The Del Mar Council Member Who Became the Lone Opponent of the Train Tunnel

Del Mar Councilmember Dan Quirk wants San Diego County to get rid of its train.

It’s not a popular perspective and it has made Quirk somewhat of an outlier on the council. It has also put him at odds with many residents and transportation agency officials.

That also means he’s not in support of a multi-billion-dollar plan to move a portion of the train tracks that run along the edge of the fragile Del Mar bluffs into an underground tunnel – another opinion that seems to go against the majority.

The San Diego Association of Governments has been talking about moving a portion of the train tracks into a tunnel for years. It’s one of the agency’s most anticipated projects of this decade. In the meantime, the agency, along with the North County Transit District, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to stabilize the bluffs and keep the rail line secure.

SANDAG and NCTD officials and the region’s leaders haven’t yet decided where exactly the tunnel will go, but most people are on board with the project itself, despite its estimated $4 billion price tag.

The tunnel would run a couple hundred feet underground and at least a mile inland from the tracks’ current, precarious location. It’s part of a larger 40-year, $160-billion regional plan created by SANDAG. 

In 2022, SANDAG received a $300 million grant from the state to put toward the tunnel. Danny Veeh, SANDAG’s rail planning program manager, told the Union-Tribune in 2022 that it was “larger than any other award that SANDAG has received to work on the LOSSAN corridor.”

The LOSSAN corridor is the railroad route from San Diego to Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo.

The 1.6 miles of train tracks that run along the Del Mar bluffs is part of that corridor, and most elected officials agree that SANDAG eventually must move it. The bluffs recede at a rate of 6 inches annually, and at some spots in Del Mar, the rails are just a few feet from the eroding cliff.

Transit leaders say the tracks are vital to the region’s commerce and transportation. The LOSSAN corridor handles about $1 billion in freight, or goods, and nearly 8 million passengers annually, with the majority of that traffic on rail segments between San Diego and Los Angeles, according to SANDAG.

“It’s our only rail link between San Diego and the rest of the country,” Veeh told the Union-Tribune in November. “It’s a vital piece of infrastructure for this region, and we have an obligation to maintain this rail corridor.”

Quirk disagrees.

“This train is not viable,” he said.

He points to data from SANDAG and the NCTD that shows steadily declining ridership numbers over the past several years, arguing that the ridership numbers and usage of the rail aren’t enough to warrant this much spending on it.

For example, NCTD’s total number of passenger boardings have declined by 51 percent from 2013 to 2022, according to the agency’s 2022 comprehensive financial report.

“All projects like this should go through a cost benefit analysis,” Quirk said. “The primary benefit for rail projects like this is, in fact, the passenger ridership… It’s to move people around. And there’s nothing that comes even close to the cost per trip or cost per rider when you look at the cost of the Del Mar tunnel.”

SANDAG and NCTD have acknowledged that ridership has declined, but they attribute the decline to the pandemic. Both agencies say numbers are slowly increasing again and will keep growing as they continue to make improvements to the rail lines and add more trains.

But Quirk isn’t convinced. He wants the region’s leaders to consider discontinuing a 61-mile stretch of train tracks that currently runs from San Diego to just south of San Juan Capistrano. 

“It 100 percent needs to be looked at for termination,” Quirk said.

He added that Del Mar and San Clemente saw constant bluff failures and other disruptions that stopped rail service for most of last year, costing millions of dollars in repairs. These costly disruptions are going to keep happening every year with the rail line’s continued operation, Quirk said.

He wants that stretch of train tracks to, instead, be repurposed into a trail for public use.

For his colleagues, though, not having a train isn’t an option. And Quirk’s insistence on the issue hasn’t sat well with them over the years.

Quirk and the other council members have clashed on this issue multiple times, resulting in heated discussions, reprimands and even a censure.

Last month, the Del Mar City Council voted to censure Quirk saying he made statements about the train and the tunnel to other agencies and the media without making it clear he was speaking for himself and not the city.

The censure, which is a formal statement of disapproval, came after Quirk did a TV interview with KUSI reiterating his criticisms of SANDAG and the North County Transit District, the train tunnel and San Diego’s rail line in general.

KUSI identified him as a Del Mar council member and the city’s official logo was displayed in the background of his interview.

One council member, David Druker, said city staff has had to repeatedly apologize for Quirk’s comments to multiple agencies and assure them that he is expressing his own opinion, not the opinion of the council.

Quirk told Voice of San Diego that, as an elected official, he’s allowed to discuss his viewpoints freely.

“I have no respect for the council on this issue,” Quirk said. “The censure was completely ridiculous. It’s an attack on my First Amendment free speech rights.”

And Quirk doesn’t plan on keeping his differing viewpoints to himself. It’s why he declined the position as the mayor of Del Mar.

In Del Mar, the mayor is an appointed position determined by a vote of the five council members, not a vote of the people. No one runs for the mayor position.

By tradition, it rotates from year to year, going to the first and then the second vote getters of the previous elections. Councilmember Tracy Martinez won the most votes in 2020, which is why she was mayor in 2023. Quirk won the second most votes and would traditionally be appointed to the mayor role for 2024.

But Quirk declined the role last month saying he refuses to put himself in a position where he may have to compromise his values.

“To be clear, I am not anti-transit,” Quirk said. “I’ve lived in New York and San Francisco – places where I used the subway and public transportation every day. There are places where trains are viable and have a cost-benefit trade-off that makes sense.”

But San Diego is not one of those places, Quirk argues. The consistently low ridership of the train is not worth putting billions of dollars into its continued operations, he said.

He’s also taken issue with a sales tax measure that a coalition of labor leaders and climate activists recently put on the November ballot. The measure is a countywide, half a cent sales tax increase to fund SANDAG’s regional transportation plan, including the train tunnel.

“Sales taxes are incredibly regressive, so those penalize everyone in the county,” Quirk said. “A decreasing number of people use these train tracks in the county, but 100 percent could potentially be paying for it via a sales tax.”

SANDAG would control all of the money from the tax increase and most of it would go toward transit projects, with the remaining funds going toward highway and road improvements.

Quirk said funds and resources should instead go to other projects in the region, like the Surf Line Trail.

In Atlanta, Georgia, 22 miles of unused railroad tracks were repurposed into trails, walkways, open green space and parks to create the Atlanta BeltLine.

In New York City, a 1.45-mile elevated trail and linear park occupies what was once a section of the New York Central Railroad. It’s now called the High Line.

This is what Quirk envisions for the 61-mile stretch of train tracks that currently run from San Diego to just south of San Juan Capistrano.

It’s a movement called the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, an effort to preserve unused rail corridors for public use. The organization has converted thousands of railroad tracks into public trails for walking, running and biking since its inception in 1986.

Quirk and his twin brother are working on garnering support for the Surf Line Trail. It’s an effort he plans to continue championing, he says.