Yesterday
Horses, cables and kilowatts
San Diego’s first big land boom was just under way when Elisha S. Babcock, Jr., and Hampton L. Story launched the city’s first transit service to take residents where they wanted to go.
On July 3, 1886, the San Diego Street Car Company began sending horse- and mule-drawn coaches along thin, flat-iron rails laid through the central business district, running between Fifth and L streets and the bay along the corridor now known as Broadway.
The open-air cars transported as many as 32 people at a time along mostly unpaved streets. Fares were five cents. Within three years, the system had expanded to five routes, all centered on the bustling commercial area. Legend has it the company once was fined for allowing a car to hurdle along Fifth Street at an unlawful speed of 8 miles per hour.
Horse-drawn coaches had been used elsewhere for decades but before long, a brand-new technology appeared on San Diego streets. The electric streetcar made its debut on Nov. 19, 1887, initially running between downtown and Old Town before the poles and wires were dismantled and moved to a new line on Fourth Street.
Like several other start-ups of the early rail era, the first electric cars were short-lived. A cable-car operation that ran from downtown San Diego to Park and Adams, boasting vehicles with curtained windows, kerosene dome lights and stained-glass transoms and speeds of up to 10 miles per hour. It lasted only 13 months in 1890-91. And when San Diego’s land boom came to an end so did the original streetcar business. It went into insolvency in 1891 and was sold for $115,000 in January 1892 to John D. Spreckels, the city’s most prominent entrepreneur.
Spreckels’ San Diego Electric Railway Co. inaugurated service on Sept. 21, 1892, launching a new era of public transit that would transform San Diego and lead directly to the Metropolitan Transit System of today. A grand civic ceremony with a double-decker streetcar at Fifth and H (now Market) streets marked the beginning of five-cent service.
“Several stops were made for frightened horses,” said a newspaper account of a test run a few days earlier, “and also at a few switches to allow horse cars to pass.”
The cars went as far as 31st Street and back. “All along the route people ran out by the hundreds to see the electric car.”
In Spreckels’ mind, streetcar operations should expand with an eye toward promoting development, not following it, in the outer reaches of the young city. New and remodeled cars quickly were put into service to increase the passenger carrying capacity. Spreckels took control of a railway in National City and converted it to electric power, starting the first interurban service – from Chula Vista and National City to San Diego – late in 1907. Extensions to Otay and Ocean Beach followed.
More significantly, however, San Diego Electric Railway began building lines through barren corridors to such neighborhoods as North Park, East San Diego and Kensington, which were all but vacant at the time. As the service took hold, subdivisions were mapped and the neighborhoods began to boom. Or as Spreckels himself put it: “Transportation determines the flow of population.”
From rail to rubber
A double-track line to Balboa Park opened in 1914 in conjunction with the Panama-California Exposition of 1915. About the same time, service to the international border was introduced, followed in the ‘20s by lines to Mission Beach, La Jolla and Ocean Beach. The Electric Railway Co. also pressed its first buses into service in 1922, for service between National City and Chula Vista, the first step in a 27-year transition from steel wheels to rubber tires.
A more streamlined, quieter and faster model of streetcar was introduced to San Diego in 1937, making its first appearance in the western U.S. These Presidential Conference Committee cars were aimed at keeping a streetcar system, but their time in San Diego would be short.
Marjorie McLaughlin, who began 35 years as a streetcar and bus operator in 1945, remembers the era as a time both forms of transit services addressed vital needs. “A great many people did depend on them a lot. Part of this was during a war when gasoline was hard to get. And a lot of people worked places where it was very difficult to find a parking space for an automobile.”
As the business became a financial drain, the Spreckels family sold the streetcar business to the Western Transit Co., which changed the name of local operations to the San Diego Transit System.
On April 23, 1949, a caravan of 45 buses made a procession along Broadway. Car No. 446 pulled into the Adams Avenue car before dawn the next day on its final run, and San Diego – one of the first cities in the U.S. to adopt streetcars – became the first city on the West Coast to switch entirely to buses.
Today
Private to public
San Diego Transit transferred to the City of San Diego’s hands as a non-profit corporation in 1967. The Metropolitan Transit Development Board was formed about 10 years later under legislation sponsored by state Sen. James Mills and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. Placing decisions into the hands of a public agency meant transportation policy could help promote broader, more regional goals.
Senator Mills, who rode streetcars as a child, and other civic leaders were thinking big from the start: the first new light-rail system in the U.S. since World War II. Rail transit returned to San Diego on July 26, 1981, as the San Diego Trolley began regular operations along its 15.9-mile line between downtown San Diego and San Ysidro, just 200 feet from the international border.
The $86 million project was completed on time and without federal funding. The initial fleet, operating from 5 a.m.to 9 p.m., consisted of 14 cars, built in Germany and painted bright red. One-way fares were a dollar.
Like the original streetcars, trolleys were a part of the overall vitality of San Diego’s downtown business district, which included the opening of the Horton Plaza shopping mall in 1985.
The first extension in the trolley system was a 4.5-mile line from 12th & Imperial to Euclid Avenue. Gov. George Deukmejian joined civic leaders as a ride-along in a Mar. 20, 1986 ceremony to launch the Euclid Line, which featured six new trolley cars.
Bowls, baseballs and Batman
Over the years, the San Diego Trolley grew into three lines of over 53.5 miles with 53 stations, including an underground stop at San Diego State University. The trolley has kept pace with a development boom in Mission Valley and is credited with a share of the success of the San Diego Convention Center, where it has served annual Comic-Cons and the 1996 Republican National Convention. It carried thousands of football fans to Holiday Bowls and Super Bowls XXXII and XXXVII at Qualcomm Stadium, and serves all regular San Diego Chargers and San Diego Padres games at Qualcomm and Petco Park, respectively.
Average weekday ridership is more than 91,000 and total ridership since 1981 is placed at more than 605 million.
Leon Williams, a former San Diego city councilman, county supervisor, and transit board chairman, said the trolley has accomplished “what most of us had in mind.”
“It’s done more than most people expected,” says Williams. “One of the ambitions we always had was to try to induce people to ride who DO have a choice.”
The bus system, operating hand-in-hand with the trolley, has seen change, too. The fleet went green, converting mostly to vehicles powered by compressed natural gas or gasoline-electric hybrid engines.
A “Super Loop” in North University City was introduced in 2009, tying the community’s biggest employment, shopping and hospital centers together in service with quicker intervals and electronic tricks to avoid gridlock. A premium bus service, also known as bus rapid transit, has been introduced on several routes in the Interstate 15 corridor, a possible precursor to similar routes throughout the region.
The transit agency consolidated its bus and trolley functions under a new name, the Metropolitan Transit System, in 2005. Its achievements drew widespread notice in 2009 with an award as “Outstanding Transit System of the Year” from the American Public Transportation Association.
More places to go
What’s in store for the transit passenger of tomorrow?
MTS is part of a countywide transit plan looking all the way to 2050, promoting smarter, more sustainable growth with hundreds of miles of new trolley tracks and speedier bus service.
As the population of San Diego continues to increase, says Leon Williams, transit can help preserve “really nice, viable communities” with a circulatory system that gets people where they want to go.
A trolley renewal project already is under way along the Blue and Orange lines. Trolley stations between Old Town and downtown San Diego are being remodeled to accommodate the more modern, low-floor vehicles currently used only on the Green Line. Passengers no longer will need to transfer from one trolley to another to complete a trip between Mission Valley and the convention center or Petco Park.
Old rail, overhead wires and other equipment is being replaced to ensure a smoother and more reliable ride. The renewal work is scheduled to be finished by 2015.
As one of its next big transit projects, MTS aims to construct a trolley extension to University City. The Mid-Coast line would run from Old Town to the UTC mall, with stops at Mission Bay, Pacific Beach, Clairemont and the University of California San Diego. MTS has applied for federal funding to help with construction; the local share would come from Transnet, the voter-approved half-percent sales tax.
Other parts of the 2050 plan still are in public review and are tentative depending on funding sources. They include trolley lines to Sorrento Mesa, Mira Mesa, Kearny Mesa and the beaches. There could be a downtown trolley tunnel – just like a subway – and grade separations at other locations to reduce interference between light-rail and automobile traffic. And how about “express” trolleys between UTC and the border to drastically cut travel times?
Buses play a big role in the future, too. MTS hopes to introduce a network of bus rapid-transit lines, making long-distance trips speedier and more comfortable. Urban bus routes would offer more frequent service.
And taking transit back where it started 125 years ago, there’s even talk of the return of streetcars, to be reintroduced in such locations as downtown San Diego, East Village, North Park and Hillcrest.
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