Today, Leucadia Roadside Park is packed. The 20th annual LeucadiART Walk has taken over the grass and the surrounding blocks of North Coast Highway 101, pulling in the roughly 7,500 to 8,000 people who show up every year for local art, live music and a beer garden that spills out toward the tracks. It's the kind of afternoon that makes the neighborhood feel finished, settled, exactly what it's supposed to be.
A few blocks over, the trains are still running, and the horns are still sounding. That part hasn't changed, and 2026 is the year residents are finding out it isn't going to change as fast as the paperwork suggested.
For the better part of a decade, the assumption in northwest Leucadia has been straightforward: once the city finishes building legal, safe crossings where pedestrians and cyclists can get across the tracks, the horn problem gets solved as a byproduct. Build the crossing, get the quiet. This year is the year that assumption ran into the actual mechanics of federal rail law, and the two projects that sound like one turned out to be two.
Two Projects, Different Finish Lines
The City of Encinitas is running two separate rail corridor projects right now, and they are easy to confuse because they involve the same tracks, the same neighborhood, and often the same public meetings.
The first is the Leucadia At-Grade Rail Crossings project: two new legal pedestrian and bike crossings at Grandview Street and Phoebe Street, closing a 1.3-mile stretch between Leucadia Boulevard and La Costa Avenue that has had no legal crossing point for decades. On February 5, 2026, the California Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved the city's application for these crossings. City Manager Jennifer Campbell called it a milestone at the council meeting where the news landed.
"This is the first big hurdle," Campbell said.
The council followed through on June 17, 2026, adopting the city's five-year capital budget and allocating an additional $300,000 to fund the final engineering phase of the crossings. The city has already spent roughly $644,900 on studies, conceptual design and the CPUC application itself, and the total project is estimated at $6 million to $6.5 million, with the city pursuing federal funding to cover 80 percent of that cost. Design and permitting are targeted to wrap by the end of 2026, with the remaining funding needing to be locked down by early 2027.
The second project is the E Street to Leucadia Boulevard Quiet Zone, the effort to actually stop routine train horns along the corridor. It has its own separate timeline: 50 percent design completed in October 2025, a second community meeting in January 2026, and work now underway toward 90 percent design.
Read the project name again. E Street to Leucadia Boulevard. That boundary matters more than almost anything else in this story, because Grandview and Phoebe sit north of Leucadia Boulevard, on the far side of the exact line where the funded quiet zone stops.
Why a New Crossing Doesn't Mean a Quiet One
Federal Railroad Administration rules require locomotive horns at every public at-grade crossing unless that crossing has an approved substitute in place. Because Grandview and Phoebe will be brand-new legal crossings, they trigger this requirement the moment they open, regardless of what happens with the broader quiet zone effort.
The city's answer is wayside horns, stationary devices mounted at the crossing that sound in place of the locomotive's horn and are aimed at the road rather than blasted in every direction. The city has built wayside horns into the Grandview and Phoebe design from the start, and the concept has precedent nearby in Del Mar and San Clemente. But wayside horns still need sign-off from both the FRA and the CPUC before they can replace the standard horn, and that approval hasn't happened yet.
The advocacy group Better Crossings Leucadia has been blunt about what this means in practice: wayside horns redirect sound, they don't eliminate it. The group also points to the math behind why residents are so exhausted by this in the first place. Current federal rules require four horn soundings at roughly 110 decibels for every train approaching every crossing. With about 54 trains a day passing through three crossings in the area, that works out to roughly 648 individual horn blasts daily, a number the group expects to climb further once North County rail traffic roughly doubles by 2035, a projection tied to planned expansion of passenger and freight service along the corridor.
The Carlsbad Problem
Even if wayside horns get approved at Grandview and Phoebe, that only addresses those two specific crossings. A true quiet zone, the kind that silences routine horns across a continuous stretch of track, is a different regulatory animal, and extending one north of Leucadia Boulevard runs into a jurisdictional wall.
To establish quiet zone status north of Leucadia Boulevard, the City of Carlsbad would need to install its own enhanced safety measures at the Cannon Road rail crossing, since a quiet zone has to be continuous and Carlsbad's crossing sits just up the line. That cooperation hasn't materialized. Encinitas district representatives Luke Shaffer and Jim O'Hara have said they're exploring ways to extend quiet zone status throughout the city, including northwest Leucadia, but as of this year the piece that would make it possible sits outside Encinitas city limits and outside Encinitas city control.
So the geography works against residents twice. The funded quiet zone stops at Leucadia Boulevard. The new crossings sit north of it. And the fix for that gap depends on a neighboring city's public works decisions rather than anything Encinitas can approve on its own.
Two Advocacy Groups, Two Different Asks
The push for change in Leucadia isn't coming from one unified voice, and that's worth understanding if you're trying to follow the debate at council meetings.
- NOWLeucadia has focused its energy on getting the at-grade crossings funded and built, arguing that decades of delay have left residents without a safe legal way to cross the tracks on foot or by bike. The group said it collected 737 petition signatures supporting the crossings ahead of an April 2026 city budget workshop.
- Better Crossings Leucadia has taken a different position, arguing that at-grade crossings lock the neighborhood into permanent horn noise and safety tradeoffs no matter how the wayside horn question shakes out, and pushing instead for a grade-separated underpass or overpass that would eliminate the horn requirement entirely.
That same April 2026 workshop turned into something more contentious than a routine budget hearing. Alongside the residents and advocates pressing council to fund the crossings, two local physicians urged the city to pause construction, warning that wayside horns can reach decibel levels that pose long-term health risks to nearby residents. The council didn't get a clean resolution out of that meeting, and the disagreement over what "safe" actually means for this stretch of track is still open.
What This Actually Means Through the Rest of 2026
If you live near the tracks in northwest Leucadia, here's the honest version of where things stand. The crossings at Grandview and Phoebe are moving forward, with design work funded through 2026 and a federal grant decision pending. When they open, they will very likely open with wayside horns rather than silence, and that wayside horn system still needs regulatory approval it doesn't yet have. The quiet zone that would actually reduce routine horn noise is funded only as far north as Leucadia Boulevard, short of where the new crossings sit, and closing that gap depends on Carlsbad taking action at Cannon Road that hasn't happened. And the community itself hasn't settled on what it wants: legal crossings now with an imperfect noise fix, or a longer wait for something that removes the horn question for good.
None of this means nothing is happening. Two years ago, this stretch of track had no legal crossing and no funded path to one. Today it has CPUC approval, a funded design phase, and a real timeline into 2027. It's just a slower and more layered story than "the crossings are approved, so the noise problem is solved," and anyone following the council agendas this fall is going to want the fuller picture before the next vote.
Whatever happens with the tracks, Leucadia Roadside Park will keep doing double duty, host to the LeucadiART Walk every August and to the city's flood pumps every winter storm. It's a small reminder that this neighborhood tends to solve its problems one layer at a time, in public, with everyone still arguing about the details.
If you're watching how infrastructure like this shapes life in Leucadia, or you're weighing a move to North County San Diego and want a straight answer about what's actually happening on the ground in a specific neighborhood, Pagni Real Estate can walk you through it. Schedule a free consultation and get the local read before you make your next move.
