San Diego, the first site on the West Coast to be settled by Europeans, is a desert paradise perched against the Pacific where the United States meets Mexico.  Founded by Spaniards in 1542, decades before their countrymen landed at the East Coast's St. Augustine, the city of San Diego only began to grow large after the United States Navy developed a base there during World War II. Through the second half of the twentieth century, the city continued to attract people and industries for its year-round mild weather and easy, California lifestyle.

San Diego Planning and Layout

Today, the city of San Diego has a population of 1,325,000, making it the U.S.A.'s eighth largest.  Because it only began to grow into a city after the automobile age had begun and because the land is rolling and bisected by canyons, San Diego developed into a sprawling patchwork of low-density, car-dependent neighborhoods.  Villages popped up on mesas, canyons were left wild, and the city built a comprehensive network of freeways and highways to support decentralized, sprawling building patterns.  In keeping with the city's focus on the automobile as the highest priority transit mode, its downtown is a large grid of one-way streets, allowing cars to flow freely but precluding any sense of human-scale for pedestrians or bike riders.

San Diego Public Transportation

San Diego transportation is dominated by a freeway-based infrastructure that supports the use of cars for the many people living in moderately low-density neighborhoods across a large landmass.  Public transportation is composed of bus routes through the closer-in residential districts of Hillcrest, North Park, and South Park; and light-rail, which serves some of the outlying areas of the city, including one line stretching to the Mexican border and another line connecting widely-spaced development nodes alongside a freeway.  The trains have a relatively high patronage compared with other urban U.S. light-rail companies, with an average daily ridership of 100,000 passengers.  Despite the promising light-rail statistics, the over-all public transit picture in San Diego is less than ideal, as I can attest after a week of daily bus rides at various times and on different routes.  Except for certain peak times, buses come only every 20 to 30 minutes, and many trips require a transfer – which means that most of those trips take about 1 ½ hours, including waiting time, or three hours round-trip!   On San Diego buses, unlike in most other cities, there are no visual display boards showing the next stop, so passengers must rely on often unintelligible announcements made by the driver.  Also, the bus lighting at night is cold and harsh, rather than warm and amber; ditto on the light-rail trains.  Finally, who can say that buses are their favorite mode of transit, even when only given two choices – train or bus?

San Diego Economy

San Diego has the enviable attribute of being a U.S. Foreign Trade Zone and is the site of the world's busiest international border crossing – in the city's San Ysidro neighborhood.  Furthermore, the city is the home of the world's largest naval fleet, an economic mainstay for much of its modern history.  Its harbor hosts at least 200 cruise ships per year, supplying the area with a steady stream of tourists.  Downtown San Diego serves as the cultural and financial heart of the city and holds such tourist attractions as the Midway aircraft carrier museum and the San Diego Maritime Museum.  The downtown and gaslamp zones are also the entertainment and convention hubs of the city, attracting throngs to its many restaurants and bars, as well as to major-league baseball games at its Petco Park.

San Diego Today and Tomorrow

San Diego is undeniably inviting and pleasant, with year-round mild and sunny weather, and is a fantastic place to live- if you have a car.  Without a car, it is possible to live here of course, but not super-easy.  The San Diego of tomorrow can benefit tremendously by traffic-thinning its downtown by making its streets mostly two-way, more slender, and using the difference by adding Copenhagen-style bike transit.  It can also convert its highest volume bus route (#7) to a tram line, and build special lanes for its planned BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) routes.  By making these changes and continuing to add high-density, town-style development and parks to its central neighborhoods, it can control its growth, add to its social and economic vitality, and increase its pleasant appeal.