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That was my biggest gripe growing up in SD - felt like Caltrans / SANDAG abdicated responsibility for developing good transit/bike/ped infra, doubling down on car dependency. It should be a mecca of active transportation given the weather!

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It is actually absurd the amount of freeways there are in San Diego. How many north south and east west freeways are there? And they are like sometimes 1 mile or less apart from another parallel running freeway. Then you have all these thick roads where its 6-8 lanes across with a 50 mph speed limit basically freeway capacity right there. Probably the most "built for car" urban area in california IMO, with orange county a close second for basically the same reasons (lot of freeway redundancy and also high capacity high speed roads). LA county would be closer but they never finished their highway master plans and it shows with some of the freeway void spaces where planned freeways were never built for varying reasons. They have those 50mph high speed roads but its limited to the comparatively newer sections of LA county like santa clarita, which is very much built in a "san diegan" way compared to the older san fernando valley.

Agreed it's a bummer.

There's a lot of low-density sprawl in San Diego county which makes effective transit difficult, and because you have to drive everywhere, sentiment trends anti-bicycle. The previous CEO of SANDAG tried to push a mobility-centric vision but left because of intense pushback from folks who wanted more funding for roads and freeways, rather than transit and bike paths.

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