San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Readers set the record straight
Why is Interstate 805 called an “interstate”?
Subscriber and frequent letter writer Allen Stanko of Alpine disputed the name in a recent email to the readers’ rep. He had seen the headline “Pedestrian struck by car and killed while crossing I-805 in Mountain View.”
Stanko said that in his view 805 is not an interstate; it doesn’t leave California.
He’s right. It runs from a junction with Interstate 5 in San Ysidro, up for about 29 miles, to where it rejoins I-5 in northern San Diego, around Sorrento Valley.
So why is it called an interstate? For that answer I asked Steve Welborn, a Caltrans public information officer in San Diego.
He said it was approved as an interstate route in 1958. It was completed in 1975. Seven years later, it acquired the name the Jacob Dekema Freeway, after the Caltrans engineer and district director who played a major role in designing the region’s freeway system. (He died in La Jolla in 2017 at age 101.)
It’s designated an interstate because of the federal funding that created it, not whether it goes from state to state, Welborn said.
He also noted that Hawaii has an interstate — which was federally funded. And a portion of Interstate-15 in the Mid-city area is not federally funded. That part is called “state Route.”
Outstanding catches
I’m always grateful and amazed at the scrutiny of readers in catching errors. Several examples of that happened recently.
Jim Lundquist of Alpine, who’s director of Museum Services for the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum, and Don Jones of Vista spotted errors in a file photo caption on the year of construction and the height and length of the Goat Canyon Trestle rail bridge. The caption accompanied a B1 story Nov. 13. Because they flagged the errors, the archived photo caption was changed so the mistakes will not appear again.
Jones also noted the story had an error about when the company that had planned to improve the San Diego and Arizona Railway, also called the Desert Line, stopped making lease payments to the rail line’s owner, the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System.
He referred to minutes of meetings of the MTS board. The story was corrected to report that MTS received its last payment from the company in summer 2019.
Andy Irwin of Solana Beach noticed that numbers and wording on a graphic on A1 Nov. 21 weren’t adding up.
The graphic ran with a story on the new Blue Line trolley extension. Ridership numbers, according to the chart, were much too low, he said.
Irwin was correct, and he spotted the error. The graphic wording should have referred to “daily” numbers — not “weekly.” The graphic was corrected; it reran Nov. 24.