Fresh Look at Swap Meet’s Traffic Snarls Is Expected : Situation Likely to Worsen as High-Volume Stores Plan to Open in Popular Sports Arena Shopping Area
As anyone who has driven down traffic-clogged Sports Arena Boulevard may deduce, the area is an extremely vital retail district. Seven days a week, shoppers jam a gamut of retail establishments, ranging from auto dealerships and home-improvement centers to supermarkets and sporting goods emporiums.
That impression of “vitality” is stronger at certain hours on weekends when lines of cars waiting to enter Kobey’s Swap Meet at the Sports Arena fill lanes bumper to bumper, often making access to neighboring stores difficult and nerve-racking.
Concerns by neighboring merchants that swap meet patrons are harming their business by blocking access to their stores and taking up their parking spaces were aired earlier this year during city hearings to consider Kobey’s conditional-use permit of the Sports Arena parking lot, property owned by the city.
Mitigation Measures
As part of a deal worked out by the city to mollify the merchants, Kobey’s agreed then to take on certain traffic-mitigation measures, including leasing 300 parking spaces at an adjacent school and shuttling patrons to the meet.
Though the swap meet is described by city planning officials as an unsuitable use for the district, the city had several incentives to forge the agreement. First of all, the swap meet is immensely popular, attracting up to 14,000 shoppers on some weekend days. Secondly, for as many retailers who complain about Kobey’s, a similar number support it because of the overflow walk-in traffic created for their businesses.
Last, but not least of the city’s considerations was that the swap meet generates more than $225,000 per year in lease and tax revenue to the city. Swap meet tax revenues even helped pay the interest on bonds that financed the construction of San Diego-Jack Murphy Stadium during past years when Padres’ and Chargers’ attendance was off.
Paul Grasso, executive assistant to City Councilman Ron Roberts said Roberts supports the location of the swap meet and believes it can “coexist” with surrounding businesses. Since the traffic mitigation measures were agreed to by Kobey’s earlier this year, the number of traffic complaints by surrounding businesses “is way down,” Grasso said Monday.
Local merchants, including Dixieline president William Cowling, say they see no visible improvement in traffic. But Cowling, for one, still expresses a tolerant, wait-and-see attitude.
Traffic in the Sports Arena district is likely to receive renewed scrutiny, however, in coming months as two new high-volume retail chains open stores in the area.
Traffic to Increase
Home Depot, a home-improvement discount warehouse chain, will open a store on Sports Arena Boulevard in an old, expanded Handyman location before the year is out. How much new traffic will Home Depot create? The Atlanta, Ga.-based chain said Monday that a typical 100,000-square-foot store draws 1 million shoppers per year.
The other chain entering the Sports Arena retail “mix” is Circuit City, a fast-growing, Richmond, Va., consumer electronics chain that sells audio and visual equipment plus major appliances. Circuit City, which is opening a store at Midway and Rosecrans, is a highly promotional company that utilizes high-powered broadcast and newspaper advertising to build business.
In addition, the Sports Arena-Midway area this year is witnessing the reopening/rehabilitation of two shopping centers each totaling 200,000 square feet of space, said Jon Bilger, associate vice president of Coldwell Banker commercial real estate in San Diego and a specialist in retail leasing and sales.
The new centers will undoubtedly add shoppers to the area, said Bilger, who as a leasing agent represents one of the new developments, the Loma Center at Rosecrans and Midway. “But (the added traffic) is not a factor for us. We have excellent signalizing, ingress and egress, and parking,” Bilger said.
Because of the projected growth of Sports Arena-Midway as a retail district, the city is projecting significant increases traffic increases over coming years. Daily car trips on Sports Arena Boulevard are expected to reach 60,000 per day over the next 20 years, a doubling of the current total, said Kristi Berg, senior traffic engineer with the city’s traffic and engineering division.
