NORTH COUNTY - This promises to be a year of milestones for North County's overtaxed transportation system.

A few big-ticket projects that have been under construction for several years are expected finally to open to commuters in 2007. Those include the new, eight-mile car-pool and toll lanes in the center of Interstate 15 between Rancho Penasquitos and Lake Hodges, as well as the expanded Interstates 5/805 merge in Sorrento Valley and the 22-mile Sprinter light-rail line between Oceanside and Escondido.

It also promises to be a milestone year for customer-oriented features, as an instrument akin to a credit card for paying train and bus fares and a telephone-computer system for estimating crosstown travel times for commuter trips of all types debut.

Many drivers have been looking forward to the end of invasive construction projects that, while offering the promise of future relief, have managed to make rush-hour traffic worse in the meantime.

"Just the cleanup of the construction alone will help," said Debi Gibney of Fallbrook, referring to the equipment and concrete barriers that squeeze motorists on I-15. "Driving those construction zones, I'm flat out of my mind half the time. Driving through there is a hazard."

It's not all good news when it comes to construction. For I-15 commuters, the construction zone will shift upstream. Transportation officials say that, no sooner than the exclusive lanes for buses, car pools and toll payers open, construction will begin on the Escondido segment between Lake Hodges and Highway 78.

In the case of I-5, construction is expected to begin this year on general purpose lanes between Via de la Valle and Lomas Santa Fe Drive and a reconstruction of the Lomas Santa Fe interchange, said Gary Gallegos, executive director of the San Diego Association of Governments, a regional transportation and planning agency.

Gallegos said officials also hope to break ground on a project that will widen Highway 76 to four lanes between Melrose Drive in Oceanside and Mission Road in Bonsall.

Despite the improvements, commuters say they have no visions of grandeur - they know the bottlenecks won't disappear.

"As long as we keep adding more and more people, it's not going to make a whole lot of difference," Gibney said. "It's still going to be crowded. I've lived here a long time, and no matter how much we expand a road, we always clog it back up."

The milestones

But officials say the improvements will provide some relief. Features in store for San Diego County commuters this year include:

• Around February, the planning association intends to unveil 511, a dual telephone and Internet system that will help commuters plan trips.

By calling 511 or going online, bus and train riders will be able to plan connections for traveling from one part of the county to another, said Garry Bonelli, association spokesman.

The system also will provide estimates for bus and train riders - and for drivers as well - of how long it will take "to get from Point A to Point B," Bonelli said.

• In May, transportation officials intend to open new southbound lanes and connectors in the complicated web of lanes and ramps that is the I-5/805 merge. The northbound lanes opened earlier.

• By midsummer, several transportation agencies intend to roll out the instrument they are a calling a "smart card" that will operate a little like the FasTrak transponders used by customers who drive the existing I-15 express lanes. Bus and train riders will open accounts and the cards will automatically deduct fares from their account balances when they board.

"You'll pretty much be able to go from North County to South County using one card and one system," Gallegos said. "You won't have to worry about all these transfer passes."

• Around November, the new lanes in the center of I-15 will open, extending the "highway within a highway" north from Highway 56 to Via Rancho Parkway. Along with the lanes, bus stations will open at Ted Williams Parkway, Rancho Bernardo and Via Rancho, with ramps that feed buses directly into the exclusive lanes.

• By year's end, the North County Transit District intends to open the Sprinter, with 15 stations in Escondido, San Marcos, Vista and Oceanside, including one at Cal State San Marcos.

"We will be ready to open in December 2007," said Pete Aadland, North County Transit District spokesman. "We're 70 percent complete."

Once up and running, it will take 50 minutes to travel from one end to the other, although the typical customer will likely get off after five miles, Aadland said. The rail system is designed to replace existing bus service in the Highway 78 corridor and to lure new riders.

More work to do on I-15

When it comes to the I-15 car-pool and toll lanes, there will be four of them. But because of the mismatch between the existing two lanes in the center of the freeway between Highways 56 and 163, only two of the four will open initially.

"We're building this thing for the long haul," Gallegos said. "The movable barrier will get exercised more in the future than it will in the short term."

He was referring to the portable concrete barrier that one day will separate southbound and northbound lanes on the highway within a highway, offering express bus service in both directions while leaving room to accommodate the heavy volume of commuters headed south.

While the association is gearing up for construction of the northern four-lane segment through Escondido, it is shopping around for the $400 million needed to retrofit the existing two-lane southern section in Mira Mesa so that it matches what is being built to the north. The agency's board voted earlier this month to request $400 million in state money from the big transportation bond California voters approved in November.

If the association gets a cut of bond proceeds, the entire 20 miles of managed lanes will be finished by 2012, Gallegos said.

In the system's early years, or before 2030, it will be reserved for buses, car pools and toll-paying drivers during the morning and evening commutes, he said. And it probably will become an exclusive truck route at other times of the day.

"During the nonpeak periods, we want to use these for goods movement," Gallegos said.

Fast forward to 2030 and beyond, though, and one could find the lanes serving an entirely different purpose.

Gallegos said his futuristic vision is for I-15's state-of-the-art center to become one of the first places in the nation to try out automated driving, where commuters sit back and read a book, surf the Internet or put on makeup while a computer steers.

Computers actually would drive the cars and keep them a safe distance from the vehicles in front and back of them.

Automated driving, if it works, will offer the advantage of squeezing many more cars onto a road with as little as six feet of space between them, Gallegos said.

Automation not a pipe dream

While automated driving may seem like a clip out of the old Jetsons cartoon, Gallegos said there already are signs that it is on the horizon.

"You're seeing commercials for Lexuses that can park themselves," Gallegos said. "It measures all the parameters very quickly with a computer and it decides the best way to get into this small parallel parking space. And it does it for you accurately time after time."

Then there's Infiniti's advanced cruise control system, he said.

"You, the driver, program your comfort level as to how far behind you want to be from the car in front of you," he said. "And if somebody gets in front of you, it automatically slows you down to make sure that you keep that safe space."

At some point, Gallegos said, cars will become even more sophisticated and there will be enough of them on the road to give automation a spin around the block.

"But probably not everybody's going to have it and not everybody's going to be able to afford it right away," he said.

And, so, Gallegos said, the separated road in the middle of I-15 would be an ideal place for a test ride because other cars with human drivers could continue moving on the regular northbound and southbound lanes.

"People say that you'll never be able to get rid of (congestion) … if you live in a major metropolitan area like San Diego," Bonelli said. But, he said, "good old American ingenuity" may find a way around the perpetual bottlenecks.

"If we get this automated highway system, we won't have to lay down another yard of concrete and we'll double or triple the capacity," Bonelli said.

- Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 740-5442 or ddowney@nctimes.com.