18-Month Study of Solutions : Grant May Help Ease North City Traffic

San Diego’s booming North City, plagued in recent years by escalating rush-hour traffic, received the hope of relief Wednesday with a $250,000 federal grant for a private-sector program to reduce congestion around the area’s bustling employment centers.

Officials with the San Diego Chamber of Commerce and the San Diego Assn. of Governments, the agencies that received the grant, said the money will go for an 18-month study of solutions to the traffic crunch.

The study will focus on the busy high-tech business areas in Sorrento Valley, the Golden Triangle and Campus Point along Torrey Pines Road, according to Gina Zanotti, the chamber’s North City office director.

Promises to Get Worse

During the rush hour, traffic often backs up onto the freeway and clogs surface streets leading into those areas, creating a bottleneck between downtown San Diego and North County. The situation promises to worsen, experts say, as the budding high-tech centers continue to grow and residential construction flourishes.

Among the solutions to be be addressed in the study are more extensive use of van pools, car pools, flexible hours and possibly the implementation of four-day work weeks for some employers, Zanotti said.

“What we’ll try to do is get the private sector to take the initiative to come up with some creative solutions,” she said. “We’re not looking to reinvent the wheel, but I think this can have a very positive impact.”

Alfred DelliBovi, administrator of the federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration, announced the grant award during a press conference Wednesday in San Diego.

In his remarks, DelliBovi expressed hope that the San Diego study can act as an example of private-sector involvement in enacting traffic management solutions, an example that can be replicated in other California cities and across the nation.

Only the Northern California city of Pleasanton has undertaken a similar traffic-management effort using a federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration grant, officials said.

Zanotti said the grant money will be used to hire an executive director to coordinate the North City traffic program. As part of the effort, companies in the region will band together as the North City Alliance for Better Transportation.

The alliance will oversee efforts such as jointly leasing or purchasing a fleet of vans to shuttle employees to and from work. It will also help coordinate car pooling.

“It will be a sort of cooperative, a joint effort to help purchase equipment and coordinate,” Zanotti said. “Rather than having businesses X, Y and Z try to buy vans on their own or figure out who can car-pool with whom, they’ll work together on it.”

To help convince employees of the need to participate, the group will develop brochures and videotapes to be shown at work and in residential settings, she said.

Another goal of the group will likely be getting public transportation into the Sorrento Valley, Zanotti said. The crowded nest of high-tech companies straddling Interstate 805 is not served by a single public transportation entity, she said.