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ChineseRide report - North County Transit District
Ahh, San Diego.
There’s a lot to love about it. It’s room temperature 300 days out of the year, Sea World makes it fun – and profitable – to watch an orca belly flop, the zoo is vast and beautiful and it was ahead of the curve in the central city and public transit renaissances.
Only, this is about the cities north of it. At least it’s in the same county. And the city’s attractions make a more interesting lead than saying the North County cities are remarkable for being military towns that do not have tattoo parlors and rancid prostitutes as their economic base.
The way to explore San Diego – city or county – is by public transportation. The meager service and exorbitant fares are made up by excellent planning and scenic routes that are fun to ride.
The North County Transit District provides bus service in, well, northern San Diego County. Duh. It’s no ordinary bus system. It is one of the smallest bus agencies to also operate rail. Coaster is a commuter train from the north coastal suburbs to downtown San Diego using bilevel Bombardier cars, just like the ones on Metrolink.
The other rail service is not ready yet, but it is scheduled for disgracing North San Diego County and rail transit in general sometime next winter. Sprinter is a diesel-powered fustercluck that spans across the North County, from Oceanside to Escondido, at about the same speed, frequency and fare of an existing express bus.
One of the reasons of this journey is just to see ridership on Sprinter’s parallel bus lines and see how useless the train service will be.
But enough about the negatives.
The day stared very early, at 8 a.m., to take southbound Metrolink train 600 from Union Station to Oceanside. Ridership was very good from L.A., and there were several passengers boarding in Norwalk and north Orange County. Most of the passengers looked to be in their 40s and 50s, heading to jobs in the tragic kingdom. Beyond Irvine, ridership becomes younger and more scantily clad. They headed to San Clemente and Oceanside for surf and sun. The scenery changes from the industrial armpit of downtown and Southeast L.A. to the suburban towns of Orange County, with the southern end of the line running along the coast for a truly priceless view.
The train pulled into Oceanside a few minutes early, barely allowing a transfer to most buses that left at 10 a.m. (Metrolink was supposed to arrive just in time to see a caravan of NCTD buses leave). Oceanside is not the worst place to wait. The Oceanside Transit Center is a city-within-a-city. It has hundreds of parking spaces for commuters and beachcombers, but it’s Oceanside’s main transit hub as well as a depot for Metrolink, Coaster and Amtrak. Greyhound also serves the station. For food, there’s Burger King. The station is just off Coast Highway, with several restaurants and bars, and the ocean is about a football field away.
The first bus was the one that will likely disappear once Sprinter runs, NCTD 320. It operates primarily on SR-78 between Oceanside and Escondido, about half an hour faster than its local sister, 302. Luckily, NCTD isn’t stingy with this express service and operates it half-hourly seven days a week.
The bus, along with all the others I rode today, is a New Flyer C/D40LF. Bus #2316 left Oceanside promptly at 10 a.m. with about a half dozen passengers. The only stops it makes are at Plaza Camino Real, the Vista Transit Center, Palomar College and the Escondido Transit Center. Altogether, 18 people boarded, with slightly more on the vista to Escondido segment.
This was a pretty fast trip. Even with all the waiting at the transit centers, the bus arrived in Escondido in a little over an hour.
Escondido, like most transit centers throughout the county, is a testament to fantastic transit planning. In Los Angeles, a transit center is usually a piece of cheap land shoehorned with buses but having very little connection with the immediate neighborhood. See the West L.A. Transit Center, Crackton Turnaround (the lot at Pico Boulevard and Rimpau Street that exists solely to force people to transfer from one agency’s Pico service to another) and the El Monte Bus Station.
Now San Diego, on the other hand, is a sight to behold. Escondido is near a pleasant walkable downtown, is a hub for 18 buses and Greyhound, and even has a convenience store with a hot-food kitchen. It is also very secure, patrolled by a transit security officer and next door to Escondido’s police station.
So many buses, so little time. Rather than taking the busier services, it would be interesting to see the ultra-low frequency lines, the stuff that runs every 2 hours. Yes, that bad, but to be fair, these are short loop routes that have the opposite direction running an hour later.
One such route is 349, a short loop serving south Escondido. This route, leaving the center at 11:15 a.m. with bus #2405, had a rookie driver with an instructor. Most of 349 runs through single-family residential neighborhoods. Only four passengers boarded, two women with two children. Four passengers and this line has a 40-foot bus. Yeesh. And NCTD does have cutaways, Thomas midibuses and 35-foot New Flyers, so the equipment’s available.
The loop only took 25 minutes to complete. Back to Escondido now, where it was on to another 2-hour marvel. Line 358 (and 359) serves the north Escondido and Country Club areas. Another 40-foot bus on an empty line, with 15 passengers boarding bus #1143 on the 11:45 a.m run. Broadway is the retail drag of Escondido, lined with fast food chains, drugstores, and automotive shops. The loop of the route was a mix of apartments closer to Broadway and single-family homes near the Country Club.
Line 358 was also the low point of the day. Once the bus was back on Broadway, a burning odor emanated from the air conditioner. The driver dispatched the problem and was told to drive back to the center where the bus would be replaced. The bus completed the deviation near the Escondido Senior Center but crapped out in the left turn lane at Washington Avenue and Broadway. Ten minutes later, a maintenance truck arrived to push the bus to the next stop and unload the stranded passengers, then pushed the bus away. The mechanic said a pump failed.
Luckily, the bus was maybe a half mile from the Transit Center, and offered a chance to explore downtown Escondido. It’s a well-landscaped small-town city center with some art galleries and many mom-and-pop stores, but not a whole lot of restaurants. It’s a very pleasant place for a stroll but there were no pedestrians. Sad.
After lunch at Filippi’s Pizza Grotto, it was a short walk back to the Transit Center.
The day winds down with an end-to-end trip on NCTD’s backbone line, 302. This local bus runs between Oceanside and Escondido and serves San Marcos, Palomar College, Vista Transit Center, MiraCosta College, Plaza Camino Real and Oceanside. The 2 p.m. trip on bus #1109 left Escondido half full, and like 320, the bulk of ridership was on the eastern segment. Altogether, 96 passengers boarded, about a third of them children.
Much of the riding activity was on the streets and not in the transit centers. The land use is an incoherent witches’ brew of light industry, strip malls and empty patches of land on a road with many hills. About a third of the route parallels the Sprinter tracks. Or should I say track. It looks like the line will be single-track, which explains the half-hour service. This line is well-patronized, but if 302 gets rail, L.A. should get 75 different train lines.
The bus arrived in Oceanside some time past 3:30 p.m., and northbound Amtrak Pacific Surfliner train 583 arrived on time at 3:52 p.m. for the two-hour trip back to L.A. The train was packed with commuters, families and tourists. The double-deck cars are very comfortable and clean, making for a pleasant ride.
Overall, the transit experience in North County was pleasant, notwithstanding the failure of 1143. The buses were all punctual and clean. And they’re really fast. Most buses had air conditioners running, and they still maintained high speeds with no struggle. Besides that, NCTD has the best bus paint scheme anywhere.
Discussion
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man, you had quite a day wad. if you were to guess, how much did all that traveling cost? and did you ever make it into san diego itself? i’ve not traveled there yet so my expereince with their public transit is nill. some friends and i traveled to santa barbara and were pleasently surprised by the ease as to which the bus system worked. timetables and stops and what not. does san diego and the northern areas post their schedules at the stops as well or is that just a SB ammenity?
and i agree, from the pics you’ve posted, i really dig their bus’ color schemes.
It was quite a pretty penny to travel down there. The Metrolink fare was $12.50, and the Amtrak ticket was $21! The NCTD day pass is $4, but the $5 regional day pass is accepted throughout San Diego County. The $5 jobs are hard to come by in North County, though.
San Diego only posts schedule information at transit centers and transfer intersections. The nice thing about the transfer intersections is that a customized timetable is posted for that stop even when it does not appear on the paper schedule.
On NCTD, though, all schedules are available in a booklet. All buses are well stocked with the booklets.
I did not get to make it to San Diego proper that day. I just wanted to stay in North County. Taking anything but a train or Greyhound bus is slow going. San Diego Transit Line 20 runs between downtown and the North County Fair mall in South Escondido, but even that is two hours. The other frequent option is to take NCTD 101 to La Jolla (a very scenic route) and catch another bus the rest of the way, but that’s at least 3 hours in each direction.
eek. so either san diego or north county, not both. got it. thinking about making a san diego trip… any transit tips?
My advice:
The first place to go is a Trolley stop. Buy a day pass, $5 per day, but progressively cheaper the more days you buy (up to 5 days). Day passes are not sold aboard buses, but transfers are free and act as 3-hour passes. The only other place to buy a day pass is the Transit Store, on Broadway about 3-4 blocks west of Horton Plaza.
Base fares are the highest in the country ($2.25, $2.50+ for express and $1.75 for routes serving military installations) for comparatively weak service. The base headway for most routes in San Diego is 30 minutes, although a major shake-up in September will have a lot of 15-minute service weekdays and new all-day limited-stop service on a few routes.
The interesting thing is San Diego has a lot of interesting scenic routes, and not just in the out of the way places. Pick out a few and have fun. But, the most you could practically get done in a day is a Trolley segment (downtown to the Border, downtown to El Cajon and Santee, and Mission Valley to points north). You’d have to save North County for another day, and I found it hard to ride several routes in cities other than Oceanside. Escondido transfer connections are better than Vista’s, and the coastal cities are barren save for the dial-a-rides and Coaster Connection feeder buses.
The “Crackton Turnaround” at Pico/San Vicente is there for a reason, and it is a historic one.
Up until 1963, that spot was the terminus of the Los Angeles Railway “P” line, the most popular streetcar line in the city. In fact, the line survived the demise of the Los Angeles Railway itself (along with 4 other streetcar lines) and was operated by a city agency (the first MTA) for about six years, until the idiots removed all the streetcars. Historically, people had to transfer to Santa Monica city buses right there to continue along Pico, a setup that continues to this day.
There was also a small railyard adjacent known as “Vineyard,” where the Pacific Electric had a major junction and stored cars. The P.E. had a route that went north from there on San Vicente (that’s why that street has a median), and ended at their railyard at Santa Monica/Robertson (that’s why there’s a bus garage there). That’s also why San Vicente has no median north of Santa Monica. The station there was originally a streetcar loop where the cars turned around (they used PCC cars, which were single-ended and had to turn around at the end of the line), and after the streetcars were removed it was converted to a bus station, even though conceivably they could have removed it and just continued the bus down Pico to the west. I don’t know why that didn’t happen.
Greetings.
Great report. I’ll have to make a scooter run to see that palace pictured under the report on the breakdown.;)
The Sprinter will apparently be a lot faster than the bus, and more comfortable due to the wider body. Much of it will, in fact, be double tracked, with plans to complete full double track service at a later date. Sadly, it’s limited by the old Santa Fe right of way. Connections to N.C. Faire are in the works, but I’d also like to see service to the mall in Oceanside and the local airport.
I would return the favor and visit your town, but the short schedule of the Coaster makes a weekend daytrip into a 3 day expedition.(No trains on Sunday)
Keep up the goodwork.
Claude L. Medearis
El Cajon, CA
Thanks for reading the archives, Claude, and greetings to our readers down San Diego way.
I am pessimistic about the Sprinter. I wanted to approximate Sprinter usage with existing bus patronage.
We have yet to know how fast Sprinter will be, but a big problem is that the speed is canceled out by very long waits for buses. Much of NCTD’s base headway is 60 minutes. Some routes even run every 2 or even every 3 hours. All the speed that’s gained by riding the Sprinter would be lost in waiting for long bus connections.
NCTD has planned for zero ridership growth. Also, it will goose ridership by first canceling 320 (OK, because it’s redundant) but also breaking up Line 302 into smaller segments. As I said in my report, Line 302 was very well used, even if removing the school children on the trip. Line 302 is mostly local trips between the bus hubs, so Sprinter is not likely going to capture this market.
If you wish to come up to L.A., you can take Amtrak seven days a week, or even Metrolink with limited service on the weekends. Greyhound runs several non-stop buses between L.A. and Oceanside or San Diego.
Glad to hear from you.