CA: ‘We have left the era behind of very big ideas’: SANDAG trades trains for buses in $125B transit vision

The San Diego Association of Governments is in the midst of a reality check.

Five years ago, the regional planning agency called for a $163 billion transformation of public transit over the coming decades. A high-speed commuter rail system, stretching from the U.S.- Mexico border to Oceanside, would be the backbone of a future transit network that helped the region meet state mandates for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Those ambitions are now getting pared down and postponed. And even with a scaled-back version of its transit goals, SANDAG leaders still face uncertainty over how they’re going to pay for it.

SANDAG’s latest regional plan — a $125 billion blueprint for how it will build and fund the San Diego area’s infrastructure by 2050 — no longer includes the heavy rail projects called for a few years ago.

Those projects had been the brainchild of former SANDAG CEO Hasan Ikhrata.

But SANDAG has new leadership now.

CEO Mario Orso and his team have shaped the latest regional plan into what they call a “reality-based approach.” The agency’s board of directors is set to vote on whether to adopt the plan when it meets Friday.

Under the plan Orso is pushing, billions of dollars SANDAG can harness from the federal government and the state — and locally from its half-cent sales tax surcharge — would go toward creating more rapid bus routes, express lanes on freeways, micro-transit shuttles within communities and light rail trolley service instead of heavy commuter rail.

Solana Beach Mayor Lesa Heebner, who chairs SANDAG’s board, lauded Orso’s efforts to make SANDAG think of how to “live within our means” when it comes to big projects.

“Let’s see how much money we can realistically expect,” Heebner said. “Let’s see what projects we can really deliver.”

San Diego City Council President Joe LaCava, the vice chair of SANDAG’s board, also endorsed the new approach, saying it could rebuild some of the trust the agency has lost with the public.

For too long, SANDAG has over-promised on ambitious projects that have not yet materialized, LaCava said.

“We have left the era behind of very big ideas,” he added.

Changing realities at SANDAG have already affected the timelines for some long-dreamed-of transit projects.

The Purple Line — envisioned as part of the San Diego trolley operated by the Metropolitan Transit System — has long been planned to run from the U.S.- Mexico border to Sorrento Valley. Along the way, it would stop in City Heights and at San Diego State University.

The 2021 regional plan called for much of the Purple Line to be built as heavy rail, with an estimated opening by 2035. But in the latest draft of the new regional plan, the Purple Line is light rail, goes only to Mission Valley and gets its completion pushed out by another 15 years.

The segment between Mission Valley and Sorrento Valley, with stops at the UTC mall and Kearny Mesa, is still identified as a potential future extension of the line.

Current estimates for the project without the extension are $11.3 billion. That’s five times the price tag of the Blue Line’s 11-mile extension to University City, which opened in 2021 and cost $2.2 billion.

“We just wouldn’t be being honest with the public if we said we could build it by 2035,” Orso said in an interview.

‘SANDAG has to be bold’

For some San Diego neighborhoods along possible routes of the Purple Line, the current timeline further delays a project residents have wanted for decades.

In City Heights, the idea of a trolley line first arose in the 1980s, said Jesse Ramirez, director of urban planning for the City Heights Community Development Corporation.

With the neighborhood’s low levels of car ownership and modest transit access to job centers, Ramirez said City Heights residents need a faster and more reliable way to get around.

“The Purple Line really checks those boxes of allowing our people to move, improving our environment and also to really give economic mobility to communities like City Heights,” Ramirez said.

“The sticker price is scary,” he added. “But I think that doesn’t mean that we can’t move the needle on certain things and make this project a reality. As an agency, SANDAG has to be bold.”

For SANDAG planners, the Purple Line faces more challenges than the price tag.

Topography is just one of them.

The rough proposed route would have to navigate a series of mesas and valleys, including a 400-foot drop-off going north into Mission Valley from City Heights.

SANDAG recently completed a conceptual study for building the Purple Line as heavy rail underground, and it expects a study of possible alternatives for the corridor, such as light rail and bus service, to be complete within a year.

If built as light rail like the trolley’s other lines, current estimates project the route to have a daily ridership of 20,000. The Blue Line, the most heavily used line, has about 71,000 daily riders.

It would be difficult to secure federal or state funding for a route with that projected level of ridership, said Jennifer Williamson, SANDAG’s deputy director of mobility planning.

Rapid buses, long-awaited highway fixes

With investments in heavy rail now off the table, the regional plan wants to shift the agency’s focus to another mode of transit: rapid buses.

Over the next decade, the regional plan calls for the completion of up to 35 new rapid bus routes. High-level planning is already underway for six of them, all on major transit corridors.

One MTS route would roughly parallel the planned path of the Purple Line, while another would follow the Blue Line trolley with limited stops between San Ysidro and downtown.

Leif Gensert, vice president of transit advocacy group Ride SD, worries that rapid buses won’t offer service as reliable as the kinds of rail projects SANDAG now wants to downgrade and delay.

What’s more, if SANDAG doesn’t run the buses in dedicated lanes with priority signaling, it could make bus transit even less attractive, Gensert added.

“You can sprinkle in these compromises here and there, and ultimately, the bus will not be as good as they promised in the regional plan,” he said.

Another rapid route operated by the North County Transit District between Temecula and San Marcos would direct more investment to state Route 78, a corridor where SANDAG wants to direct billions under the regional plan.

The new plan calls for $1.5 billion worth of managed lanes on that stretch between Interstates 5 and 15 to reduce congestion — a longtime goal of North County leaders.

Managed lanes favor carpooling and public buses but allow for individual drivers to pay a fee to drive on them, much like a toll road. The makeover also includes a $444 million overhaul of SR-78’s much-hated interchange with I-5 in Oceanside.

To Orso, the SR-78 corridor could be a prime spot for SANDAG to pivot to a new strategy for how it executes its projects.

In recent SANDAG board meetings, Orso and other officials have supported using the money the agency already has available for smaller segments of large projects, instead of waiting to have funding in hand to build everything.

“The idea is when you get money, let’s put that to use and make a difference in people’s lives,” LaCava said.

Orso has identified state Route 67 between Lakeside and Ramona as another potential site for phased projects.

The regional plan calls for $1.2 billion in new investment to improve the road by 2035, a project that includes shoulder widening, intersection improvements, fire access roads, bicycle paths and protection from falling rocks.

Over the last decade, Caltrans has already spent nearly $60 million on safety and maintenance projects on the road, including on a mountainous stretch that is particularly dangerous. Just this summer, eight people died in crashes on the road in the span of about a week.

Future tax hikes

While the regional plan is a lengthy wish list of projects, state and federal law requires SANDAG to identify how it’s going to pay for them all.

For that, SANDAG includes major assumptions in the plan that hinge on the will of county voters.

An original draft of the plan called for using two future votes on half-cent sales tax surcharges to bankroll future projects — one aimed at the 2032 ballot and another in 2036.

The plan has since been revised to call for a single ballot measure in 2036 that would raise local sales tax by three-quarters of a cent.

The ballot measures — which would each need a two-thirds majority to pass — would bring in about $14 billion in revenue by 2050.

Another key revenue assumption for the regional plan is a proposed half-cent ballot measure being sought by MTS in its coverage area for 2028. If successful, the regional estimates that new surcharges and other local revenues for MTS could generate nearly $11 billion for SANDAG projects involving the transit agency’s service by 2050.

SANDAG’s current half-cent sales tax — TransNet — already plays a critical role in the agency’s finances. Just 16% of total revenue, TransNet is expected to bring in $434 million for the agency’s budget in the current fiscal year. And since voters first passed it in 1987, later extending it in 2004, it has raked in $8.2 billion, according to SANDAG.

But over the last decade, getting county voters to back more sales tax ballot measures to fund transit has failed.

A SANDAG-led measure failed in 2016. And last year, the agency had a chance to boost its revenue even more with Measure G, which aimed to raise the local sales tax by another half a cent to fund transportation projects.

Because a citizens committee would have administered the spending of the revenue, that ballot measure needed only a simple majority to pass. Instead it narrowly failed, winning 49.5% of the vote.

“If there was to be another tax, what would it look like? What would be the priorities for that?” said Oceanside Mayor Esther Sanchez, who sits on SANDAG’s board. “You’re not going to get people to vote for that unless they’re good projects.”

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