SHORTCUTS: Highways of Future : Byways Become Highways for North County Drivers

On Sycamore Avenue in Vista, which is a shortcut south from California 78 to Palomar Airport Road, signs read: “Road Closed to Thru Traffic,” “Private Road,” “Closed Weekends and After 10 p.m,” “Not a Thru Road,” and “Unsafe, Hazardous Driving Surface.”

Despite the warnings, road barricades and detour signs, hundreds of motorists use the Sycamore shortcut daily. The smart ones turn off at Business Park Way, a five-lane, newly built shortcut to the shortcut.

Road engineers have bowed to the tenacious motorists and are now installing a traffic signal at the Palomar Airport Road-Business Park Way intersection.

Such is the situation as wily North County commuters have grown streetwise in avoiding traffic signals and gridlock in their effort to turn some rural byways into highways.

Almost every North County driver has a mental logbook full of detours that avoid stoplights and stop signs, so much so that some irate residents have raised a ruckus over traffic on their residential streets.

Secret Roads Unmapped

There are shortcuts to Palomar College and back roads to Camp Pendleton’s back gate. There are improved stretches of future highways that cut across the midsection of the fast-growing North County. There are roads that even Thomas Brothers doesn’t chart and where county engineers have never placed a traffic counter.

County public works engineers do pay heed to the shortcuts that traffic counts uncover. But they do not discourage their use in most cases.

Dwight Smith, the county’s public works deputy director, said county engineers keep a close eye on traffic counts and accident rates on county byways, doing what they can--intersection improvements, stop signs, speed limits--to smooth the motoring path until the expensive task of building a needed highway is undertaken. As one shortcut becomes too popular, another route is opened up that perhaps is not as direct but gets you where you are going without a five-minute wait at an overloaded intersection.

In San Marcos, for example, Linda Vista Drive has long been a favorite bypass route for students from the coast heading for Palomar College or San Diego State University’s North County campus. It angles northeast from Palomar Airport Road, bypassing most of the congested traffic intersections for which Carlsbad is notorious.

Can’t Please Everyone

But one man’s shortcut soon becomes another man’s irritation. An Encinitas driver who uses residential Cerro Street to avoid a tiresome wait at Encinitas Boulevard and El Camino Real noted that homeowners along his route greeted him with frowns and sometimes even impolite gestures.

In time, the residents prevailed on their county supervisor for two stop signs on Cerro Street to discourage the through traffic. The commuter, who prefers to remain anonymous, continues to use the route and obeys the signs. But he honks his horn in defiance at each stop.

Next door in Cardiff, local drivers know of a circuitous traffic path that slants northeast, bridging over Interstate 5, avoiding El Camino Real traffic and Village Park stop signs, finally linking up with Rancho Santa Fe Road. It’s a zigzag route with alternates in case traffic flow stagnates, but the regulars aren’t giving away the exact location of the phantom highway.

Smith says he can recall only one incident when North County residents rose up in wrath over creation of a shortcut, a proposed route through Village Park linking El Camino Real to Rancho Santa Fe Road.

Although the route was part of the county’s road plans, he said, “we took it to the (county) Traffic Advisory Committee and to the Board of Supervisors.” The opposition won and the through road was never built.

Encinitas Mayor Marjorie Gaines remembers the battle over Village Park Way, too. It was in the pre-incorporation days and was one of the issues that convinced San Dieguito-area residents to vote to take over their region’s planning and land use decisions from county officials.

“They were going to create a road that would have split a residential neighborhood and sent a great deal of through traffic through the middle of it,” she explained. “We opposed it, and we won.”

A San Diego woman who travels the North County roads daily has learned to ferret out shortcuts by watching other drivers. She claims that when traffic slows and bunches up on a main route, a few canny motorists will make a quick right or left turn and wind around the bottleneck on a relatively traffic-free bypass. She follows.

Attorney Jan Goldsmith of Poway moved here from New York, in part because of the traffic there and “so I wouldn’t have to search for shortcuts.” Not that he has necessarily escaped the search.

But he won’t divulge any local shortcuts because, he said, “shortcuts are not the way to go.” Now he’s working with other mid-county residents to keep ahead of commuter gridlock by voting for the half-cent local sales tax measure--Proposition A on the Nov. 3 ballot--to get improved local and regional roads that won’t need to be avoided.

One of the fanciest byways crisscrossing the North County countryside between Interstate 5 on the coast and Interstate 15 inland is San Dieguito Road. It starts in a meadow and ends at a locked gate in the posh Fairbanks Ranch. In between it offers a smooth, wide speedway bypassing a congested five-mile section of Via De La Valle, a narrow two-lane stretch that carries most of the area’s east-west traffic.

Another escape route for avoiding Via de la Valle and other substandard Rancho Santa Fe roads is Camino Del Norte, which runs north of The Ranch and joins Rancho Santa Fe Road to Del Dios Highway. The roadway has long been known to county engineers as SA 680 and was scheduled to become a sorely needed east-west arterial linking Interstate 5 at Leucadia with Interstate 15 near Poway. But county planners doubt it will ever be built. Lack of money and the determined opposition of the newly incorporated city of Eninitas block its path.

The granddaddy of all North County shortcuts is Black Mountain Road which, with Carmel Valley Road, angles across the vast North City region that once was 50,000-plus acres of absolutely nothing. The rambling easterly route begins at Interstate 5 south of Del Mar and extends across country on potholed pavement to the northern reaches of Rancho Penasquitos near Interstate 15.

The road generally travels the path that a future freeway will follow. California 56 is in the state highway system, but hasn’t made the budget yet. However, North City West developers are committed to construct part of the highway and the state has acquired most of the right-of-way to Interstate 15. Carmel Mountain Ranch developers will extend it even farther eastward through the planned community.

Today, Black Mountain provides a back-door escape to the coast for hardy Penasquitans. When Interstate 15 slows to a stop, Black Mountain Road with all its ruts and curves gets a lot of use, residents say. It is avoided during the rainy season, however, because 3.5 miles of it isn’t paved.

Oceanside has its byways but they are fast becoming as congested as its arterials. Many of them are designed to avoid congested sections of Mission Avenue on its eastward path up the San Luis Rey Valley and shunt traffic between Oceanside Boulevard and Mission as the snarls dictate. One of them, Brooks Street, offers a back door to Oceanside High School from the east.

Camp Pendleton provides its own byway for Marines living in the Fallbrook area and also contributes heavily to shortcut traffic on North River Road and the giant military base’s back gate on Vandergrift Boulevard.

Escape Route to I-15

Fallbrook commuters use Reche Road as an escape route to Interstate 15. To head west, they often alternate between Stage Coach Lane and Green Canyon Road.

A lonely shortcut cross-county from northern Vista east to Interstate 15 is Gopher Canyon Road, and a popular bypass through northern Escondido is Country Club Lane. In southern Escondido, Felicita Road and Via Rancho Parkway are nominated by locals as good east-west shortcuts.

A scenic but time-consuming shortcut--Questhaven Road--runs easterly from Rancho Santa Fe Road into western Escondido. The trip through the hills and valleys, via Elfin Forest and Harmony Grove, is more of a tourist attraction than a bona fide commuter escape route. It also serves as the main road to the main North County garbage dump.

County Public Works Deputy Director John Burke said that the county’s roads are the products of community plans, land-use designations and population estimates fed into computers to project traffic flows and proper road sizes. Predictably, drivers often popularize a shortcut that, sometime in the future, will be a major highway.

Yes, Burke said, he, too, has a favorite shortcut of his own.

No, he said, he isn’t about to reveal it.