Have you noticed Highway 101 feels tighter lately near Fletcher Cove, or that Lomas Santa Fe has orange cones where there weren't any last month? You're not imagining it. Solana Beach is spending the same currency in two different places this season: a full driving lane, traded away to finish two bike and pedestrian projects that have been stuck in planning for a decade or longer.
Neither project is new news exactly. The Coastal Rail Trail gap at the north end of town has been there since the early 2000s. The Lomas Santa Fe Corridor project has been in some form of study, workshop, or design review since 2015. What's new is that both are moving into construction in the same window, and both required the city to decide that a car lane was the price of finishing what residents have been asking for since before some of them owned their current homes.
The Trade Nobody Voted On Twice
Start with the trail. It currently runs from Via de la Valle at the city's southern border north to Ocean Street, a stretch that gets plenty of daily use from people walking or biking to the Solana Beach Transit Center. Then it just stops, a few blocks short of the Encinitas line, and cyclists get dumped onto the shoulder of Highway 101.
The fix has been funded since January, when Solana Beach accepted $300,000 in state money toward the roughly $1 million project needed to extend the trail those final blocks. The design that went in front of the City Council in late June solved a real problem: extending the trail on the west side would have cut through a conservation easement along Harbaugh Seaside Trails. The workaround pushes the path into the Highway 101 right of way instead, which means the stretch north of Solana Vista Drive drops from two travel lanes to one.
City Engineer Austin Frisby called it the most workable option that stays inside the existing roadway. City Manager Alyssa Muto has been clear that Solana Beach intends to finish its portion regardless of what happens next door, telling the council the design work lets the city keep moving forward on its own timeline. Construction is expected to start this fall, with the whole extension wrapped by March 2028.
That's a year and a half of one-lane traffic on a stretch of coast highway that a lot of Solana Beach residents drive daily, in exchange for a bike and pedestrian path that closes a gap two decades in the making. If you use that stretch of 101 to get to the grocery store or the train, this is the tradeoff that's about to become part of your commute.
Why "Finished" Won't Mean Connected
Here's the part that hasn't made it into most of the neighborhood chatter. Even after Solana Beach spends eighteen months and a full driving lane finishing its side of the trail, the path will still end at the Encinitas border, not continue into it.
The connection was supposed to come from a joint project: a pedestrian crossing at Highway 101 linking Harbaugh Seaside Trails to Cardiff State Beach. Encinitas secured a $350,000 Caltrans grant for exactly that crossing. But Encinitas's own council backed away from the lane reduction the design required, and the two cities are now working through alternate concepts. Mayor Lesa Heebner has said she wants whatever gets built to preserve the two historic beaches at the current end of the trail rather than pave over them, and the crescent-shaped platform that currently marks the trail's dead end will be replaced with landscaping, not a through-connection.
Councilmember Dave Zito made a smaller but telling point during the same council session: most people already ignore the signage that tells them to walk a quarter mile south to the safer crossing at Solana Vista Drive. The city's plan is to try catching pedestrians earlier, before they reach Harbaugh, rather than assuming better signs will change behavior that's already established.
So the honest way to describe this project isn't "Solana Beach finishes its trail." It's "Solana Beach finishes its half of a trail that still needs a second city to solve its own lane fight before the whole thing connects." If you're picturing a continuous ride or walk from Fletcher Cove into Encinitas by 2028, that timeline depends on a negotiation that hasn't been resolved yet.
The Other Lane Disappearing This Fall
While that plays out on the coast, a second, larger project is landing on the inland side of town. The Lomas Santa Fe Corridor project has been the subject of community workshops since 2018 and design revisions that at one point considered roundabouts before settling on a simpler layout. The eastern segment, running one mile from Santa Helena to the city's boundary at Highland Drive, finally has a contractor. In late May, the council awarded a $7.4 million construction contract to Tri-Group Construction, and the city's own project page lists construction running from September 2026 through fall 2027.
The scope is bigger than the trail project: new paving, sidewalks, a multi-use trail, bike lanes, landscaped medians, benches, decorative crosswalks, and new traffic signals. The funding stacked up over years rather than months. Rep. Mike Levin secured $7 million in federal money for the eastern segment back in 2023. SANDAG added $3.5 million toward the still-unfinished western portion earlier this year. Deputy Mayor Jill MacDonald, whose district includes the corridor, said her first City Council meeting years ago was likely a discussion of this same project, which gives you a sense of how long residents have been waiting for shovels to actually move.
Senior Civil Engineer Anda Wright told the council the city has built in non-working days around the opening of the San Diego County Fair and the first week of the school year specifically to limit traffic disruption during the periods that matter most to families and commuters. At least one travel lane will stay open in each direction throughout construction, and the city has set up a dedicated hotline and email address for residents to flag problems as they come up.
What This Actually Looks Like If You Live Here
Two infrastructure projects, both years in the making, both landing in the same season:
- Highway 101 north of Solana Vista Drive goes from two lanes to one starting this fall, for the Coastal Rail Trail's final extension to the Encinitas border, with completion targeted for March 2028.
- The trail's connection into Encinitas itself is not resolved. That depends on a separate crossing project the two cities are still negotiating.
- Lomas Santa Fe Drive between Santa Helena and Highland Drive is under construction from September 2026 through fall 2027, with at least one lane open in each direction and a city hotline for construction issues.
- The city has already shown it can finish smaller commitments on schedule. The Fletcher Cove ramp rehabilitation and shower tower project was completed earlier this year, a small item next to a highway redesign but a sign the city follows through on the maintenance side, not just the ribbon-cutting side.
If your daily route touches either corridor, the next year and a half looks different than the last five. The upside, eventually, is a continuous bike and pedestrian path along the coast highway and a rebuilt inland corridor that's supposed to carry BikeWalkSolana's long list of walkability requests. The near-term reality is fewer lanes, not more, on two of the streets Solana Beach residents use every day.
None of this changes what has always made this stretch of coast worth living in. It does mean the version of Solana Beach you'll be driving through next spring won't quite match the one you're driving through now, and the border with Encinitas will still be a place where one city's finished project meets another city's unfinished one.
If you're a longtime Solana Beach homeowner curious how infrastructure like this tends to move the needle on property values over time, or you're weighing what your own equity looks like as these projects wrap, The Lotzof Group knows this stretch of coast block by block. Request a confidential home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
