Hutton Marshall | Uptown Editor

SANDAG leads study on improving busy transit corridor

Key agencies throughout the city recently teamed up to get a general sense of how to improve transportation along San Diego’s central interstate.

The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), a regional planning agency, teamed up with the City of San Diego, the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) and the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) to examine a 13.6-mile stretch of the Interstate 8, hoping to relieve some of the traffic congestion notorious in Southern California.

On July 25 and 29, the four organizations hosted their first round of community information meetings on the I-8 Corridor Study, which SANDAG plans to finish by Spring 2015. The meetings, held in Old Town and College Area, were an opportunity for the community to weigh in on specific areas along the portion of the I-8 in question — which stretches from College Area to the interstate’s end in Ocean Beach.

Residents weighed in on several specific issues, such as the Fairmont Drive entry onto I-8 just past the eastern edge of Kensington, as well as the jam-packed region of Mission Valley funneling into I-8 entryways.

The project’s manager, Scott Strelecki, an associate regional planner at SANDAG, said lane expansion of the actual interstate wasn’t on the table. Rather, he said the study hoped to identify potential transportation projects that would compliment the I-8 corridor.

Overall, Strelecki said, the study is not in-depth enough to see specific projects to fruition, but rather look for areas or projects with great potential for improvement.

“I think the important thing that — when we’re at a workshop like this — that’s often hard for the public to understand is that this is just the beginning of analyzing the corridor,” Strelecki said. “Once we have the final study done, there may be things that have strong potential to be built, and if there’s funding capabilities for it, then it’ll need more detailed analysis.”

Strelecki said the study will look at the I-8 Corridor within the context of SANDAG’s Regional Transportation Plan, which lays out long-term transportation planning as far ahead as 2050.

“Corridor studies are going to take things that already exist and say, we know this is already planned, let’s put in in there. Then they’re going to say, well let’s try to identify things on top of that, that are issues that we can address,” Strelecki said. “It’s your opportunity to test some things and see if other things shake out.”

While Strelecki said other studies have analyzed the I-8’s span across the state, there hasn’t been a study done specifically on the I-8 through San Diego in recent memory.

On SANDAG’s website, it lists right-of-way constraints, freeway interchanges, “selected” local streets and intersections, and active transportation among other potential projects to be considered within the scope of the study.

The two July meetings were just the first round of public input to be gathered for the corridor study, said SANDAG spokesperson Tedi Jackson. SANDAG will now compile and publish the feedback it received. It will then analyze the corridor with the public input in mind before holding a more focused round of public input meetings at the end of 2014.

Visit sandag.org/I-8 for more information about the I-8 Corridor Study.