SHORTCUT LINKING HILLCREST, MISSION VALLEY TO BE CLOSED

Bachman Place will be unavailable for 2 years during UCSD expansion

Savvy local drivers are about to lose one of their favorite secret shortcuts, the Bachman Place two-lane connector road between Mission Valley and Hillcrest.

The winding and hilly road, which allows travel between those two popular neighborhoods without using freeways, will close for roughly two years starting April 4 to make way for a major expansion of UC-SAN Diego Medical Center.

Community leaders say the lengthy closure of the three-quarter-mile road segment will increase traffic congestion on state Route 163, Washington Street, Texas Street, Camino del Rio South and many nearby surface streets.

It will also make life less convenient for many nearby residents, especially people living in Hillcrest and Mission Hills who do much of their shopping in Mission Valley.

“Two years is a long time — a very long time,” said Tom Mullaney, chairman of the Uptown Planners neighborhood group representing Hillcrest, Bankers Hill, Mission Hills and University Heights. “It’s a lot farther around for people.”

During the first phase of the closure, the roughly 5,000 workers at the sprawling hospital campus will still have access to the Bachman Place parking garage from the Mission Valley side. But that will be eliminated in summer 2023 when Bachman closes completely.

“It’s definitely going to be painful for the community and all of our faculty and staff,” said Lisa Rhodes, chief administrative officer for the Hillcrest Campus. “I personally use that thing all the time.”

A recent analysis found that more than 6,000 cars travel on Bachman Place during a typical day so they can quickly zip between northern Hillcrest, Mission Hills and southwestern Mission Valley. About half are UCSD employees.

An analysis of the UCSD expansion found that delays caused by the closure during the peak commute period would be no more than 10 minutes and mostly in the range of three minutes to five minutes for the rerouted traffic.

The university is also increas

ing the frequency of a shuttle from the Old Town Transit Center, working with city officials to synchronize nearby stoplights and creating a “turnaround” on Bachman from the Mission Valley side for confused drivers.

And they have notified Google Maps, Waze and other navigation aid companies of the closure so those companies won’t be sending drivers, especially confused tourists, onto a temporarily closed Bachman Place.

Rhodes stressed that the closure is necessary for the roughly $3 billion upgrade and modernization of the hospital campus, where nearly half the buildings were constructed before 1970.

The project will also dramatically upgrade Bachman Place and make it a more effective shortcut that might not be quite as secret when it reopens in two years.

The road will be rerouted, elevated as much as 75 feet in some places and punched through to connect with Arbor Drive. The project will also extend First Avenue to the north to create a new patient drop-off corridor.

Arbor Drive and Bachman Place will also be widened to accommodate buses and new protected cycling lanes.

While those changes will almost certainly be embraced, cyclist Steve Sallis said the two-year closure of Bachman is a major setback.

“This is a disaster,” he said. “It’s going to be really bad to come up from the valley into Hillcrest because you will have to go down to Texas or way around through Old Town and up Washington.”

Sallis, who lives in San Carlos, said city and university officials should put something temporary in place so cyclists can get up and down the hill between Mission Valley and Hillcrest.

“This was our little quiet and easy way to get up the hill,” he said. “We will now have two roads where we used to have three roads.”

While commuters on both sides of the shortcut will suffer, Mission Valley residents typically travel less frequently to Hillcrest than vice versa, said Jonathan Frankel, chairman of the Mission Valley Community Planning Group.

“Bachman Place is not a super well-known thoroughfare on the Mission Valley side,” he said. “But any north-south connector is important, especially with all the development and new housing coming to Mission Valley.”

Crews broke ground in November on the UCSD expansion, which will take over 15 years to complete and be handled in five phases. Thirty-six of the 38 buildings on the hospital campus will be replaced and more than 1,000 housing units will be added.

The project also includes a six-floor outpatient pavilion and a garage capable of holding 1,850 vehicles.