The San Diego City Council unanimously approved Tuesday a long-awaited mobility master plan that ranks 380 proposed city projects that essentially share the same goal: encouraging people to stop commuting by car.
The document — the first of its kind for San Diego — includes proposed bike lanes, neighborhood shuttles, roundabouts, curb extensions, sidewalk projects, dedicated bus lanes and several other kinds of projects.
The city is combining those projects into one document so they can be weighed against each other for prioritization and funding purposes.
“This mobility master plan is a key step toward making our streets safer while protecting our environment,” Councilmember Stephen Whitburn said. “It moves closer to being a city where everybody can walk, bike and use transit easily and safely.”
Councilmember Kent Lee said the plan can help people drive less.
“We’re not going to be mandating people to transition out of their cars to more sustainable modes of transportation, but we certainly can incentivize it and plan for it through smart land-use decisions,” Lee said.
The 132-page plan was endorsed Tuesday by business and environmental groups, and no one spoke against it.
“The plan is an important and useful document for aligning the city’s transportation priorities,” said Evan Strawn of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce. “The chamber is especially ive of transportation solutions that will expand connectivity in business districts, allowing people to use transit to visit and our city’s fantastic local and small businesses.”
Carina Contreras of nonprofit Climate Action Campaign also praised it. “This mobility master plan really does set a good framework forward,” she said.
The city’s Climate Advisory Board endorsed the plan but suggested it should be better integrated into several other city plans — including the bicycle master plan, the pavement management plan, new plans to charge for parking in more places and the Vision Zero effort to reduce traffic deaths.
The mobility plan approved Tuesday is a dramatically different document than the draft version city officials released in fall 2023. The number of projects has nearly tripled from 135, and performance indicators have been added to track city progress.
But Councilmember Marni von Wilpert said there are still only a handful of projects in north inland Council District 5, which she represents.
“It makes me sad,” said von Wilpert, explaining that her district has no trolley, limited bus lines and fewer bike lanes than other parts of the city.
She suggested neighborhood shuttles there could help. “I know they are hard to fund, but they don’t even make it into the plan,” von Wilpert said.
She also lobbied for more electric vehicle chargers, which are not part of the mobility plan, so more residents in her car-dependent district can at least shift to electric cars.
Councilmember Raul Campillo praised the plan but amended it to add streetlight installations and intersection upgrades to the long list of performance indicators that will be used to track progress.
One key indicator, city officials said, will be shifts in what city officials call mode share — the percentage breakdown of how residents get around the city.
The city’s climate action plan calls for biking, walking and transit to for 36% of commutes by 2030 and 50% by 2036. Last year, they ed for just 13%.
Other performance indicators are the number of miles San Diegans travel by car, traffic crash fatalities, miles of bike lane completed and new roundabouts and traffic circles installed.
Projects in the plan vary widely by type and by location.
They include one-way cycle tracks along Market Street from 19th Street to Boundary Street, a bikeway along College Avenue from Navajo Road to Lemon Grove City limits and a pedestrian promenade along the north side of University Avenue between Sixth Avenue and Park Boulevard in Hillcrest.
Some projects are more complex, including a plan to convert La Jolla Village Drive between Interstate 5 and Interstate 805 into a special corridor with a flex lane in each direction that could be used for mass transit or carpooling. The corridor may include transit signal priority, curb extensions and protected intersections.
And some are highly ambitious, such as a proposed aerial skyway connection between Mission Valley and Hillcrest.
Others focus primarily on walkers. They include adding pedestrian facilities along Florida Street between Upas Street and Polk Avenue, which could include widening sidewalks, closing sidewalk gaps and adding pedestrian countdown timers and curb extensions, also known as bulb-outs.
While the number of projects in District 5 is slim, the plan does include a proposed off-street bikeway that would roughly follow the Interstate 15 corridor from the Poway Road interchange to Carmel Mountain Road.
