Rail industry advocates and public officials often conflate statistics for the entire 351-mile LOSSAN (San Luis Obispo to San Diego) line with those of the southern 20% – the San Diego Segment, which is in serious jeopardy from existential threats in two locations – falling bluffs in Del Mar and rising seas, eroding shores and sliding bluffs in San Clemente. By treating the entire line, which is comprised of seven segments owned by 7 separate entities with 9 operators and managers, as one united and indivisible line, they hope to justify the expenditure of hundreds of millions for unending armoring, repairs and walls and perhaps ultimately, billions for an inevitable relocation of the endangered Del Mar and San Clemente sections.
Officials must think this line is really important to passengers. But how important is it – really? How many people are actually affected if –or accurately, when — the tracks are shut down? After carefully examining data obtained from Public Records Act requests the answer is pretty clear: Not very many – and certainly not enough to justify the inordinate expenditures contemplated.
What are the real numbers? And why don’t rail industry advocates seem to have good data at their fingertips, and if they do, why won’t they disclose it? Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner data broadly tells the tale.
In a January 9, 2024 letter to the State Department of Transportation, state senators including Senator Catherine Blakespear admitted that 2023 trips from all carriers on the entire LOSSAN corridor were less than 4 million – down more than 50% from the pre-pandemic peak of 8 million, which is still inaccurately quoted on the LOSSAN Rail Corridor Agency website four years later. The graph below tells the tale, depicting data for Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner for the entire LOSSAN line. It shows that despite extensive marketing efforts, passenger demand remained mostly flat for more than a decade before the pandemic, plunged precipitously after 2019, and is still trending at less than half of pre-pandemic levels.
Transportation experts credit the work from home movement with a major shift away from public transportation – a trend that appears here to stay. A new MIT study has found that a 10% reduction in onsite workers yields a 27% decrease in ridership and fare revenue for transit agencies.
Endangered San Clemente Segment
What marketing claims fail to disclose is that the San Diego segment of the corridor (San Juan Capistrano to San Diego) is underutilized and disintegrating. In a December 11, 2023 meeting of the State Transportation Subcommittee on the LOSSAN Corridor, officials admitted that between 2022 and 2023, passenger service in the vicinity of San Clemente was shut down or not operating on a normal schedule for 251 days, mostly due to landslides and track movement exacerbated by severe erosion. The 7-mile crisis zone is serviced by both Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner and Metrolink but neither line shows significant ridership, especially in relation to Orange County’s 3.1 million people. Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that the southern segment is neither “vital’ nor “essential, as rail interests repeatedly claim, is that there was no discernible increase in highway traffic during these lengthy service interruptions.
From 2022-2023, daily Amtrak passenger data through the endangered coastal segment looked like this:
Looking at total daily trips on Amtrak within this coastal segment, it’s clear that there are spikes, but passenger loads for Pacific Surfliner are generally holding steady at 2,500 to 4,500 rides per day WHEN the trains are running.
Using data for both Amtrak and Metrolink (only monthly data was available for Metrolink), monthly passenger traffic through the same San Clemente segment for the same period, in total and for each carrier, looks like this:
Considering the last two years, a simple average calculates to only 2,588 rides per day on the coastal segment. To be fair, it makes sense to look instead at daily rides in the months when both lines were actually running – January to September 2022 and in 2023, the month of April plus the six-month period, July to December. Considering only operational months, ridership ranged from 4,337 rides per day in 2022 down to 3,513 in 2023, an average of 3,925 daily rides. Metrolink numbers are astoundingly low especially considering that most rides are round trips; 584 to a high of 1,288 trips per day, during months when it is actually running. This gives credence to a statement by former Metrolink CEO, Art Leahy, that Metrolink should consider truncating Oceanside service above the county line. If it truncated service in San Juan Capistrano — a better idea considering an economy fed by Mission traffic — Metrolink would spare itself and taxpayers millions of dollars and spare the environment significant diesel fumes from trains running almost empty along the coast to Oceanside.
Riders vs. Passengers
It is very important to note that “ridership” numbers grossly overstate the number of individual passengers who take trains. North and southbound trips on the San Diego Segment are of similar proportions, suggesting that the vast majority of passengers take roundtrips. If every passenger were to take roundtrips, the number of people riding is, in fact, half of the ridership numbers, approximately, ignoring the fact that 5-day weekday commuters should be counted as one tenth of their rides; fifteen hundred trips made by regular weekly commuters would then be only 150 passengers. Train interests now have access to electronic purchase information, and it is possible for them to reveal this data, but they don’t. It would be highly disadvantageous to their advocacy to show how few people are riding trains on the San Diego Segment.
If coastal rail were to shut down for a while, what would happen? As it does during frequent rail outages, OCTA could create a bus bridge, preferably between San Onofre and San Juan Capistrano. In the unlikely event that passengers travelled solo in individual cars instead, it would only add 1.4% to the lowest average daily I-5 vehicular traffic at the Orange County-San Diego line (267,000/day in 2021), well within normal variations.
Too much investment for too few people
Despite huge expenditures to keep coastal rail in place, it’s not a stretch to assume the coastal route will continue to be plagued by shutdowns because science has proven the armoring will do nothing to assuage climate change or protect against erosion on a long-term basis. And coastal armoring does absolutely nothing to assuage the risk on the other side of the tracks — landslides. The five recent slides have been dramatic but were actually quite small compared to the potential devastation that could be caused by catastrophic ground movement. Any hopeful predictions that ridership will suddenly grow or even go back to normal – a “normal” that was flat since 2006, are largely a smokescreen.
Even if San Clemente were miraculously fixed by piles of boulders and miles of bluff walls, unfortunately at the expense of its beaches, there’s a good chance a bluff collapse at Del Mar will stop the trains. SANDAG and OCTA insist on treating each crisis location discretely, but they are obviously interdependent. Why spend billions on a tunnel in Del Mar if San Clemente can’t be permanently secured? And conversely, why spend hundreds of millions armoring San Clemente’s beaches when the line could be down for years in Del Mar?
Does it really make sense for taxpayers to fund $200M on another round of repairs this year when the San Clemente segment presently carries so few passengers? And considering ongoing climate change, that’s just this year’s price tag. Taxpayers must demand reliable, transparent data and a rational cost/benefit analysis before we lose our beaches while futilely attempting to keep a doomed railroad on life support.
Toni Nelson is a retired CPA/financial executive and founder of non-profit community organization Capo Cares, a coastal advocacy group located in the Capistrano Beach community of the City of Dana Point. Since 2014, Capo Cares has followed issues of interest to community members, such as coastal erosion, beautification, public health and safety, local development, arts and culture. The group updates the community via daily postings at www.Facebook.com/capocares. Nelson writes frequently on topics related to coastal erosion at Voice of OC, is a community contributor at www.patch.com/lagunaniguel-danapoint and can be contacted at capocares@gmail.com
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