Let Them Take Buses: The Ugly Truth About San Diego Transit Commuting
Why do San Diego’s political leaders keep pushing transit-oriented development in a city with a hopelessly inadequate transit system?
That question was at the heart of my August 29 post about commuting by bus and trolley around San Diego. Our YIMBY government claims that more people will use transit if they live closer to it. Judging by the responses to my post, proximity won’t make a bit of difference.
Simply put, the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) does not get people where they need to go when they need to be there. The Blue, Orange and Green trolley lines are efficient, but they are linear routes with narrow reach. Most of the city must depend on a sprawl of 97 bus lines that are neither timely nor user-friendly.
For a full picture of the hardships of transit commuting, and using the excellent online MTS Trip Planner, let’s map out how the residents of two “Complete Communities” housing projects would take buses and trolleys to regional employment centers for jobs that start at 8:30 a.m.
In Point Loma, a four-story, 56-unit apartment building is planned at the busy intersection of Rosecrans and Talbot Streets. In Lomita, 37 ADU units are slated for construction at 819 Jacumba Street. Neither project will have on-site parking for residents. Both are in congested neighborhoods where street parking is already scarce.
We’ll start by commuting from Rosecrans and Talbot to Qualcomm in Sorrento Valley. You would leave at 7:00, walk to Rosecrans and Canon to catch the #28 bus to the Old Town Transit Center, take the Coaster to the Sorrento Valley station, then take the 472 Coaster connection bus to Qualcomm Building Q.
Your total transit time is 1 hour and 25 minutes, including 14 minutes of walking. If you drove, even in rush hour, the estimated time would be 35 minutes.
Now let’s commute from Lomita to the UCSD Hillcrest Medical Center. To arrive by 8:30, you’d have to leave home at 6:40 and walk over to St. Vicente Street to catch the #4 bus. You get off at Paradise Valley and Meadowbrook to catch the #12 bus to Logan Avenue and Jarrett Court. Then you catch your third bus of the morning, the #3, which takes you to the Medical Center.
Your total transit time is 1 hour and 39 minutes, with 5 minutes of walking. If you drove, even in rush hour, the estimated time would be at most 40 minutes.
How many people will choose to commute to work by transit when they can drive there in half the time? How many people have the patience and the energy to trudge from home to transit stop to transit stop to workplace?
Political leaders don’t consider such logistics because they have a “let them take buses” mindset. As then-Councilmember Monica Montgomery Steppe coolly remarked during a 2023 discussion of Transit Priority Areas, “You will walk a mile to transit if you have to. For those of us who maybe have never had to, it’s easy to say folks won’t do that.”
Indeed. The little people learn to suck it up at an early age. Let’s face it, we can’t all be important and privileged.
Which brings me back to my invitation to Nicole Capretz of the Climate Action Campaign to ride the #2 bus with me.
My Rag post responded to Capretz’s August 28 Union-Tribune op-ed pushing for passage of pro-density Senate Bill 79. I wanted to know if Capretz, a champion of transit-oriented development, uses transit herself.
I haven’t heard from her yet, but I’m holding out hope. In fact, I want to expand the scope of my outreach to include Councilmembers, Planning Commissioners, and city planners.
The next time any deliberative body at City Hall discusses transit-related housing, the public should ask each member on the record how they commuted to the meeting and how they regularly get to work.
A final “thank you” to Paul Webb and Carolyn Chase for comments on my post that taught me a lot. Like most of San Diego’s problems, we have lousy transit because short-sighted civic leaders through the years were too lethargic to engineer a system that gives people the services they actually need.
Rag story about Steppe from February 2023