The looming scenarios that could sever San Diego’s only rail connection to the rest of the United States are haunted by “what-ifs” and lost opportunities that reach back more than four decades.
Last month, crumbling cliffs once again dumped rocks and dirt on the fragile track along San Clemente beaches, disrupting Amtrak’s second busiest corridor, Metrolink commuter service, and freight movement. Officials are scrambling once more to temporarily stabilize the bluffs and advocating a permanent move of the route inland both at San Clemente and farther south at Del Mar, where the cliff-hugging track is within feet of tumbling into the Pacific should ongoing short-term fixes there fail.
Yet the most optimistic plans target 2035 for completion of a $4 billion inland Del Mar tunnel; those for an alternative in San Clemente are even less developed. The possibility of a long-term interruption is disturbingly real, bringing collateral economic damage to the Port of San Diego where nearly 10% of all cars for American roads arrive for rail shipment nationwide. Tourism would take a big hit and Camp Pendleton would lose a vital transportation artery for moving equipment in a mobilization.
And here are the what-ifs:
• What if a visionary 1979 bill by the late-San Diego congressman Lionel Van Deerlin and backed by Caltrans Director Adriana Gianturco had passed to appropriate $1 billion and pare Amtrak’s one-way LA-San Diego running times by 30 minutes to just two hours by 1990, competitive with the fastest drive, by relocating the route at Del Mar and San Clemente and fully double-tracking the 120-mile line?
Instead, there was at best tepid support from area leaders and strong opposition from the Santa Fe Railway, rail line owner at the time, and meaningful political backing never materialized. Over the past 40 years, running times have actually ballooned from two-and-a-half hours to three as an increased number of trains too often clog at single-track bottlenecks in San Diego and southern Orange counties.
• What if promoters who in April 1982 announced a privately-funded and operated Japanese-style bullet train between LA and San Diego had then worked cooperatively with coastal residents and local officials explaining specifics for tunnels and above-ground environmental mitigation?
Instead, they kept details secret until unveiling an end-of-session bill with powerful leaders in the California legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown that allowed a bypass of major environmental reviews. The immediate blowback poisoned their reception almost everywhere. Distrustful coastline dwellers worried about visual and noise pollution formed powerful anti-bullet-train coalitions, frightening away would-be investors and collapsing the plans in October 1984.
• What if state and local officials hadn’t recoiled as dramatically as they did following the bullet train fiasco and had considered private-public ventures for train service similar to that now a reality between Miami and Orlando, where a private company runs trains at speeds up to 125 mph, averaging 70 mph on existing railroad rights-of-way and making the 181-mile trip faster than Interstate driving?
Instead, Southern California planners slow-walked piecemeal improvements county by county over three decades as relatively small pots of federal, state and local funds became available to add track at easy-to-widen sections and replace century-old bridges. But progress was slowest in San Diego County, with less funding and a greater number of difficult issues, leaving the knottiest hurdles like a Del Mar alternative unscheduled even through 2050, until cliff collapses became a frightening reality.
The state’s focus moved to 220-mph high-speed rail with passage in 2008 of a $9 billion state bond to begin its construction between LA and San Francisco. Even if mismanagement and false optimism hadn’t quickly doomed the original projections, the subsequent San Diego-LA portion — an inland route via Riverside — would not have entered service until 2040 at the earliest. Imagine how the coastal line might look if as little as a fourth of the $25 billion (and counting) already plowed into a now-truncated 181-mile Merced-Bakersfield project (to open at the earliest in 2030) had been spent in Southern California.
So today the most vexing challenges to a safe and fast coastal rail route envisioned 45 years ago still remain unmet: the threatened segments at Del Mar and San Clemente, the serpentine single track in Soledad Canyon, and the cramped right-of-way through downtown Encinitas.
There are now urgent calls for unified, focused action led by the state’s transportation planning agencies. Let’s demand that this time the past not be prologue to more band-aids. Mother Nature has lost patience; so should the region’s residents.
David Smollar is a former a Los Angeles Times staff writer who covered transportation in Southern California. He lives in Tierrasanta.