$1 Billion Grant Awarded For San Diego Trolley Project
Construction on the roughly 11-mile light rail extension is set to ramp up next month.
A $1.04 billion federal grant that will help cover about half the cost of extending a trolley line north from downtown San Diego has been approved, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration said Wednesday.
The $2.17 billion Mid-Coast Trolley extension will be among the largest public transit projects in the history of the region, according to the San Diego Association of Governments. Plans call for adding nearly 11 miles and nine stations to the San Diego Trolley system’s Blue Line.
Operations on the Blue Line began in 1981. It now stretches about 15 miles, from the San Ysidro Transit Center, near the Mexican border and Tijuana, north to downtown San Diego.
The line is part of a roughly 54-mile rail system with two other trolley lines that serve 53 stations.
Once the extension is complete, Blue Line trolleys will travel from the Santa Fe Depot in downtown, along existing Green Line tracks, to San Diego’s Old Town.
New rails will extend north from there, alongside Interstate 5, before arcing east to the University of California, San Diego campus and then turning south with the line terminating at what’s known as the Westfield UTC shopping center.
The Federal Transit Administration committed money to the project through its Capital Investment Grant Program.
Funding to supplement the federal grant will come from a countywide, voter-approved half-cent sales tax for local transportation projects, dubbed TransNet. The tax was first approved in 1988 and extended in 2004 for another 40 years.
The trolley line extension project will initially be awarded $100 million in federal funds. The remaining money will be provided in annual payments over 10 years and is subject to congressional approval.
San Diego has about 1.3 million residents. Planners estimate that the extended line will handle upwards of 20,000 new trips every weekday.
“With the population along the Mid-Coast corridor expected to grow nearly 20 percent in the coming decades, this trolley extension will offer a much-needed alternative to traffic congestion in the years ahead,” Acting FTA Administrator Carolyn Flowers said in a statement.
Utility relocation work is already underway for the project with heavier construction set to begin in October.
The line is currently scheduled to open to riders in 2021.
Serving as the construction manager and general contractor on the project is Mid-Coast Transit Constructors, a joint-venture between the construction and engineering firms Stacy and Witbeck, Inc., Herzog Contracting Corp. and Skanska USA.
Bill Lucia is a Reporter at Government Executive's Route Fifty and is based in Washington D.C.
