Traffic Studies at Issue : MTDB Delays Decision on Old Town Trolley Route

“What government does best is delay,” Imperial Beach Councilman Bill Russell said Thursday, and government proved him right.

After failing to obtain a necessary margin to act, the Metropolitan Transit Development Board (MTDB) voted unanimously to delay a decision on a new San Diego Trolley route until April 11.

Russell, an MTDB director, was attempting to sway the other board members to act immediately to adopt a future trolley route north from the downtown Santa Fe Depot to Old Town--a route high on the MTDB’s priority list for construction.

But other interests intervened, urging delay while other studies are made and other agencies are consulted.

Among the reasons cited by those who argued for delay were:

- A pending state Department of Transportation commentary on traffic patterns in the downtown area that hints at the future need for Pacific Highway as an eight-lane safety valve for traffic to and from downtown when Interstate 5 slows to a gridlock during heavy commuter hours.

- A plan by the county to build a parking garage on land in the path of one of three proposed trolley routes north from the Santa Fe Depot.

- Opposition from Mayor Roger Hedgecock to any northern route that would not serve Lindbergh Field directly.

- A Centre City traffic circulation study, more than a year in the making and due to be released in a few weeks, that may conflict with the proposed trolley extension.

- Opposition from the San Diego Chamber of Commerce to selection of a trolley route before the downtown traffic circulation study is completed.

In a 4-3 vote, MTDB directors adopted a staff recommendation calling for a Pacific Highway alignment from Broadway north to Washington Street, then shifting east to tracks paralleling the Santa Fe Railroad to Taylor Street in Old Town. The split vote was short of the five favorable votes needed to adopt the route, and directors then voted unanimously to delay the issue until April 11.

The $53-million proposal to run the trolley line up the middle of Pacific Highway, then shift, via underground or overhead trackage, to east of the Santa Fe tracks, was not attacked directly by transit board members. But most of them had concerns about the staff plan. Hedgecock, attending the session while a Superior Court jury deliberated his fate on charges of conspiracy and perjury, emphasized his opposition to any northern trolley extension that would make it more expensive to build a bayside trolley line to the airport. The only logical routing for the trolley from downtown north, he said, is Pacific Highway.

Caltrans officials have expressed concern that use of the Pacific Highway center median for a trolley line would preclude a future two-lane widening of the highway. Widening the roadway would be necessary if an interchange is ever built to connect it with I-5 and I-8 near the intersection of the two freeways. Such an interchange--now only in the idea stage--would provide another route to the downtown and bayfront areas, taking traffic pressure off I-5.

John McNeece, an attorney for the Chamber of Commerce, protested that the transit directors’ decision Thursday could run contrary to the nearly completed Centre City traffic circulation study.

But Hedgecock countered that a delay, for whatever reasons, would not change the fact that the trolley route would take “two lanes out of someplace, Harbor Drive, Pacific Highway or Kettner Boulevard.” He backed the Pacific Highway route north as “the only possible route to Lindbergh Field.”

On the opposing side were directors who wanted the trolley route to follow the present railroad line north. That was opposed by MTDB staff members, who pointed out that trolleys would add 100 railroad crossing closures daily at the busy Grape, Hawthorne, Laurel and Ash Street crossings--causing traffic congestion on major east-west streets from the bayside to downtown.

Former state Sen. Jim Mills, now the state’s representative on the local transit board he helped create, lobbied for the railroad route, pointing out that the unrestricted trolley line would cut at least three minutes off the travel time from downtown to Old Town.

Mills estimated the three-minute savings in travel time would mean a $3.2-million savings in “person time” yearly (multiplying three minutes times an estimated 32,000 daily trolley ridership times an estimated $4 average hourly wage). But his mathematics did not sway other directors.

Mills interpreted the vote to delay a routing decision not as opposition to a Pacific Highway/railroad right-of-way compromise route, but as a desire to get more input from other transportation agencies.

The downtown-to-Old Town trolley link is ranked third on the MTDB construction priority list, behind the East Line trolley to El Cajon and the Bayside Line from downtown to Lindbergh Field.

However, MTDB General Manager Tom Larwin said that if local private and public support for the bayside line does not materialize, the Old Town route--the first leg to a trolley line to Mission Valley and North County--will step up to the second priority spot.

The eight-week delay will not jeopardize the northern extension’s chances for state or federal funds, Larwin said. But Supervisor Leon Williams did see danger in the delay.

“It will make the problem become bigger and bigger and allow more and more vested interests to emerge,” he warned.