If you live in North County, particularly on the coast, you’ve probably heard about a plan to move a portion of the train tracks that run along the edge of the Del Mar bluffs into an underground tunnel.
If that sounds extremely complicated and very expensive, that’s because it is.
It’s called the LOSSAN Rail Realignment project, and it’s led by the San Diego Association of Governments, better known as SANDAG, which is the region’s transportation agency.
Right now, the project has an estimated price tag of $4 billion, so it’s not going to be cheap. That’s only a small piece of SANDAG’s larger 40-year, $160-billion regional transportation plan.
Side note: If you haven’t already heard, there’s going to be a countywide sales tax measure on the November ballot that would help pay for that massive transportation plan, including the tunnel. A coalition of labor leaders and climate activists put it on the ballot.
Despite its outrageous price tag, most of the area’s public officials do agree that the train has to be moved.
That’s because there has been a string of bluff collapses in Del Mar over the past several years that have suspended train services for multiple days. Many fear it could be just a matter of time before something catastrophic happens.
According to experts, 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.
But even though most people agree the tracks need to be moved into a tunnel, the location of the tunnel is where it starts to get a little more complicated.
SANDAG had five possible routes where a tunnel could go, and then they narrowed it down to two. Then, Del Mar residents started to take issue with the idea of a train running underneath their homes, so now, there are about a dozen possible routes for the tunnel, and people are starting to wonder: when and how is it going to be narrowed down?
According to SANDAG officials, the first step is just around the corner. Next month, SANDAG will start the first phase of developing an Environmental Impact Report, which is a detailed analysis of the environmental effects that a project will have on an area.
The final environmental impact report probably won’t be completed until 2026, but the process will start in just a couple of weeks.
Officials also said at a recent transportation committee meeting that they’re working on narrowing down those route options as we speak. Ultimately, only a few route options will be evaluated in the Environmental Impact Report.
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This is a dumb and expensive idea. The rail line is going to have to be moved inland. It is not just Del Mar, there are unstable sections of track to the north as well. Digging an expensive tunnel that will have to be abandoned in a decade or so is dumb, dumb, dumb.
Do what you have to in order to keep the rail line running until it can be moved inland. But don’t invest big buck on this line, it will not survive.
That’s a lot of bike lanes. But the reality is, there’s not a lot of long term forward thinking going on, city or state.
This title seems designed to cater to the NIMBYs, or in this case maybe NUMBYs? There is already so much FUD and disinformation flowing around the Del Mar communities. Tunnel drilling is a mature technology, proven over decades and even centuries. It can and will be done safely without impacting the community above ground. Futureproofing our transportation network just makes sense and is the sort of thing government should be doing on a regular basis