All good, right? Not even close. The plan relies heavily on three half-cent sales tax hikes — each requiring voter approval — and a controversial per-mile road use charge eyed for 2030. Republican board members have long lambasted it as an unfair mileage tax and this week board chair and Encinitas Mayor Catherine Blakespear, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and National City Mayor Alejandra Sotelo-Solis opposed the charge. What an alternative would look like is anyone's guess at this stage.
The path forward is unclear and unappealing: Approve the plan to stay in compliance and in the running for lots of money, then rework it? In travel terms, this is called building a plane while flying it.
You'll remember SANDAG from the scandal in recent years when the estimates for its last regional transit plan were found to be wildly overstated, leaving revenue projections nowhere close to reality and promised projects on the cutting room floor. SANDAG Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata took over the troubled agency three years ago, promising truth and transparency. Now, touting the on-time and on-budget completion last month of the $2.2 billion Mid-Coast Trolley extension, the largest infrastructure project in the region's history, he envisions a 200-mile network of elevated or tunneled high-speed rail that uses electric trains linking a dozen new stations, including large facilities near the San Diego airport and the Tijuana border. This as the state's once 800-plus-mile high-speed rail project is vastly scaled back, many years behind schedule and far over budget — and as SANDAG's bikeway network has blown past its own budget amid delays.
Let's take a closer look.
In context, the plan's issues are plain: Too few riders. Too uncertain a time. Too pie in the sky.
1. More appealing, expanded, low- or zero-emission transit is essential. It's important that the trolley extension now connects the border to one of the region's biggest job hubs. Nevertheless, people in sprawling regions like Southern California have never embraced transit as people in densely packed cities like New York have. Ikhrata says that if the new trains are convenient, comfortable and fast, transit use would grow sharply among riders who choose to use transit as opposed to those who do because they don't have cars, perhaps tripling use. The history of the Southern California Association of Governments, the Los Angeles regional transportation agency where Ikhrata used to work, suggests otherwise. From 1990 to 2018, it added more than 100 miles of light and heavy rail and more than 530 miles of commuter rail — and transit use went down. Some smarter investments in transit have potential, but electric car subsidies can appeal to the masses. Shouldn't the plan factor this in more?
2. The long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on commuting are unclear. And a rise in working from home, likely leaps in transportation technology and slowing population growth make it especially hard to predict the future. Ridesharing is an innovation that's here to stay, and bikes and scooters have their (small) place in the system, but there may never be an easy answer for the first and last mile quandary of efficiently getting people from transit hubs to their homes or workplaces. Meanwhile, investors are betting billions on the promise of autonomous or semi-autonomous electric vehicles, which could be summoned by people from their phones for trips. Isn't it better to build an ever bigger network of electric charging stations than so many fixed rail lines?
3. Finally, how can SANDAG ignore all the profound problems facing the state of California's similarly ambitious rail program? In 2008, state voters approved $9.95 billion in bond seed money for a statewide high-speed rail system. But in 2012, facing implacable opposition to the bullet train in wealthy communities in Silicon Valley, state officials gave up on the idea of a high-speed link to San Francisco. How on Earth can SANDAG assume that wealthy communities like Solana Beach and Encinitas will accept the disruptive construction of rail lines that Cupertino and Sunnyvale rejected?
In a Monday Zoom interview with members of The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board, Ikhrata offered no specific response when asked how a SANDAG high-speed rail project could escape the community opposition that knee-capped the state's project. In response to another question, he said, "I don't want to talk about fantasyland. I want to build things."
But "fantasyland" is exactly what the San Diego regional transportation plan is. It envisions a public appetite for transit that doesn't exist. It embraces a fixed-route transit approach built on 20th-century assumptions about technology. And it presumes that San Diegans will placidly accept the disruptions of life from new rail construction that Silicon Valley residents saw as unfathomable.
If SANDAG's leaders feel compelled to adopt the regional plan this month to meet state and federal edicts, so be it. But until the three questions above are answered — fully and honestly — San Diegans have 160 billion reasons to want SANDAG to go back to the drawing board.
©2021 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
