The Dirt Path Along La Costa Avenue Is Finally Becoming a Real One

"We no longer walk to the beach, just to be clear."

That was Steve Norton, a longtime Leucadia resident, describing what happened after his wife was struck by a vehicle in the crosswalk at North Vulcan Avenue and La Costa Avenue. Norton had already spent more than a decade asking the city to build a sidewalk along that stretch. After the crash, he and his neighbors stopped waiting. They cleared a strip of dirt and brush next to the roadway themselves, tamping down an unofficial footpath so pedestrians heading to South Ponto Beach would have somewhere to walk that wasn't the traffic lane.

That homemade path has been the de facto sidewalk on La Costa Avenue for the past couple of years. It is also, as of late summer 2026, about to be replaced by an actual one, built by a contractor the city hired, using money the city didn't have when Norton started complaining.

What residents built, and what the city is finally building

The La Costa Avenue Pedestrian Path project runs along the south side of the street, from Interstate 5 to North Vulcan Avenue, covering the exact stretch residents patched together on their own. The finished version will include about a half-mile of 4-foot-wide decomposed granite path, a buffered bicycle lane, 15 ADA-compliant curb ramps, seven rebuilt driveway aprons, four upgraded street crossings, and a new concrete sidewalk connection on North Vulcan Avenue itself. On August 26, 2026, the Encinitas City Council awarded the construction contract to Prestige Prime Engineering. City staff have said construction is scheduled to begin this fall.

Getting here took longer than the path itself will take to walk. The city first approved $311,000 for design back in the 2023-24 budget cycle, then pulled more than $211,000 of that back a year later to cover other priorities. Design went through multiple revisions before reaching 90 percent completion in January 2025 and final sign-off in March 2026. A Coastal Development Permit followed in April, then a funding agreement with SANDAG's Solutions for Congested Corridors program before the project could even go out to bid. In the meantime, interim fixes arrived piecemeal: narrower vehicle lanes, green-painted bike lanes, a new stop sign at Sheridan Road and La Costa, and a reduced speed limit of 30 mph. Those measures stayed in place while the path itself moved through design review and permitting.

The other half of the same road isn't there yet

A few blocks north, the same logic is playing out on a different timeline. The North Vulcan Avenue DG Pedestrian Path would run 1.23 miles between Leucadia Boulevard and La Costa Avenue, on the west side of Vulcan between the roadway and the railroad tracks. At 6 to 8 feet wide, it's a more substantial build than its La Costa counterpart, and it includes a wooden pedestrian bridge over a drainage culvert. The Encinitas Planning Commission advanced the project in mid-September 2026, with a hearing for discretionary approval held September 17.

What it doesn't have is construction money. Design and permitting were funded back in May 2025, but the council has not yet allocated dollars to actually build it. Staff have indicated that funding could next be considered at the start of the 2027-28 budget cycle, which begins in July 2027. Planning Commissioner Bridget Kimball put it plainly during the hearing, saying she wished more could be done along that stretch but calling the current plan a step in the right direction. Commissioner William Whitaker raised a smaller but telling detail: the city estimates ongoing maintenance of a decomposed granite path that length at roughly $1,000 a month, covering weed removal, material replenishment, and reapplying the hardening agent that keeps loose granite from washing out. Whitaker said he was confident in the choice based on how the city has maintained similar surfaces elsewhere.

So the two ends of the same walking corridor are on different clocks. Here's how they compare heading into this fall:

Anyone walking from South Ponto Beach up toward Leucadia Boulevard this winter will cross from a freshly built granite path onto the same unmarked shoulder that's been there for years, with no announced date for when that changes.

The bigger project running underneath both of them

The La Costa and Vulcan paths sit inside a larger piece of infrastructure news that landed this past August. On August 19, 2026, the city announced it had secured up to $33.6 million in federal funding through the Federal Railroad Administration's Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail Program, covering roughly six miles of the LOSSAN rail corridor that runs through Encinitas. The money funds three separate priorities the city had been chasing for years: new vehicle and pedestrian gates at the E Street, D Street, and Leucadia Boulevard crossings, two new at-grade pedestrian and bicycle crossings at Grandview Street and Phoebe Street, and a new pedestrian and bicycle undercrossing between Verdi and Liszt avenues that will connect residents to San Elijo State Beach without crossing the tracks at grade at all.

The Verdi undercrossing has its own long backstory. The city first identified Verdi as a possible undercrossing location in 2008. Two other undercrossings on the same corridor, at Santa Fe Drive and El Portal Street, were completed in 2013 and 2022 respectively. Verdi's estimated cost runs between $17 million and $18 million, and the design was finalized and approved by the Planning Commission before the federal award came through. The grant also funds a citywide quiet zone, meaning trains will eventually stop sounding their horns through a stretch of the corridor from E Street to Leucadia Boulevard, contingent on the safety upgrades at each crossing being completed first.

The city's own accounting of the deal has a specific number attached: staff told council they spent $77,000 preparing the three grant applications, which returned $33.6 million in federal funding, with the city responsible for a 20 percent local match, or roughly $8.4 million, toward the total project cost.

What changes for someone walking this corridor

None of this alters property lines or rezones anything. It changes how a walk to the beach actually feels along a stretch that residents have been narrating in complaint after complaint for over a decade. By this time next year, someone leaving a house near North Vulcan Avenue could plausibly walk a raised granite path down to La Costa Avenue, cross on an upgraded signal, and eventually reach the beach without setting foot on pavement shared with cars, at least on the La Costa half. The Vulcan half of that same walk still depends on a City Council budget vote that hasn't happened yet.

The rail corridor changes will take longer to show up day to day. Quiet zones and new crossing gates require the kind of design, environmental review, and phased construction that stretches across multiple budget cycles, and the city has been explicit that this is a multi-year build-out rather than a switch that flips this winter. What's different now is that the money exists. For most of the past decade, the constraint on all of these projects wasn't community support. Advocacy groups including Leucadia 101, Encinitas 101, and NOWLeucadia had already lined up behind the corridor improvements. The constraint was funding, and that constraint lifted for three projects within the same twelve months that a fourth, smaller project on Vulcan Avenue is still waiting on.

Steve Norton got his sidewalk. It just took an accident, a self-built dirt path, and roughly a decade of city budget cycles to get there. The residents walking the next stretch north are still on the earlier end of that timeline.

If you're weighing what's happening along this corridor against a property you're watching in Leucadia or elsewhere in Encinitas, Pacific Harmony Realty can walk you through what's funded, what's still pending, and what it might mean for the neighborhood you're considering.