State Leaders Warn of Risks to Southern California Rail Corridor

The coastal rail corridor between San Diego and Santa Barbara faces growing risks from coastal erosion and climate change, according to a California Senate Transportation Subcommittee. As Phil Diehl explains in The San Diego Union-Tribune, “Landslides and cliff collapses have periodically stopped the trains in Del Mar and San Clemente, and many other places also need improvements and protection from sea-level rise along the 351-mile Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo corridor.” Yet the corridor provides a crucial transportation link for passengers, freight, and military transportation.

According to a Senate report, the cost of making safety improvements to the Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo (LOSSAN) corridor could be more than $20 billion. With seven different right-of-way owners, the corridor is a complex system with little precedent in the United States. Researcher Genvieve Giuliano says a long-term solution would be “to create a single statewide agency that would fully integrate the multiple agencies that provide the separate passenger services — Amtrak, Coaster and Metrolink.”

Farther up the coast, the state’s Department of Transportation (Caltrans) recently completed its first erosion mitigation project for a roadway, moving a highway segment 400 feet to protect it from landslides.