Opinion: Nostalgic ‘Trolley’ Name No Longer Fits San Diego’s 70-Mile Urban Transit System

I have a mea culpa to declare. As a journalist four decades ago, I was responsible more than anyone else for the name San Diego Trolley on the region’s urban rail network.

I now confess my mistake in pushing “trolley” in article after article from the initial line’s proposal in 1978 to the name’s approval in 1980. Following dozens of high-speed rides on the system’s four corridors over the past several months, I believe that the time has come for a designation more appropriate to its reality today.

Urban rail was controversial when planned in early 1978 as a 16-mile line between Santa Fe Depot and the Mexican border utilizing abandoned tracks of the defunct San Diego & Arizona Eastern Railway except for a two-mile stretch along C Street and 12th Avenue in the downtown core. The late Neil Morgan in his Evening Tribune three-dot column soon hung the derisive tag “Tia Juana Trolley” on it, reflecting the general skepticism at first among the city’s establishment.

Morgan poked fun both at the concept and its prime mover, State Sen. James Mills, a pioneering but humorless transit advocate and former San Diego State University history professor who had crafted legislation providing state funds for the Metropolitan Transit Development Board if the city would opt to build a rail system. He and the MTDB referenced the project as “light rail”, a description that academic planners had come up with in the early 1970s to distinguish modern urban tram systems from traditional subway and commuter rail service.

When the Los Angeles Times inaugurated a San Diego edition in March 1978, I joined the bureau as transportation writer. My editor quickly decided the controversial rail proposal was one to sink our teeth into, but he found the “light rail” definition jargonistic and off-putting to readers. To both of us, the planned concept resembled a modern trolley, and so that term was adopted for our stories.

At one point, I was sent to Edmonton, Canada, to report on its new commuter line, which was the model that MTDB wanted to replicate. Its manager conceded that their name, Northeast Light-Rail Rapid Transit Line, was a bureaucratic mouthful and wished that officials had used “trolley” or another alternative.

The Times consistently referred to the plan as a San Diego-border modern trolley. After the City Council in October 1978 approved MTDB’s plan 5 to 4, Morgan seldom mentioned “Tia Juana Trolley” and the Tribune’s occasional news articles always chose the term “urban rail.” The San Diego Union opted for MTDB’s “light rail” usage.

Mills publicly expressed his distaste for any use of “trolley” whether sarcastic or neutral, believing the word connoted a cartoonish mode of transportation as depicted in a pre-WWII comic strip titled “Toonerville Trolley.” He wrote a scathing letter to my editor alleging that I was intent on sabotaging the project.

When the MTDB in July 1980 officially selected San Diego Trolley for the line, Mills strongly opposed it. Board members themselves were less than enthralled with their decision, but chairwoman Maureen O’Connor said the bottom line was that the ”trolley” term had become a fait accompli due much to the Times’s coverage and that its official adoption would help dissipate any negative connotations from Morgan’s appellation.

To a large extent she was right. The “San Diego Trolley” name no longer invites comparison with a defunct cartoon. But neither does it reflect the system’s current vast operational reach. It has quadrupled in size to nearly 70 miles, with additional lines east through Encanto and La Mesa to Santee, through Mission Valley to San Diego State, and since late 2021 north to UC San Diego and University Town Center.

Its iconic images are no longer of a modern streetcar moving slowly along C Street by City Hall but rather of bright red rapid trains curving gracefully along sleek viaducts above I-5 near UCSD and cruising past Snapdragon Stadium. There are today a dozen or so similar systems in cities across the United States today, and not a single one calls itself a trolley. A few have stuck with the technical “light rail” description, but most have chosen a version incorporating “metro rail” or “metro” or “rapid transit”.

Google “trolley” and you’ll find it reserved for nostalgically-designed, open-sided vehicles taking sightseers around to tourist attractions in towns large and small, such as the Old Town Trolley, Portland’s Pink Trolley and even a Toonerville Trolley on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Sen. Mills boycotted the 1981 ceremony marking the original line’s completion to the border and remained bitter for the rest of his life. A new name within the parameters of “trolley” and “light rail” would posthumously validate his vision.

David Smollar is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer. He lives in Tierrasanta.