If you walk your dog along Beach Range Road toward the underpass near Reindollar Avenue in Marina, you've probably noticed the chain-link fencing that's been up for over a year. Most people assume it's the usual construction shuffle: annoying, finite, eventually gone. But since April 2026, the path that used to connect Beach Range Road to the Monterey Bay Coastal Trail under Highway 1 hasn't just been closed for work. It's closed for good.
That distinction matters if you're one of the Seaside residents, CSUMB students, or Sand City commuters who's used this stretch of trail for years to get to the beach, to class, or simply to log a few flat, ocean-adjacent miles without dealing with Highway 1 traffic. The old underpass connection isn't reopening when construction wraps. It's been replaced by a new route near Del Monte Boulevard and Reindollar Avenue, complete with its own accessible ramp and crosswalk. If you haven't updated your mental map yet, this is the moment to do it.
Why This One Change Doesn't Reverse
Most of what's disrupting trail access around Fort Ord Dunes right now is genuinely temporary. Fencing goes up, work happens, fencing comes down. But the Reindollar Avenue closure is different because it wasn't driven by construction logistics alone. It's a permanent reroute built to accommodate the new SURF! Busway that Monterey-Salinas Transit is laying down in the old rail corridor parallel to Highway 1. Once that busway is paved and operating, the underpass path simply won't exist in its old form anymore. The new connector near Reindollar Avenue is the trail now, not a placeholder for the trail.
That's a small but telling detail about how public infrastructure actually gets built along this coast. Projects that look like a single "construction zone" from the trail are often several separate efforts stacked on top of each other, each with its own agency, its own budget, and its own finish line. Understanding which changes are temporary and which are the new normal is the only way to actually plan your commute instead of just tolerating it.
Two Agencies, Two Very Different Finish Lines
The reason Beach Range Road has felt disrupted for what seems like forever is that two large, unrelated public projects happen to be under construction on the same stretch of dunes at the same time.
| Project | Lead Agency | Broke Ground | Construction Length | Expected Completion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fort Ord Dunes Campground | California State Parks | Summer 2025 | About 2 years | Around 2027 |
| SURF! Busway and Bus Rapid Transit | Monterey-Salinas Transit | June 2025 | About 28 months | Spring 2028 |
The $33 million campground project has actually been decades in the making. It was written into Fort Ord Dunes State Park's master plan back in 2004, but it stalled for years while the site, a former rifle training range, went through environmental clearance with the state's Department of Toxic Substances Control to confirm it was free of lead contamination. Once that cleared, State Parks broke ground in the summer of 2025 on what will eventually be 98 campsites, a campfire pavilion, a visitor center, and a walkway over the dunes to a bluff-top viewing platform overlooking Monterey Bay.
Running at the same time, but answering to a completely different timeline, is MST's SURF! Busway, a roughly five-mile bus-only corridor built in the old Southern Pacific rail right-of-way connecting Marina, Sand City, and Seaside to Monterey. That project broke ground in June 2025 and is expected to keep working through spring 2028, about a year past the campground's target date.
Neither agency planned around the other. They just happen to share a corridor, which means the disruption you're feeling on your daily walk or ride isn't really one construction project. It's two, layered on top of each other, closing out on two different clocks.
By January 2026, Monterey District superintendent Dan Shaw gave residents a concrete sense of where things stood on the campground side, telling a community meeting:
"We're about a quarter of the way through the project at this point."
That same meeting, hosted virtually by Marina Mayor Bruce Delgado and Monterey County Supervisor Wendy Root Askew, drew about 70 attendees, mostly people who rely on Beach Range Road for exactly the kind of daily use this article is about: commuting to CSUMB, walking dogs, or getting to the beach without driving. Root Askew has said the overlap between the two projects is likely to keep both trails limited for roughly two years total, a timeline that lines up with the table above.
What's Actually Open Right Now
If you're trying to plan this week's route rather than sort through two separate agency timelines, here's where things stand:
- A stretch of Beach Range Road remains closed while campground work continues, per State Parks' own park status page.
- The permanent underpass connection near Reindollar Avenue is gone, replaced by the new path and crosswalk near Del Monte Boulevard.
- The rest of Fort Ord Dunes State Park's trails, and its four miles of beach, remain open to the public.
- Commuters heading toward CSUMB have mostly shifted to the parallel Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail, though Root Askew has noted it wasn't built or maintained with the same standards as the trail it's replacing.
- General Jim Moore Boulevard is another option for cyclists, though it doesn't have a dedicated bike lane.
- MST crews have spent recent months painting directional arrows along the coastal trail specifically to help pedestrians and cyclists find their way around the active work zones, so if your usual route feels different, look for the new paint before assuming you're lost.
The Trade You're Actually Making
It's easy to experience two years of rerouted walks as pure loss, but both projects are adding infrastructure that didn't exist before, not just replacing what's there. MST's own planners have said the finished busway will add about a mile of new multiuse trail beyond what currently exists, with new connections at Palm Avenue, the future 5th Street Station in Marina, and California Avenue in Sand City. On the State Parks side, the finished campground will bring a staffed, 24-hour facility with a bluff-top overlook where the current trail simply passes through open dune, plus a visitor center and campfire pavilion built specifically for interpretive programs about the site's Fort Ord history.
Because MST operates under a CEQA exemption that requires at least two public construction updates a year, more community meetings are already built into the schedule. If you want to stay ahead of the next reroute instead of discovering it mid-walk, the state parks project page and MST's SURF! updates page are both worth bookmarking, since both agencies post specific closure dates and detour maps as work progresses.
None of this changes what makes this stretch of coastline worth walking in the first place. The dunes, the four miles of open beach, the ammo bunkers left over from the old Fort Ord training grounds, all of that stays exactly where it's always been. What's changed is simply how you get to it, and understanding that the Reindollar Avenue reroute is permanent while the rest of the disruption is not is the difference between adapting once and getting caught off guard every few months for the next two years.
Seaside's daily rhythms, from the trail you run before work to the beach you take out-of-town guests to see, are the kind of local detail that only comes from actually living here and paying attention. If you're curious about what else is changing across the Peninsula, or simply want to talk with people who track this coastline as closely as you do, the team at Monterey Coast Realty is always glad to talk shop, no transaction required.
