In 2018, an east-side homeowner named Marjory Williams polled more than 300 of her neighbors on a single question: did they want four roundabouts installed along Lomas Santa Fe Drive. Ninety-seven percent said no. Residents showed up to a City Council meeting that August holding hand-lettered signs. One woman who had lived in town since 1972 stood up and told the council to spend the money on potholes instead.
Eight years later, construction crews are on that same stretch of road. The roundabouts never happened. What did happen is worth understanding, because the project rolling out this month is not a surprise imposed on the neighborhood. It is closer to a receipt for an argument residents already won, one most people who were not sitting through those 2018 hearings have long since forgotten.
The Fight That Decided the Design
The Lomas Santa Fe Corridor Improvement Project traces back to a 2015 citywide transportation study that flagged the two-mile road as a priority for safety and bike and pedestrian access. Design work started in 2017. By the summer of 2018, the city's engineering consultants had narrowed the options to two: restripe the road with medians and keep four travel lanes, or install four roundabouts along the eastern stretch between Camino De Las Villas and Highland Drive.
The roundabout option did not survive contact with the neighborhood. Residents worried about emergency vehicle access, about traffic getting pushed into side streets, about a design that a civil engineer confirmed would add roughly ten seconds to every car's trip through the corridor. Then-Deputy Mayor Jewel Edson told the crowd the four-roundabout option was not popular among council members either. By September, the Council passed a resolution eliminating roundabouts from consideration entirely and instructed staff to move forward with a striped, four-lane design instead.
That single decision shaped everything that followed. When BikeWalkSolana, the local cycling advocacy group, submitted formal comments after a 2019 design workshop, they were responding to the striping option specifically: narrower travel lanes to make room for a Class I multi-use path, buffered bike lanes, a pocket park near Stevens Avenue. Those comments are the blueprint for what is now under construction.
"I think maybe the first City Council meeting I went to was probably discussing this project."
That's current Deputy Mayor Jill MacDonald, describing how long the corridor has been on the city's agenda. She was elected years after those 2018 hearings. The project outlasted the political careers of some of the people who debated it.
What Actually Starts This Month
The piece breaking ground now is officially called the Lomas Santa Fe East project, and it covers a specific one-mile stretch: from Santa Helena east to the city's boundary at Highland Drive. The Solana Beach City Council awarded a $7.4 million construction contract to Tri-Group Construction after reviewing six competing bids, and the work is scheduled to run from September 2026 through fall 2027.
The scope matches what came out of those years of workshops: new roadway paving, new sidewalks, a multi-use trail, bike lanes, landscaped medians, pedestrian upgrades like benches and decorative crosswalks, and new traffic signals. None of it involves a roundabout.
| Segment | Status this month | Length | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| East (Santa Helena to Highland Drive) | Under construction, Sept. 2026 through fall 2027 | About one mile | New paving, sidewalks, multi-use trail, bike lanes, landscaped medians, new signals |
| West (I-5 to Highway 101) | Design phase only | About one mile | Similar improvement category, no construction start date yet |
The eastern segment is the one funded and moving. Congressman Mike Levin secured $7 million toward this project back in 2023, money that sat waiting through several more years of design refinement before a shovel touched the ground. The western segment, running from I-5 toward Highway 101 and closer to the Cedros corridor and the train station, is still in design. SANDAG awarded a separate $3.5 million toward that portion earlier this year, but city leaders plan to finalize the design next year, which means residents near Cedros will not see construction crews yet. If your daily route runs through the west side of town, the disruption starting now belongs to the other half of the corridor.
The Logistics That Actually Affect a Tuesday
City engineers built the schedule around the calendar residents already live by. Officials identified specific non-working days meant to avoid major traffic conflicts, including the opening of the San Diego County Fair and the first week of the school year. At least one travel lane will be maintained in each direction throughout construction, so the corridor will not fully close at any point.
A few details worth keeping on hand if you drive, bike, or walk this stretch regularly:
- Construction runs September 2026 through fall 2027, on the Santa Helena to Highland Drive segment only.
- One travel lane stays open in each direction for the duration.
- The city is running a dedicated hotline and email address for residents to report issues during construction.
- The finished corridor will include a multi-use trail, buffered bike lanes, and landscaped medians, not roundabouts.
- The west segment, closer to Cedros and the train station, remains in design and has no construction start date yet.
Senior Civil Engineer Anda Wright told the Council the city intends proactive outreach before and during the work, which is a fairly direct answer to the concern residents raised back in 2018: that a project decided at City Hall would arrive without warning on a residential street.
What the Decade of Arguing Actually Bought
It is easy to read a road project as pure inconvenience, another summer of orange cones and detour signs. The more useful way to read this one is as evidence of how a small city actually processes a contested decision over a long stretch of time. The roundabout fight was not a footnote. It was the fork in the road that determined whether Lomas Santa Fe would end up looking like a suburban traffic circle or like what BikeWalkSolana pushed for in their 2019 comments: narrower lanes, a genuine multi-use path, bike infrastructure that residents can actually use to get their kids to school without merging into car traffic.
The corridor that starts taking shape this fall is the second option. Residents who showed up to comment on curb extensions and median placement in 2018 and 2019 are, in a very literal sense, going to be driving and walking through their own feedback for the next year. That is a slower and less dramatic story than "the city started construction," but it is the more accurate one, and it is the kind of detail that only shows up if you track a project across its full decade instead of catching the headline the week the paving trucks arrive.
For anyone weighing what a changing corridor means for how a neighborhood functions day to day, or how infrastructure investment like this tends to shape long-term interest in a block over time, that is exactly the kind of question The Daniels Group spends its time answering for people who already call Solana Beach home. If you want the read on what's actually happening on your street, reach out.
