San Diego's downtown airport is comically tiny, so this has been an issue for awhile. The ideas proposed, in order, were:
1. Convert the Marine base at Miramar into an airport -- nixed by the wealthy residents of nearby La Jolla
2. Partner with Tijuana and build a binational airport straddling TJ and San Ysidro on some conveniently undeveloped land there. This stalled for a number of reasons, and then some housing developments sprang up on the mesa where this would have worked, so the idea died.
3. Build a mega-airport in the desert, out towards El Centro, and a superfast bullet train between there and downtown San Diego. Kind of... inconvenient, and reeks of compromise.
4. A floating metropolis off the coast of Point Loma! Well, Singapore's doing something similar.
Notably, most of the flights from San Diego's downtown airport go to LAX or other nearby hubs, and LAX to San Francisco is the most-travelled air route in the country. These are not long distances; a decent bullet train system connecting California's metro areas would substantially ease the congestion at SAN, SNA, LAX, etc. and probably be more environmentally friendly, too. The CA high-speed rail project was proposed about a decade ago, and is progressing excruciatingly slowly -- deets here:
1. Convert the Marine base at Miramar into an airport -- nixed by the wealthy residents of nearby La Jolla
2. Partner with Tijuana and build a binational airport straddling TJ and San Ysidro on some conveniently undeveloped land there. This stalled for a number of reasons, and then some housing developments sprang up on the mesa where this would have worked, so the idea died.
3. Build a mega-airport in the desert, out towards El Centro, and a superfast bullet train between there and downtown San Diego. Kind of... inconvenient, and reeks of compromise.
4. A floating metropolis off the coast of Point Loma! Well, Singapore's doing something similar.
Notably, most of the flights from San Diego's downtown airport go to LAX or other nearby hubs, and LAX to San Francisco is the most-travelled air route in the country. These are not long distances; a decent bullet train system connecting California's metro areas would substantially ease the congestion at SAN, SNA, LAX, etc. and probably be more environmentally friendly, too. The CA high-speed rail project was proposed about a decade ago, and is progressing excruciatingly slowly -- deets here:
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/
Last I heard, it was expected to begin construction in 2012, and start carrying passengers around 2020.