
Two members of the California legislature who left their posts upon being termed out in 2024, State Senator Anthony Portantino and Assemblyman Chris Holden, both of whose districts weree primarily in Los Angeles County but which overlap into western San Bernardino County, in the last years of their tenure in office were casting about for some means to ensure a legislative legacy. Both saw the revival of the extension of the Gold Line into San Bernardino County as a move in that direction.
On July 8, 2024, largely at Portantino’s and Holden’s instigation, the California State Transportation Agency earmarked just under $500 million to be used to extend the Gold Line into San Bernardino County.
This brought the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority back on board for a light rail ride between Claremont and Montclair. Completion of the Gold Line to Claremont was anticipated for late 2026 to early 2027, at which point the construction of the line through to Montclair was to begin. The San Bernardino County Transportation Authority, newly enthusiastic about the prospect for a light rail system into the heart of the Inland Empire, set aside $80 million for the project, $37,199,643 of which was to be expended toward right-of-way acquisition and other engineering and preparatory work for the project.
In the same timeframe, the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency staff began negotiating a memorandum of understanding with their counterparts on the staff of the Gold Line Construction Authority in Los Angeles County, seeking to find some grounds for agreement that would entrust to the Gold Line Construction Authority, with its established expertise in light rail development, the clearance to design and build the project within a jurisdiction where the SBCTA had jurisdiction over transit issues.
In September 2025, however, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority board took up a discussion of an item listed as “Gold Line to Montclair Project Cost Increase and Funding Request.” Though it had among four options three opportunities to essentially stay the cours with regard to the matter, including acting to “approve keeping $37,199,643 in funding in place until a decision is made regarding how to proceed,” the board was also asked to consider “establish[ing] an ad hoc committee to work with staff to examine alternatives to the Gold Line Extension for the City of Montclair.”
At the September 3, 2025 meeting, however, a majority of the board appeared to be gripped by resentment toward the Gold Line Construction Authority, which during negotiations on the finalization of memorandum of understanding for the line extension had sought to reserve for itself complete autonomy over how the construction should proceed. This extended to reserving all of the positions on the authority’s board to Los Angeles County officials.
At the basis of the authority’s reluctance to place a representative on the board was the fashion in which the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency, seemingly overnight and at the drop of a hat, was willing to walk away from the project after tremendous preparation effort and even after having secured substantial funding to be used toward proceeding. The San Bernardino County Transportation Agency’s board of directors, by a 15-to-11 ratio of those participating, precipitously opted out of extending the Gold Line light rail transportation system into San Bernardino County. The September 3 vote superseded a motion presented by Montclair Mayor John Dutrey and Chino Hills Council Member Ray Marquez to continue to work on the memorandum of understanding. It called for the authority to end negotiations on a memorandum of understanding with the construction authority, to not approve the funding needed to include the Montclair extension with the design procurement currently underway, and directed SBCTA staff to study alternatives to connecting Montclair with improved transit options using the $37 million in local funding the agency had been holding to complete the Foothill Gold Line to Montclair.
Members of the Gold Line Construction Authority were stunned by the action, which seemed to underscore the concern they had about letting a member of the San Bernardino county Transportation Authority take a position on the construction authority board, given the volatility that was being evinced. Gold Line Construction Authority board members felt the authority’s proven track record in designing and building a $3 billion project on time and on budget should have counted for something. Though in negotiations the Gold Line Construction Authority had offered assurances that San Bernardino County officials and SBCTA itself would have significant opportunities to provide input into the process, San Bernardino county Transportation Authority board members, collectively, were not willing to accept the basic terms of that agreement, which several of the San Bernardino County officials said would result in an outside agency having authority to make decisions in their county.
This constituted, if not the death of the potential of bringing light rail to San Bernardino, prevented the preparation for the Montclair extension from moving forward simultaneously with the Claremont portion of the final project segment on the Los Angeles County side.
There are yet in place individuals who believe the Gold Line being extended into San Bernardino county would be of benefit to the county’s residents.
One of those is 41st District Assemblyman John Harabedian, whose district extends from Pasadena in Los Angeles County and includes other Los Angeles County communitis such as Alta Dena, Sierra Madre, La Canada/Flintridge, Bradbury, Monrovia, Duarte, San Dimas, La Verne and Claremont as well as portions of Upland, San Antonio Heights, Rancho Cucamonga, Lytle creek, Wrightwood, Pinon Hills, Phelan and Hesperia in San Bernardino County. In february, he introduced Assembly Bill 1678, legislation that would create a new “Claremontclair Authority” to construct an extension of Metro’s A Line from Claremont into the City of Montclair.
Under the bill, the Claremontclair Authority would replace the existing Metro Gold Line Foothill Extension Construction Authority for the Claremont–Montclair segment and authorize the awarding and overseeing of all design and construction contracts for the extension, starting from the east side of the Claremont light rail station and continuing to the Montclair Transit Center. It would require the authority to conduct financial studies, planning, and engineering, and to make reasonable progress on design and construction. It would dissolve the authority upon completion of construction.
Governance of the Claremontclair Authority would consist of five voting members and one nonvoting member, with appointments from the city councils of Claremont and Montclair, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the president of the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority board and the San Bernardino Couinty Board of Supervisors. The governor would appoint the nonvoting member.
Despite the board having three of its five voting members controlled by entities in San Bernardino County, the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency Board of Directors on April 1, 2026 voted to oppose the legislation.
“After prudent discussion and careful consideration of the long and complex history surrounding the proposed Gold Line extension to Montclair, the board determined that AB 1678 is inconsistent with SBCTA’s previously adopted direction regarding the project and would significantly diminish SBCTA’s authority over transportation matters within San Bernardino County,” the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency put out in an official statement. “The board noted that the bill introduces substantial legal and financial risks to the agency, limits SBCTA’s role in project oversight, and obligates the agency to fund operations and maintenance costs without the ability to negotiate terms in advance. Additionally, AB 1678 would remove SBCTA from a meaningful decision-making role in the delivery and long-term operation of a project within its own jurisdiction, creating concerns about governance, accountability, and responsible stewardship of local funding.”
According to the statement, the boards action in September 2025 discontinuing its pursuit of the Gold Line extension to Montclair was taken “after years of cost escalation, delays, and an inability to reach an agreement with the existing [Gold Line] Construction Authority that would provide essential protections for San Bernardino County taxpayers. Since then, the board has moved forward with advancing enhanced Metrolink service as a more reliable and cost-effective mobility option for the region.”
The statement did not dwell on, and no one from the county transportation agency was willing to address the observation that, it was SBCTA’s abandonment of the project in 2019 that delayed the construction timetable or that ridership on the Metrolink’s San Bernardino Line has dwindled to, in some cases, fewer than five passengers on three car – one locomotive and one cab and one coach – trains and four car – one locomotive and one cab and one coach – trains.
Nevertheless, the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency stated. “The Board’s action to oppose AB 1678 is consistent with the agency’s 2025/2026 State Legislative Platform to oppose any mandate requiring SBCTA to build, fund, or operate specific projects. The board directed staff to continue advocating for transportation solutions that reflect the region’s priorities, fiscal responsibility, and local control.”
The board called upon the county’s cities to likewise oppose Assembly Bill 1678.
As of this week, only one city in San Bernardino County had complied with that request. On April 27, the Yucaipa City Council voted unanimously to stand in opposition to Harbedian’s proposed legislation.
Coucilwoman Judy Woolsey, who serves on the SBCTA board, said, somewhat inaccurately, that preventing the creation of the ClareMontcair Authority was justifiable because “Metro wants our money, but they don’t want to give us any voice in what’s going to be done.”
-Mark Gutglueck