Money, Not Permits, Decides Which Coastal Rail Trail Gap Closes First

"I understand this is a good compromise and is an improvement over what we have now."

That's Encinitas Planning Commissioner Bridget Kimball, speaking after her commission voted this month to approve a decomposed granite walking path along Vulcan Avenue. The vote was unanimous. The path is 1.23 miles long, six to eight feet wide, and includes a wooden footbridge over a drainage culvert. It sounds like a green light. It isn't one. The Encinitas City Council hasn't put a dollar toward building it, and under the city's budget calendar, that conversation won't even start until the fiscal cycle that opens in July 2027.

That gap between "approved" and "funded" is the whole story of the Coastal Rail Trail right now, and it's worth understanding if you walk, run, or bike any stretch of it between Oceanside and Solana Beach.

Five Cities, Five Segments, No Shared Timeline

The Coastal Rail Trail is planned as a 44-mile route running alongside the Coaster tracks from Oceanside to the Santa Fe Depot downtown, built one city at a time by Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Solana Beach, Del Mar, and the City of San Diego under a shared regional agreement. Nobody is building it end to end. Each city designs, funds, and constructs its own piece on its own schedule, which is why the open stretches today are separate segments with gaps between them.

Here's what's actually rideable right now, city by city:

None of these connect to each other. The Oceanside stretch near Oceanside Boulevard runs on the west side of the tracks, cost $2.45 million to build, and drops riders at the Oceanside Transit Center, two blocks from Tyson Street Park. A few miles south, Carlsbad's segment is short enough that locals mostly use it as a shortcut between Tamarack and the Village rather than a destination ride. Down in Encinitas, the segment between Santa Fe Drive and Chesterfield Drive runs along a natural bank next to San Elijo Avenue and has been open since 2019, longer than any other piece outside Oceanside. In Solana Beach, the trail runs between Highway 101 and the Coaster line, borders the Cedros Design District, and ends at Via de la Valle on the south end and Ocean Street on the north, a stone's throw from downtown's restaurant row.

If you've ridden this corridor before, none of that is news. What's changed in the last eight months is that one of those dead ends is finally getting money, and the reason it's getting money while a similar project in the next city over isn't is worth sitting with.

The Gap That Got a Construction Date

In January, Solana Beach announced it had secured $300,000 in state funding, arranged through State Sen. Catherine Blakespear, toward a $1.075 million project that extends the trail north from its current stopping point at Ocean Street to the Encinitas city border. The extension will run along the east side of Highway 101, closing the exact gap that currently forces riders off the trail and onto the highway shoulder if they want to keep heading north. Construction is scheduled to begin this fall, with completion targeted for March 2028.

That's a real, dated commitment. The money is appropriated, the funding source is documented in the 2025-26 state budget, and the city has a start date on the calendar. If you live in Solana Beach and have wondered why the trail simply stops at Ocean Street, the answer this fall is that it's about to stop stopping there.

The Gap That Only Got a Signature

Sixteen miles north in distance but philosophically much closer, Encinitas's Vulcan Avenue path tells the opposite story. The project would turn a stretch of unmarked parking and dirt shoulder between Leucadia Boulevard and La Costa Avenue into a proper decomposed granite path, running along the west side of North Vulcan Avenue. The city funded $175,000 for design back in its 2025-26 budget cycle. That money paid for drawings, environmental review, and the permit hearing that just concluded. It did not pay for a single foot of trail.

Construction funding is a separate ask, on a separate clock, and the city has said outright that it won't be considered until the budget process that begins July 1, 2027. Nothing about the resulting math. A pedestrian path that cleared its coastal development permit this week could plausibly not see a shovel in the ground for another two or three years, depending on how that future budget cycle treats it.

Encinitas isn't shut out of trail funding altogether. The city separately landed a $1.2 million regional grant through SANDAG's TransNet Smart Growth Incentive Program for a different stretch, the La Costa Avenue pedestrian path, part of a $55 million pool the agency distributed across 36 projects countywide. That's the other way these gaps close: not through a city's own budget, but by winning a competitive regional grant. Vulcan Avenue didn't win one. La Costa Avenue did. Whether Vulcan Avenue eventually does too is an open question, not a formality.

What This Actually Changes for Your Next Ride

If you're mapping out a fall route along this corridor, the practical version of all this is straightforward. The five open segments haven't changed: Oceanside's two pieces, Carlsbad's short connector between Oak and Tamarack, the Encinitas-to-Cardiff stretch along San Elijo Avenue, and Solana Beach's run past the Cedros Design District to Via de la Valle. Ride any of them today exactly as you would have last spring.

What's different is the shape of the next eighteen months. Solana Beach's northward extension means that sometime before March 2028, the ride that currently ends at Ocean Street will keep going toward the Encinitas line, which starts to make a continuous Solana Beach to Encinitas loop plausible for the first time. Encinitas's own missing piece along Vulcan Avenue, despite clearing its planning hurdle this month, doesn't have that same clock attached to it. A resident asking "when does the trail finally connect through Leucadia" is really asking two different questions with two different answers: one has a construction date, the other has a permit and a maybe.

That distinction, funded versus merely approved, is the one thing about this trail that the map itself will never show you. The asphalt will tell you where the trail goes. Only the budget documents tell you when it's actually going to get there.

If you're weighing how proximity to the Coastal Rail Trail, or to any specific stretch of the North County coast, might factor into a move, Connie Sundstrom can walk you through what's changing block by block.