Almost. If you're taking off from Santa Barbara (a class C airport with its own approach control) then you'd just call clearance delivery and ask for tower enroute to your destination and give him the aircraft type and equipment suffix. Then he'll come back with a full IFR clearance for you to copy. The clearance is from the Chinese menu, but I don't think they use a route number. This skips the pre-filing portion.

Now at VFR towers (class D airports) in the Bay Area (and probably in the LA area, too) they usually like you to prefile (because otherwise the ground controller has to get on the interphone with a grumpy and busy approach controller who then has to enter your flight plan). If you prefile, you can tell the FSS briefer that you want "tower enroute routing" and they usually don't go beyond the destination entry in the flight plan form. But that doesn't matter to the route itself. Although not published in the A/FD for the Bay Area, the routes are fixed and published within ATC.

It is my understanding that TEC is more of a convenience to ATC than to pilots. They don't need to enter you into the ARTCC computer that is rather picky about routes, but rather give you a local squawk code and a canned route and send you on your way. You, as a pilot, need not know anything about it except that you don't need to file a route. As far as I know, on the Left Coast, there is only one TEC route for an airport pair in use at a time. They change routes when the wind blows the other way and all the major airports in the area are landing the other way. So the pilot never makes a choice of routes. The only reason to publish the routes is to make it easier to copy the clearance.

Snowbird wrote:

Okey, dokey. Let's see if I got this straight.

On the Left Coast, TEC means you call up ground and say you want
to go from KABC to KXYZ, tower enroute, and they clear you. No
prefiling w/ FSS or DUATS, no route given, none of the rest of
the flight plan jazz and off you go. You having looked up the
route and altitude in the AF/D and the ground controller presumably
entering you in the system with the correct route number, like
a Chinese menu.