SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — Sorrento Valley is the number one employment center in San Diego County, housing 8% of the region’s jobs, according to SANDAG.
Kerney Mesa is number two, with 125,000 employees, but only 1% of workers live in the area. Roughly 4% of Sorrento Valley employees live and work there.
Both employment centers straddle I-805, making it one of the most congested highways in San Diego County. Hundreds of thousands of cars travel up and down this route every day, many of them coming from more densely populated areas south of I-8.
This creates traffic and congestion that makes an average 14-mile journey take over 30 minutes. However, only 4% of commuters take public transit to and from these areas — probably because the average bus trip employees take to either area is over an hour long.
But SANDAG has big plans for this corridor that would provide a fast and easy alternative while connecting several areas that are underserved by public transit with a new, high-speed train.
“The Purple Line is envisioned as a high-capacity transit line from San Ysidro to Sorrento Mesa via Chula Vista, National City, City Heights, Mission Valley, Kearney Mesa, and University City,” the agency says in its Purple Line Conceptual Planning Study.
The plan is to connect densely populated communities like Chula Vista, City Heights and North Park to major employment centers like Sorrento Valley and Kearney Mesa. It would also link riders to the orange, green and blue line trolleys, the COASTER commuter rail, and dozens of bus routes nearby.
A crucial piece would be making the Purple Line a high-speed, high-capacity, heavy rail line – the first in San Diego.
Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner and North County Transit District's Coaster are technically called commuter rail, which travels at a lower speed with less capacity than heavy rail, like the New York City Subway or the B (Red) and C (Purple) lines in Los Angeles.
The proposed Purple Line is intended to allow for travel speeds up to 80 miles per hour with 10-minute headways by tunneling major segments and avoiding at-grade crossings, or intersections with cars or pedestrians.
Based on similar subway lines, this would mean traveling the entire proposed length could take only 45 minutes, while driving from Sorrento Valley to National City is easily an hour-long trip at rush hour.
San Diego has seen the impact of building quality public transit in the last few years, since the opening of the Mid-Coast trolley that extended the blue line north to UTC. That $2 billion project took roughly five years to build, opening in 2021.
Since it opened, 19% of all trolley ridership is on the extension, according to SDMTS. The blue line is the highest ridership trolley line in the system, giving more than 24 million rides in 2024.
The Purple Line is projected to have nearly 30,000 daily riders, cost more than $20 billion and take at least 15 years to complete.
You can read more about the project in its conceptual phase on SANDAG’s project website.
