Airport bus service could expand

North County Times – Escondido,CA,USA
NORTH COUNTY — Leucadia’s Pat Yeakley, community activist and
Friends of the Encinitas Library board member, hasn’t driven to the
airport in five years. …

NORTH COUNTY — Leucadia’s Pat Yeakley, community activist and Friends of the Encinitas Library board member, hasn’t driven to the airport in five years.

She has no reason to.

Once Yeakley found she could hop on a Coaster train in Encinitas, and take a bus over to Lindbergh Field from the Santa Fe Depot in downtown San Diego, she has been leaving her car at home ever since.

“It seemed like the right thing to do,” Yeakley said, adding that she wanted to help the environment. “And if you go in the morning, it makes more sense than driving. You know darn well you’re going to make it in 55 minutes. You’re not going to be in bumper-to-bumper traffic for an hour and a half.”

She said it takes 40 to 43 minutes to reach downtown and another 12 or 15 minutes to reach Terminal 2.

“You still have to build in extra time because you don’t know if there are going to be lines at the airport,” Yeakley said. “But that’s true if you drive, too.”

And the train trip, with its views of the ocean and San Diego County’s extremely rare Torrey pines, is pleasant. “Part of it is a very beautiful ride,” Yeakley said.

As enthusiastic as Yeakley is about riding, there aren’t a whole lot of other county residents following her lead.

San Diego County Regional Airport Authority officials say that on a typical day, 1,015 people ride the Coaster or San Diego Trolley to Santa Fe Depot and catch the Airport Flyer. That number amounts to 1.2 percent of total airline passengers, well below the share of bus and train riders flying out of most U.S. airports.

“Our goal is to increase it to 4 to 6 percent,” said Ted Anasis, manager of airport planning, in an interview Wednesday. “We feel that that is an achievable goal in the near term — within five years.”

But it’s going to take some work, he said.

To that end, the authority is developing an airport transit plan that outlines several options to boost public transit ridership among airline passengers. While part of the strategy entails advertising the bus-rail connection that Yeakley discovered, its focus is to beef up — and speed up — transit service to Lindbergh Field.

“Our passengers want a seamless connection to the airport,” Anasis said.

For starters, the authority wants to run buses between Santa Fe Depot and Lindbergh more often. They now run every 12 minutes, and the agency wants to reduce time between buses to less than 10 minutes.

As well, the authority is exploring a new bus connection via the Old Town train station farther north, and making it an express service that runs straight to Lindbergh, Anasis said. It would run partly on proposed exclusive lanes on Pacific Highway and Harbor Drive, he said. Priority traffic signals would give buses the green light to go around lines of cars.

Anasis said the express bus from Old Town could debut within five years, Anasis said.

Another idea is to introduce express bus service to inland North County, taking advantage of the managed lanes under construction in the center of Interstate 15. That massive $1 billion project includes several stations for express buses that will run one day between Escondido and downtown San Diego, and Anasis said perhaps some buses could run directly to the airport.

As a bonus, the I-15 airport express could give passengers the option of checking baggage and obtaining boarding passes before they board the bus. That’s been done for 20 years in Los Angeles, through a remote bus and baggage check station in the San Fernando Valley, Anasis said.

“You actually feel like you are arriving at an airport terminal,” he said.

The authority is also exploring the notion of adding night and Sunday Coaster service, something that would expand Yeakley’s options for booking flights.

“It’s a really good idea,” said Miriam Kirshner, a senior planner with the San Diego Regional Association of Governments, a transportation planning agency working with the authority to boost bus connections.

But, Kirshner said, “It would be expensive to operate. You’d have to operate it frequently enough so that people would be willing to take it rather than drive their car. People won’t wait six hours to catch the train. At the same time, you can’t have a train with five people on it.”

Anasis said project details, cost estimates and ridership potential still must be worked out for each concept.

Angela Shafer-Payne, vice president of strategic planning for the authority, said her agency could fund several projects, provided they are used exclusively by Lindbergh passengers. Shafer-Payne said the airport probably could not fund a Coaster expansion because riders would use it for other activities besides flying.