Planners hope to forestall congestion on I-15

Coursing through rugged hills and bedroom communities, Interstate 15 from southwestern Riverside County to northern San Diego County isn’t a hard road to travel -- at least not yet.

At the county line, the traffic flow is 135,000 vehicles a day, anemic for a major Southern California highway. Unless there is an accident or road construction, the highway is usually free-flowing.

But anxiety grows in both counties about the future of the 44-mile stretch from Lake Elsinore to Escondido. Commuters who shuttle between the cheaper housing in Riverside County and the more abundant job base in San Diego are beginning to report familiar signs -- bottlenecks, worsening rush hours, workers leaving early to beat the stampede.

Indeed, regional planners say that by 2030 the corridor could become as bad as the Riverside Freeway, the infamous commuter route that causes more delays than any freeway in the state.

“The potential is certainly there for another 91,” said Kevin Viera, a program manager for the Western Riverside Council of Governments. “We are starting to plan now and consider all the options. Hopefully, it won’t get bad before we can do something about it.”

The warning signs are everywhere. Northern San Diego County and southwestern Riverside County are some of the fastest-growing areas of the state.

Projections are that the area’s population will almost double to 1.5 million people by 2030. The number of jobs is expected to double as well, to more than 500,000.

Already, congestion is beginning to snarl traffic through the Temecula area during the evening rush hour, and the number of vehicles is approaching more than 200,000 on some parts of the freeway, more than half the traffic load that squeezes through Orange County’s El Toro Y each day.

Planners said they became alarmed about I-15 in 2001 when the number of workers commuting from Riverside County to San Diego County had doubled to about 30,000 in five years.

The surge resulted from a migration of people from northern San Diego County who bought relatively inexpensive housing in Temecula, Murrieta and Moreno Valley in Riverside County but kept their jobs in San Diego County.

“With all the cheap land in southwest Riverside County and all the homes being built, this thing caught everyone off guard,” said Escondido City Councilman Ed Gallo, who is a member of the regional planning effort.

The trend has produced a jobs and housing imbalance between Riverside County with its lower-cost homes and northern San Diego County, which is job-rich.

Planners say that many communities in southwestern Riverside County will have less than one job for every household in the years head, while northern San Diego County cities will have 1.6 jobs per household.

This kind of uneven development pattern has plagued commuters throughout Southern California for decades. The most extreme example is shown by the Riverside Freeway, the main corridor between Riverside and Orange counties.

Every workday, almost 285,000 motorists, the vast majority from Riverside County, use the highway to reach jobs in Orange County. They clog the westbound lanes during the morning rush hour and the eastbound lanes in the evening, jamming the road up to 12 hours a day.

To avoid the mess, some commuters pay up to $9.25 for a one-way trip on the 10 miles of toll lanes that run down the middle of the freeway. And even those slow at times.

Caltrans studies show that one eight-mile stretch of the Riverside Freeway through Corona produces more total delay for motorists than any other state highway -- the equivalent of 17,202 lost hours per day, or about two years.

In contrast, Interstate 15, which has six to eight lanes between Lake Elsinore and Escondido, is often a wide-open expanse of concrete where freeway speeds are easily maintained.

Lately, the road during the morning rush hour is a straight shot from Lake Elsinore to Escondido, where traffic can slow to a crawl just south of California 78 because of continuing road construction. Motorists say, however, that the evening commute back to Riverside County can get tedious.

Caltrans predicts that the I-15 corridor will exceed its capacity of 175,000 motorists a day between 2015 and 2030. The highway is eventually expected to have more than 250,000 motorists a day, almost as many as the Riverside Freeway now has.

Commuters agree with predictions that the highway could become like its northern neighbor.

“I believe it,” said Timothy J. Davis, a surveyor from Moreno Valley who commutes to the San Diego offices of Nolte Associates Inc. three days a week. “I try to get out of San Diego before 3 p.m. After that, it gets bad. The crunch seems to get worse every day.”

But Davis does not consider the traffic overwhelming yet. “If [planners] get proactive,” he said, “they can probably contain the situation.”

Planners hope to do just that with a preemptive strike. They have formed the I-15 Interregional Partnership to assess the traffic situation and find solutions to prevent congestion.

The coalition includes transportation agencies and regional planning organizations such as the Southern California Assn. of Governments, the San Diego Assn. of Governments and the Western Riverside Council of Governments.

They are studying an area that includes parts of Interstate 15, Interstate 215, California 74 and 79 in Riverside County as well as California 76 and 78 in San Diego County. It extends from Lake Elsinore to Escondido.

“We are trying to think way ahead,” said Jane Clough-Riquelme, a regional planner for the San Diego Assn. of Governments. “We are looking at the broader region and the connections between people living and working in different areas.”

Already, planners have developed a $3.85-billion dollar wish list of projects for the corridor. They include bypasses, major widenings of I-15 and I-215, reversible lanes, bus rapid transit systems and financial incentives to encourage commuters to carpool or form van pools.

Riverside and San Diego county officials hope to use state money and new transportation sales taxes to help pay for transportation improvements.

But there is more than just adding pavement. Planners on both sides of the county line are considering strategies to reduce the jobs and housing imbalance and keep people off I-15.

In Escondido, less expensive high-density housing is already being built along the route of the new Sprinter light rail line that runs to the coast.

Officials hope the developments will attract residents and keep San Diego area workers from moving to Riverside County.

“There are opportunities to provide people different alternatives and different choices,” said Susan Baldwin, a regional planner at the San Diego Assn. of Governments.

“Transportation costs are rising. People will want to live closer to work.”

In Riverside County’s Moreno Valley, city officials hope to build the region’s job base with a variety of retail and commercial projects, including a major distribution and corporate center near March Air Reserve Base. Planners say one project could create as many as 15,000 jobs.

But Ron Roberts, a Temecula city councilman and member of the Riverside County Transportation Commission, said building the job base in his city was more complicated than it sounded.

“It’s hard to attract employers.” Roberts said. “We don’t have an airport. We can attract small firms, but not the larger companies. We don’t have enough land for warehousing, and we’d like the cleaner businesses.”

Roberts is concerned too that San Diego County is not yet on the same page as Riverside County in the planning process. He said Riverside County officials had placed a higher priority than San Diego County on widening I-15 from eight lanes to at least 12.

Gallo said San Diego County planners had been concentrating on developing a bus rapid transit system for Interstate 15 and had not ruled out widening the highway to prevent a bottleneck at the county line.

But Moreno Valley Mayor Charles White, a co-chairman of the planning partnership, said he was optimistic that both counties would resolve their differences.

“There are so many brains working on this,” White said, “we should be able to come up with something.”

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dan.weikel@latimes.com