Fair Curbs Its Perennial Traffic Woes

Fair-goers caught in a snare of traffic. Parking lots bursting at the seams with cars unable to find a spot.

In the past, such scenarios haunted the organizers of the Del Mar Fair, who planned valiantly to prevent vehicles from clogging Via de la Valle, the one and only exit off Interstate 5 to the fairgrounds.

This year, despite record-setting crowds that were drawn to the fair, which ended Monday, the perennial congestion was finally eased with the addition of a host of off-site parking spaces and shuttle services, organizers said.

“With just one access, I doubt that we can ever be totally perfect in developing a congestion-free traffic plan,” said fair spokeswoman Diane Scholfield. “Although we’ll continue to fine-tune the plan, this is about as close as we can get.”

Besides a 900-car lot at Torrey Pines High School, a 1,500-car lot at UC San Diego was open the last two weekends of the fair, when attendance traditionally is greatest. Special buses shuttled fair-goers to and from the lots, and also transported passengers from the Amtrak station in Del Mar.

Scholfield said the off-site parking helped reduce the number of cars that otherwise would have jammed the I-5 exit.

“Last year, on July 3, when we set our single-day attendance record (of 75,649), we had complaints from people who said they waited as much as two hours to get from the off-ramp to a parking space,” Scholfield said. “We are most pleased that traffic and parking were not nearly the problem they have been in the past.”

For the fifth consecutive year, the fair set an attendance record: 978,329 people crossed through the gates during its 19-day run. This year’s event lasted a day longer than previous fairs, but “on the 18th day we were still 30,000 ahead of last year’s pace,” Scholfield said. The fair also posted its second- and third-largest single-day attendance with crowds of 74,518 and 74,516, she said.

Events such as the rodeo and the fair’s boxing debut drew big crowds, Scholfield said, but “the dinosaurs were our hottest exhibit.”

A 30-foot-tall tyrannosaurus and a stegosaurus were featured in a prehistoric setting as part of the annual flower and garden show, historically “an exhibit that adults enjoy and children tolerate,” Scholfield said.

“Parents usually have to coax their kids to go, and then make compromises, like promising to take them on the rides later.”

“But this year we saw a lot of kids pulling their parents into the exhibit to see the dinosaurs,” she said.

Roland Martinez, operations manager of Evergreen Nursery, which displayed the dinosaurs, said that, now that his creatures have completed fair duty, he has another assignment lined up:

“I’ll let the tyrannosaurus guard the main office,” he said.