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ChineseSprinter opening delayed
Contributed by Wad on January 9th, 2008 at 5:30 am
The North San Diego County Transit District has put off the opening of its light rail line, Sprinter, originally scheduled for this Sunday. No start-up date has been announced.
Some of the final touches, such as parking lot striping, are not complete. The California Public Utilities Commission still has not given the OK on the line’s safety measures.
See also:
- San Diego Union-Tribune: Sprinter rail service won’t start on Sunday (brief)
- North County Times: Sprinter start may be pushed back again
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
why is the sprinter mocked again? it seems like they’ve been able to do something that the green line failed so miserably at in that it actually connects to amtrack/metrolink (and coaster for san diego). i know very little about the sprinter so perhaps the answer’s obvious, but from the map alone it makes sense.
Sounds like a big mess to me.
Next thing you know they’ll be announcing that they’ve exceeded their $350m budget.
I’m not really the jerk the following makes me appear in type. There really needs to be a little bit of mea culpa at these junctures. I think Kym owes my charity several quadrillion dollars at this point over the Talgo to Las Vegas service start date bet of 1993(?). This despite my offering 10:1 odds in her favor.
Of course the Sprinter is behind schedule, over budget and (less likely) underperforming. Learn to live with it rather than pretend.
Tyke: I don’t know San Diego County too well, but I just can’t shake the thought that it sure looks like a rail line that goes from nowhere to nowhere. Do that many people commute to Oceanside, and is the destination really dense enough to support commuter-rail-a-la-light-rail? Is the point of it to serve as a connection to San Diego’s “real” commuter rail? If so, will it have any productive ridership outside of commuting hours? To me it looks like a light rail line between, say, Lancaster and Palmdale. I’d love to be proven wrong
Having said that, while a delay this late in the game is a surprise, it’s seemed that this project has otherwise been above average in terms of on-time completion - major construction projects finish months behind schedule, not weeks.
Aaron, the Sprinter will be a terribly performing line, even though it serves some very useful destinations.
Oceanside is a great multimodal transit center. It’s right near the ocean and Coast Highway, and it has connections to commuter rail, Greyhound and Amtrak. It’s a very busy station.
Along the way it serves Palomar College and Cal State San Marcos, and the Vista and Escondido transit centers are very well developed. San Diego County does amazing things with transit centers.
That being said, Sprinter offers little improvement over the express bus it replaces. It runs at the same headways, and any speed gains are canceled by the infrequent bus connections.
It would also be asinine for the service to be used as a feeder for Coaster. Escondido already has a peak-hour express bus that takes a little more than an hour to get to downtown San Diego. Sprinter to Coaster would take two hours.
Worse, the project is severely despised. Read the comments on the Union-Tribune or North County Times stories. Maybe newspaper comment sections only attract keyboard warriors, but there is almost no support for this line locally.
Seems as if the Sprinter is the kind of project that turns people off to mass transit.
I thought this was a “We Love Public Transit!” blog. Oh sure, people like Rob Dawg are allowed in, because it would be unfair and petty to keep them out, as easy as his disappearance from these parts would make our lives (no offense, R.D.).
Going on that assumption, why the sourness about the Sprinter? Puzzling.
Anyway, I think that perhaps we should have a little get-together/field trip. We should all gather at Union Station, take the Metrolink down to OCeanside, and ride the Sprinter to Escondido on some weekend, after it opens. Maybe not on its opening weekend, that could be too crowded. Or maybe not, if everyone in North County hates the thing. (My prediction: huge opening day crowds, like every other light rail line EVER.) The Metrolink ticket to Oceanside on weekends is about 12 bucks each way, and the Sprinter another 2 bucks.
Anyone else like the idea of a field trip?
I’m down for a lil metroriderLA field trip to test that boi out. Escondido or bust!
I think people just find some aspects of it disappointing, and it’s not something that most of the people here would be able to use.
I would be up for a field trip to check it out.
one of the problems with it is that it ends service way too early (the last trains leave around 8:33 p.m. in order to allow for freight service on the line).
there were issues with the performance of the DMU’s as well (slower than electrically-powered equipment). again, compromises were made in order to continue accommodating freight service.
that said, I think people will use it. now if we could get feeder buses to temecula and julian, we might have something there…
ScottMercer said:
Yes, it’s an “We Love Public Transit” site, but that certainly doesn’t mean we have to love ALL public transit projects that exist or happen to come our way. For example, I love the Red, Blue, and Gold lines but I can’t say I have much love for the Green Line. I will never have love for a Gold Line extension to Ontario.
Sure hearing Rob Dawg say a transit project isn’t worth it is one thing, but when one of our most trusted and knowledgeable transit advocates thinks a project is a boondoggle and presents a rational argument as to why, I tend to take heed.
But once the Coaster opens I’ll be down for a field trip, might as well make use of the thing!
30 min peak headways for LRT?!? What in the world do they need LRT for if they can’t even support four trains an hour at a minimum? Oceanside, Vista and Escondido all have population densities hovering around 4,000 persons per square mile. Everyone drives with those kinds of densities. What a real waste of time and $. I bet this was a pork barrel project. No way this could have passed New Starts criteria. If it did, how?
the sprinter runs parallel to one of the most increasingly crowded freeways in san diego. that said, this line will never perform well. these suburban communities are very young and filled with people who live in the suburbs cuz they just love their cars and the sense “freedom” they bring.
san diego has been making some really poor decisions regarding it’s light rail system. the decision to have it’s next segment run from old town to university town center is really poor planning. if, instead, if it went from downtown to the airport to sea world and then on to the beaches, ridership would be significantly higher than running through yet another car loving suburb.
it’s a shame. san diego was responsible in many ways for showing the country what a succesful light rail system can bring and it has now fallen so far behind. so it goes.
My original plan was to go to North San Diego County for opening day and do the write-up. I had planned on going on Sunday, lining up vacation from work and all.
Despite Sprinter serving very useful destinations, it will still be a ghost line. Think of the Harbor Transitway or the Jacksonville Skyway. Ridership this low does not need rail. North County should be grateful that NCTD even runs an express bus for this corridor that runs outside of rush hours.
Kind of off-topic, but does anyone know how long it takes to ride Metrolink from Union Station to Oceanside? The metrolink website is very unclear on travel times. My girlfriend has a friend who lives on the marine base in Oceanside and we like to visit sometimes and it’d be really cool if I didn’t have to drive us down in that miserable LA to San Diego traffic.
Simon:
The trip from Union Station to Oceanside is 2 hour ride. You can take the Metrolink (Orange County Line) or the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner. I believe the Amtrak has a lot more trains running to oceanside (more than 10 daily trips I believe), the Metrolink has 5 daily trips. I think the Amtrak is significantly pricier, so it depends on your schedule and budget. I went down to Carlsbad earlier this year with my gf, we took the Amtrak, and the roundtrip to/from Oceanside for both of us was $77. It’s a great ride, you go along the Pacific Coast, get lots of beach and hill views, I’d recommend giving it a go… tell us how it works out if you do.
The Metrolink site is pretty bad, you can find the schedules for the Orange County line here. Just look for Orange County Line on the list and click the first icon for a schedule in HTML. You can view the Pacific Surfliner schedule on this PDF from the Amtrak site.
Thanks for the info. We probably won’t be visiting down there again for a long while, but when we do, the train sounds a heck of a lot nicer than the 405.
Root canal without medication is “a heck of a lot nicer than the 405.”