New Trolley Line for Downtown San Diego Boosts City Renewal

The key to San Diego’s Great American Plaza, a sprawling, 3-acre office tower and hotel complex under construction a block from the waterfront, is a 50-foot-high glass atrium that slices through the center of the project.

The $200-million complex wouldn’t have been built without it, or something like it.

In the atrium, the new Bayside Line of the San Diego Trolley will connect with the existing trolley line, which links downtown and the Mexican border at Tijuana. The bay route will run between central downtown, the Seaport Village shopping center and the city’s new convention center, due to be completed by the end of the year.

The Bayside Line is the next leg in a light-rail system that planners hope will someday include more than 100 miles of track throughout San Diego County. The Bayside route is scheduled to carry its first rider next June.

San Diego planners have lofty goals for the 8-year-old trolley, often cited as a model for urban light-rail systems. Besides providing transportation to San Diego’s growing tourist population, they hope it will ease congestion in a downtown area in the midst of massive redevelopment.

“Los Angeles could learn from San Diego as to how to put an organization together” to develop a light-rail system, said G. J. (Pete) Fielding, professor of social science at UC Irvine and a specialist in transportation management.

The enclosed Great American station is the type of public-private development that may become commonplace in San Diego as the trolley operators seek to integrate the trolley directly into the office, hotel and commercial projects it hopes to serve.

“We have the potential of bringing people right to the doorstep of offices or retail outlets,” said Jack Limber, general counsel for the Metropolitan Transit Development Board (MTDB), developers of the trolley.

Designed by architect Helmut Jahn and curving through the two city blocks of the Great American complex, with small stores on both sides of the tracks, the 400-foot-long “Transportation Arcade” will be covered by a ceiling of three hues of glass.

The complex will also include San Diego’s tallest--at 34-stories--building, also designed by Jahn, as well as a 15-story, 272-room all-suite hotel.

MTDB is supplying $1.2 million to the project’s developers, Starboard Development Corp. and Great American Development Co., for construction of the trolley station. The developers are contributing $2.8 million.

The developers took on myriad design and bureaucratic challenges, such as arranging for railway protection insurance and designing the complex around the trolley’s exposed 600-volt cables. The trolley had to curve through the complex, and MTDB wanted the station to accommodate four cars in the station simultaneously.

“The design was very tricky,” said Pam Hamilton, executive vice president of the Centre City Development Corp. (CCDC), the city’s redevelopment agency, noting that the whole design process was driven by the trolley. “We wish we had a little more elbow room.”

Besides a few design compromises, the redevelopment agency offered developers little more than a promise to help bring the two blocks together--they were owned by several different entities--by using its power of eminent domain.

But Starboard knew what it was getting into, having already established a track record for public-private developments. In 1986, Starboard completed the $43.7-million San Diego police headquarters, and a year later teamed with MTDB to build a 10-story complex to house MTDB’s headquarters. A ground-level trolley station was built beneath the offices.

Starboard believes the Great American project will get a boost in a very competitive market from the trolley, which will link the complex to the rest of San Diego, Starboard President G. Bradford Saunders said.

“The trolley gives the project the ability to be a seven-day a week center,” Saunders said.

Great American is just one of several large high-rise developments under construction. More than 2.5 million square feet of office space is expected to open in downtown San Diego within the next two years, as well as 1,300 new hotel rooms.

Great American Plaza is scheduled to open late in 1991, but Starboard and Great American must complete the trolley connection by June, 1990, the expected completion date for the Bayside Line.

MTDB is using the Great American project and the construction of its headquarters as models for future development along trolley routes. It already has identified 17 sites along planned trolley routes for potential joint developments.

The latest segment in the 17-mile-long East Line, connecting downtown to El Cajon, opened in June. Future lines, still in the early planning stages, will connect downtown with the airport, Mission Valley and northern San Diego County.

“We hope to get some really good examples off the drawing board and up in brick and mortar so people will start believing in (joint projects),” MTDB’s Limber said.

MTDB was created in 1975 to oversee development of the transit systems in San Diego. Its 15-member board of directors operates independently of city and county government, developing policy for, but not conducting, the day-to-day business of the San Diego trolley and various bus systems.

The board members are appointed by county and city governments. A representative is appointed by the governor.

“The organization is a point of real innovation,” said UCI’s Fielding.

Development of the trolley was aided by general support from the downtown business community, desperate for anything that would bring developers and customers back to the aging area, and and by the relative ease with which rights of way can be arranged for.

No federal funds were used for the initial $116.6-million trolley construction, allowing MTDB to avoid the bureaucratic hassles and long-term financial obligations often associated with such funding.

In addition to a variety of state and local financing, MTDB receives one-third of its funds from a 0.5% sales tax, approved by San Diego voters in 1987. It is expected to generate $750 million for San Diego County transit projects from 1988 to 2008.

Even transportation experts unenthusiastic about light-rail systems praise the San Diego trolley for delivering the most for the least investment. Almost every part of the trolley construction project has been finished ahead of schedule and under budget.

“To me, they didn’t spend a whole lot and they did real well,” said Scott Rutherford, director of the Washington State Transportation Center at the University of Washington in Seattle, echoing the comments of other transportation experts.

“San Diego is pointed out time and again as (an example of) how a city can be successful.”

The trolley’s success has more to do with civic pride and focusing attention on downtown than actually relieving traffic congestion. MTDB said the trolley carries an average of 31,000 riders a day, making a relatively small impact on the area’s traffic volume.

The trolley may not be a primary commuter vehicle, Fielding said, but it can help ease freeway traffic during rush hours.

It also serves as a spark plug of sorts. Construction of the trolley was a signal to developers that San Diego was committed to revitalizing the downtown area, Fielding said, noting that it has a similar effect on property values and development wherever a line is built or planned.

“They’ve had a renewal effect on these areas of San Diego,” Fielding said. “It gives an area a face lift, something so an individual entrepreneur who is building a business can say: ‘Something is happening here.’ Not only does (the trolley) increase property values, it gives an area a positive image.”