San Dieguito Redraws Map of Future Roads

At first glance, it seems to be a cat’s-cradle of interconnecting dots and dashes, with a few black lines. But closer scrutiny shows it to be a road map that might have inspired the saying: “You can’t get there from here.”

San Dieguito citizens have contrived it, their own road map for the unincorporated region, and one that will get them to and from the shopping centers and the freeway but will protect their beaches from inlanders--now and in the 21st Century.

Missing from the citizen-designed road plan is a future east-west highway--Route 680--designed to link Poway and Interstate 15 inland with Interstate 5 and Leucadia on the coast.

The “community circulation plan” was completed late Thursday by the San Dieguito Community Planning Group. It will compete with a county-devised circulation plan when the Board of Supervisors gets around to debating it in November or December.

Gerald Steel, chairman of the planning group, admits that the home-grown road plan does not have a grid of bold black lines, crossing at intervals, that would signal fast, easy driving.

“We do not want to make it easy to get to our beaches, to congest and divide our neighborhoods with high-speed roads,” a Leucadia woman explained. “We just want roads enough to get where we are going.”

Marjorie Gaines of Olivenhain, a veteran foe of Route 680, redesigned the community’s version of the highway Thursday night with a dogleg to the right and a left turn on a newly created road she christened “La Breeza.” She won near-unanimous approval from the planning group.

San Dieguito residents may have ruffled a few Rancho Santa Fe feathers by removing Route 680 from the map, because the affluent ranch dwellers support the east-west throughway as a bypass to siphon off most commuting motorists from the narrow, winding ranch roads. But the amateur designers won a few points back by retaining Rancho Santa Fe’s main streets as narrow and winding. County planners want to widen and straighten some of them.

To meet the needs of through traffic, the San Dieguito planners followed the lead of county designers and added two six-lane divided highways that would link I-5 and I-15. However, the roads are south of San Dieguito and within the city limits of San Diego--where neither the San Dieguito planning group nor the county Board of Supervisors has any jurisdiction.

County Transportation Planning Chief Herman Rosenthal commented that the citizens’ efforts were helpful in representing local thinking but not too useful in meeting the region’s needs for roads by the year 2005.

He said, however, that the planning group’s map will be analyzed by a county computer and added as an alternative to the county’s proposed circulation system.