UTC/UCSD: Right under the departure path from Miramar unfortunately. The military is extremely protective of their airspace, they restrict building heights all the way from Del Mar to North Park. There's a couple of corners you could get to 500', but the heart of UTC is restricted to 300' or less

Mission Valley: You could build up to 978' MSL (500' above Miramar's elevation).

I believe Mission Valley is restricted (by the city, not airspace) to “the top of the Valley “ which explains how the max seems to be roughly 20 floors. Perhaps someone could confirm.

For what it is worth, I work in the CRE industry and can confirm rumors/conversations about Papa Doug potentially exiting the development once the Navy offices are complete.

For a different kind of development. This has been confirmed for a few months now, but Council just approved:

SeaWorld’s tallest coaster is a go, San Diego City Council says
by Lori Weisberg
April 24, 2018
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com...y-council-says

https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/d...-rendering.jpg

A roller coaster enthusiast made this animation based on the track layout plans that have been revealed previously:

• Video Link

Fixed your Youtube link

• Video Link

I think at some point we're going to have to acknowledge the man is 76 years old. I wouldn't begrudge Papa Doug if, after spending the last 30 years battling to get this project under construction, he wants to spend the next few years relaxing on the beach in the Bahamas and find someone else to stress over the details of its management.

I drove by this morning. The Navy building's steel frame is above ground and surrounded by a Forrest of rebar columns for the parking structure well in excess of the expected base of the Navy building. Probably 4x the base of the navy building. They are making progress!

^ I would think the navy building would be built ridiculously strong also. Either that, or have a sea of concrete bollards lining the complex.

Any updates on 7th/Market? I can’t believe how long this project is taking :(

The plans on Civic SD's website make it pretty clear a single parking structure underlays the entire site. The parking for the Navy building is segregated from the rest by thick concrete walls, but ultimately there's only one foundation/underground parking lot that's all being built at once.

This isn't construction being cancelled or anything like that, in a hot enough real state market it's not uncommon for buildings to be sold before they're even completed. Once a project is permitted, financed, and under construction it's just as much a transferable asset as a completed one. You can box up the whole thing part and parcel, construction contracts included, and the new owner just sits there and waits for the work crew to finish up. There's a certain risk involved with leaving yourself liable for overruns, but being first in line for a hot new property (and sometimes, getting a nice discount) can be worth the liability. And when the MPG is finished, it's not like anyone is going to say some new company that came in for the final two years of a thirty year development odyssey is more responsible for its getting MPG built than a man who worked it all the way from the late 80s.

Welp, I hope everyone here is ready for a cluster of epic proportions.

As anyone who's been following regional transit issues knows that SANDAG really screwed the pooch with TransNet back in 2004. For those who don't know, the countywide ballot approved TransNet laid out a list of infrastructure improvements for SANDAG to build (mostly freeway expansions with the Mid-Coast Trolley thrown in) and put in a half cent sales tax to pay for them. Which would have worked great, except those initial funding projections didn't take into account the 2008 recession and now there's a $10 billion dollar hole in-between the cost of voter approved list of projects and the funding available to pay for them.

What's more, new state environmental regs require SANDAG transit plans reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. This means a plan which consists mostly of building freeway lanes isn't going to fly with Sacramento. The state government is more or less mandating SD County build more transit, when with the current funding it can't even afford to build the freeways it already promised.

Anyway, after all this became clear last year the old SANDAG director got fired. Then yesterday, the new SANDAG director announced he's going to propose that they cut most of the remaining highway projects and put the freed up funds into a proposed set of transit lines. Here are the projects SANDAG is planning to cut (minus the BRT):

https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/wp-c...Gunstarted.jpg

SANDAG's new director hasn't released any details of the new transit plan, only said they won't be new Trolley lines or buses (which he says are too slow). Previously he was very enamored with self-driving cars and hyperloop, until a team of automation experts and the CEO of Hyperloop (not Elon, some other guy) gave a talk at a SANDAG board meeting where they basically explained their technology wouldn't be a feasible replacement for SD county's public transit. Right now he's just saying that SANDAG's admin team is going to find a new form of public transit which is faster than LRT/Buses. So far the admin team doesn't even have a baseline cost estimate for this hypothetical transit system, although based on the typical cost of freeway lanes vs transit miles it's almost assured to be more expensive than the TransNet plan was.

Okay now here's where things get tricky, because most of North and East county don't have the population density or the job center concentration to make building mass transit a worthwhile endeavor. Predictably, they are not exactly happy with SANDAG overturning voter approved list of highway projects and replacing it with a mass transit system that will mainly benefit the denser Central SD and South Bay regions (a system which, just fyi, they will continue being taxed to pay for). But Sacramento passed a bill last year changing the voting powers in SANDAG from a per city basis to tallies based upon each cities population. So if the SD city and South Bay mayors can overrule them on the SANDAG board to approve the new plan, and so far both seem pretty happy with this arrangement.

Buuut a new transit tax require a 2/3rds majority on a countywide ballot, and that will almost definitely require at least some support from North and East county voters. And SANDAG will almost certainly need it, because in just about any sane world high tech transit systems cost more than miles of barren concrete. So under this plan SANDAG is currently proposing to eliminate highway improvements that would benefit North and East county, improvements that they in part voted to approve back in 2004, and then ask them to vote for a more expensive system that would mainly benefit central SD. But then, the alternative is to pray $10 billion dollars will rain out of the sky to pay for expanding our polluting freeways, and then tens of billions more to pay for a new transit system in central SD.

So far the mayors of Santee, El Cajon, Poway, San Marcos, Escondido, Oceanside, and Coronado have stated their opposition. Two of the five County commissioners have come out against, the full county board will vote on Tuesday and likely will condemn the proposal. Mayors of SD city, Chula Vista, and Solana Beach came out in favor. I suspect this will start hitting the media in the next week.

"So far the mayors of Santee, El Cajon, Poway, San Marcos, Escondido, Oceanside, and Coronado have stated their opposition. Two of the five County commissioners have come out against, the full county board will vote on Tuesday and likely will condemn the proposal. Mayors of SD city, Chula Vista, and Solana Beach came out in favor. I suspect this will start hitting the media in the next week."

As I understand it via the new weighted vote system at SANDAG created by AB 805 makes it so if the City of SD and the City of Chula vista are both in favor of something and vote for it (because of the size of those two cities) it will pass even if all the other cities vote against it.

I mentioned that in my post. SD city and Chula Vista make up a 2/3rds majority of the county population by themselves, so if their representatives on the SANDAG board both vote for the new plan it will pass.

But that doesn't magically give SANDAG the money to pay for all this new transit. It still only has the same TransNet dollars it had before, the ones that couldn't pay for a handful of highway expansion much less a series of far, far more expensive transit lines. The Mid-Coast Trolley extension on it own is costing SANDAG $2.1 billion (after receiving 50% federal funding), which is more than the all the under construction/completed expansions of the 5,15, and 805 combined (which received token federal funding). Even assuming increased amounts of state/federal funding will be available for transit projects, SANDAG will need increased funding just to match those outside dollars.

And that's a problem because while the SANDAG board voting system functions as though if a city's representative votes for something that's the exact same as 100% of that city's voters approving it, tax increases require an actual countywide ballot. Even if the majority of voters in SD city and Chula Visa do end up voting for a new transit tax, it's unlikely that 100% of them will both turn in their ballots and approve the new measure. That means getting funding for this new plan requires at least some level of support from North/East County.

That's why we're seeing both sides gearing up for war here, both have positions of strength. SD and Chula Vista can halt all future highway projects countywide in favor of increased transit, but to pay for that transit they need the support of North/East county (who have less to gain from transit and more to gain from highway projects) for a tax increase.

Wait, so all of those projects were in the pipeline and now they're all being cut?

Coronado voted to against the tunnel a while back so that one was already defacto cancelled, but the rest were definitely planned. The 5 freeway express lanes have even completed their environmental review. But to quote the new SANDAG director, "I will not bring a project to this board that increases Vehicle Miles Traveled". The presentation included a diagram that showed an extension of the trolley all the way to Oceanside and 'transit lines' that paralleled every major freeway from SR-67 to the 905 along the border, and assurances that this new transit system would be faster and better than anything in SD today.

I'm all for transit, but this whole thing isn't sitting well with me tbh. We're not being told what this wonderful new transit system is, or how it can be so much faster than cars/buses/LRT that no one in SD county will need a car anymore, or even how expensive it will be (although everyone seems to be in agreement it will be more expensive than the projects it replaces). My Gadgetbahn senses keep tingling...

Article on the UT about the SANDAG proposal.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.san...ct%3f_amp=true

I don't like the idea of a LRT to Oceanside, or really any long-distance LRT. I think it's better to add heavy rail for these longer distances, maybe radiate transit corridors out into various suburbs a la the COASTER. I think the FTA just loosened its regulations so we can buy more fuel-efficient rolling stock similar to what is seen in Europe or Asia.

In general like the idea of halting these freeway-widening projects, but our region isn't built to accomodate much else. You're right, this does look like a clusterfuck.

I drive around the county all the time and...
 

The 52, 78, and 56 definitely need to be widened. Who was the idiot that designed the 56 as a 4 lane highway? That should have been 6 from the get go.

San Diego's job centers are so sprawled out and with out geography of canyons, hills, escarpments, lagoons, Mira Mar military base etc I really need to see what SANDAG's plan is before I can envision transit really taking hold outside of the core of central San Diego (La Mesa west to Old Town and south to National City).

San Diego is just so sprawly and hilly I frankly don't see how transit is going to work in many areas.

I think this bold move by SANDAG is good. San Diego thrives on not rocking the boat and being overly cautious and it hasn’t gotten us very far. Maybe a radical approach is good. Let’s face it, if we keep widening freeways we will have to keep widening them indefinitely. There will always be people who are scared of new ideas. But at some point something bold needs to be done if we are ever going to change course.

As a counterpoint, I'm in favor of a bold new approach and yet the way this change is being messaged is really starting to come across as discriminatory against North/East county, and that's really going to work against it. In some of the news articles I've read SANDAG has started coaching this 'no freeway projects' mandate with the exception that managed toll lanes count as transit projects, since they can be prioritized for BRT. The 5 and 805 expansions were only supposed to consist of these managed lanes, but the SR-52, SR-56, and SR-67 expansions were planned to include free use general purpose lanes. So SANDAG is still open to giving the City of SD up to $14 billion for expansions of the 5 and 805, yet spending just $700 million to expand the 8, SR-54, and SR-56 is right out. And everyone knows that's because the City of SD has just under 50% of the vote on SANDAG's board.

It begs the question, is it worth pissing off such a large section of SD county's population and risking the failure of the entire thing at the ballot box for an already comprised plan that still lets the City of SD expand its freeways and whose main thrust seems destined to be reliant upon unbuilt and unproven technologies? When a few adjustments to the old plan could bring it back under the state mandated greenhouse gas targets, and would have a far less risk come election time?