Coming Soon, the San Diego Hook : Trolley Won’t Circle Downtown in Continuous Loop

Chicago has its Loop--trains that circle the downtown business district on elevated tracks and then head back out to the suburbs. San Diego soon is to have the same--a trolley loop that circles the downtown.

But San Diego’s downtown trolleys--following a 12th Avenue, C Street, Pacific Highway, Harbor Drive, L Street orbit--won’t make the full circle, Metropolitan Transit Development Board officials say.

San Diego’s system will be a “non-continuous loop,” or “hook configuration,” which will send trolleys into town and then back, the same way that they came in.

The South Line

South Line trains, which now run from the Santa Fe Depot station to the Mexican border and back, will continue northward from the downtown depot to stations at Cedar Street, serving the County Administration Center, and on to Grape Street.

Eventually, planners say, the South Line will link up with a North Line, to run all the way up the coast to Del Mar and Oceanside and connect with an east-west trolley line through Mission Valley.

But for starters, the South Line trains will reverse their course at Grape Street and retrace their route to the depot, east on C Street, south on 12th Avenue to their South Bay route.

East Line trolleys, which now run only from downtown to Euclid Avenue in Southeast San Diego (but will travel to El Cajon and back by 1990), will turn south from Santa Fe Depot, running past Seaport Village and the future San Diego Convention Center by the bay (becoming the Bayside Line). Then, when they come within a step or so of completing the downtown loop at 12th and L Street, the trolleys will reverse course, returning through town by the round-about route they came.

Tom Larwin, MTDB general manager, admits the routes seem awkward when they are compared to a smooth circle of the center city. But months of study and thousands of dollars went into the final route decisions, he said.

“We have an established market along C Street,” he said, “and we have to protect our present ridership, to inconvenience them as little as possible.”

The Bayside Line, a $40-million, 1.4-mile project which completes the downtown loop, won’t be in operation for at least two years, Larwin said, “and maybe, in the future if we see that riders don’t like the system, we can change it.”

The Bayside Line previously was championed by former Mayor Roger Hedgecock as the perfect tourist solution--a way to transport tourists from Lindbergh Field to their hotels and to the convention center.

Because the Bayside trolley extension was proposed mainly as a tourist aid, San Diego City Council approved setting aside 1% of the 8% hotel-motel tourist tax revenue two years ago to finance construction of the line. That fund is the only sure source of financing for the extension, but the trolley route will no longer run from the bayfront to the airport. It will from the bayfront and connect with the East Line to El Cajon.

Serve Regular Riders

Dot Migdal, San Diego Chamber of Commerce executive and a member of the MTDB subcommittee advising on trolley routing affecting the downtown area, said that the dream of red-carpet trolley service for visitors just didn’t fly.

Convention visitors and vacationers who fly in with their luggage and, often, an expense account, “just don’t take trolleys,” Migdal explained. “They take taxis or rent cars.”

Migdal said that the subcommittee representing business and civic interests were convinced that, no matter how it looked on paper, the “hook” routes are the most sensible because they provide the best service for the downtown office workers, shoppers and business people who make up the bulk of the trolley’s clientele.

MTDB spokeswoman Judy Leitner agreed with Migdal.

“There were dozens of different routes studied and none of them were perfect, but this one was the best,” Leitner said. Speaking from bus-riding experience, Leitner said that seasoned transit riders “don’t like to go out of their way” to get where they are going.

This routing, she pointed out, will provide direct to and fro service to established riders, not detouring them west to the bayfront or north to Grape Street before heading east or south for home. A downtown loop, she argued, “would inconvenience a lot of people who ride the trolley,” she said.

For example, if the trolley made a one-way loop around downtown, a rider boarding at the Gaslamp station who is heading to El Cajon, would have to travel west to the Santa Fe Depot station, then along the bay before heading east. That route would take more time than the hook route, which would allow the rider to travel east on C Street and south on 12th to the east line.

Larwin added a few hard economic facts to the psychological reasons for choosing not to use the loop over the hook routes: lower mileage, lower operating costs, fewer conflicts at junctions, faster route times, were a few.

What the proposed routings actually are, he said, are extensions of the present East and South lines which do not inconvenience present riders.

None of the decisions made are “set in stone,” he explained. The fast-developing bayfront may turn out to be a transit gold mine--warranting a direct line from the convention center area to the South Bay and Tijuana. But, for now, it’s at the end of the line.