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This is one of the most beautiful and dangerous stretches of road in Southern California. It's called PCH, or the Pacific Coast Highway. The route extends for hundreds of miles up the California coast, and scenic ocean views like this have made it a legendary road for locals and travelers alike. But out here in Malibu, which is just outside of La, PCH is better known as a road where you can easily be killed, whether you're a driver just trying to make a turn or a pedestrian crossing the street. The risk that you will be struck and killed is high, no matter how much attention you pay personally to the road.
Like its name suggests, PCH was designed as a highway, so many people treat it that way by driving well past its 45 to 50 mph speed limits. Oh, its long, scenic stretches with no stop lights for a mile at a time are almost an open invite for speeding. But these same postcard views are what attract many beachgoers and tourists to the area. Instead of making adequate space for these people, the state of California dedicated almost all of Malibu's original right of way for four to six lanes of car traffic and on-street parking. So entire miles of it go without adequate sidewalks today or medians to protect people against head-on collisions. This lack of space for pedestrians meant that Caltrans didn't leave any space for them to walk safely alongside the road, and this is what that feels like. Navigating through this can be a terrifying experience. This becomes even more deadly when steep turns exist on the road, causing speeders to flip their cars over or crash into pedestrians trying to navigate on the side of the road.
There's perhaps no better example of that on PCH than what residents named Dead Man's Curve, just behind Carbon Canyon Road. Just a few months ago, a horrific wreck happened at this exact spot, which took the lives of four students walking to a party from their college nearby. They were killed when a driver going over 100 mph lost control of his car and smashed into a bunch of parked cars on the side of the road. Right after this happened in October, the public reacted with fury and demanded a bunch of changes come to PCH. And it wasn't just because of this accident; it's because it was just the latest in a string of way too many of them. Since 2010 alone, 58 people have been killed in collisions here.
So outraged with these stats, people in Malibu and all throughout La took their case to Caltrans, which is the primary agency in the state that's responsible for redesigning roads. And a couple of months later, the head of that agency came down to Malibu to make a giant announcement. "I talked to our team and I said, uh, this is going to be the number one priority, uh, as far as safety goes in our state." Listening to this at first, you'd probably expect to hear a bunch of radical or substantial changes coming your way, but here's the actual plan that he then proceeded to announce. First, they're going to add 10 new speed feedback signs, which tell you how fast you're going and clearly work in getting people to go the speed limit. Second, is they're going to add optical speed bars at 10 different locations. And if you've never heard of those before, well, I haven't either. I looked it up, and it basically just involves painting these white lines on a road so that it creates an optical illusion that a driver is actually moving faster than they really are. These apparently work in slowing people down at first, but over time they learn to go around them and that it's an illusion.
Moving on to the third proposed change that Caltrans is bringing is that they're going to restructure 11 existing crosswalks on PCH—yep, restripe. But this doesn't address the main way that pedestrians are struck in Malibu, which is crossing the road where there is no crosswalk. People often have to wait up to 5 to 6 minutes here just to cross the road safely without resorting to a real-life game of Frogger. The last major change that Caltrans is going to do is to simply install 30 new warning signs about the rules of the road and the speed limit. Oh, and they're going to paint the speed limit on the road once every mile. But the only thing these signs are going to do is remind people not to break the law. It's not going to make it harder for them to speed on PCH, and it definitely isn't going to make it more likely that they'll get caught speeding on PCH and punished.
And luckily, it seems like this is coming on the horizon, but before I get into that and talk about the enforcement solutions coming to PCH, I want to analyze what could be done to the road itself. There's a lot of engineering solutions out there which Caltrans didn't even appear to talk about in their list of changes. None of the four changes on this list have anything to do with a major concept called road dieting, which is essentially reconfiguring a road so that it's accessible for all road users and not just drivers. This primarily involves taking away a vehicular travel lane so that it can be replaced with a bike lane or a bus lane. This clip of Culver City is a good example. But doing that to PCH is going to be a particularly interesting challenge because it's hemmed in on both sides with tough topography: there's a beach on one end and mountains on the other. Plus, this is a road which is used by tens of thousands of people as a commuting path to get into the San Fernando Valley. Because road diets can introduce horrible traffic conditions if they're not done properly, we need to be really careful about where we do that on PCH, because the areas closest to the city and the Santa Monica Pier tend to be the most congested with people traveling to go to the Topanga Canyon route to the San Fernando Valley. Right now, this section is largely three lanes on each side, or two lanes, and I'm worried taking away one here for a full-on road diet might enrage a lot of the public who need to come this way with their cars.
But this is not the case if we go just a little bit up the road, about a few miles away. This is the Topanga Canyon Road where it meets PCH, and in my opinion, most of PCH beyond this point is what should be targeted for road dieting. The first thing that's beyond obvious to me about what this stretch needs is medians. They're not going to do a whole bunch in terms of reducing speeding, but what it will do is significantly reduce the chance of head-on collisions and improper turns. According to a 10-year survey of accidents on PCH, that was one of the most common causes of fatal accidents. And although the lack of a median allows people to make U-turns wherever they want to, we can just add these little turn pockets every few hundred feet or so. The other thing medians will do is allow pedestrians to cross the road much safer. This would involve adding a little opening in the median for pedestrians to cross safely along with a marked sidewalk. A great place for that, as an example, would be Moonshadows, which is a popular restaurant, but its employees have to get off the bus on the other side of PCH or park here and then cross the road without any form of protection. It's crazy to me that Caltrans never mentioned adding a crosswalk to places like this. But even if we add more crosswalks, we still need to address the fact that it's dangerous to walk alongside the road. That's why I think the biggest possible change we can make to PCH is removing a lane so that we can create mixed-use sidewalks shared by pedestrians and cyclists. We would have to install bollards to make that happen—real ones, not just these plastic ones that you see all around La—or we could use K-rail, which is otherwise known as a Jersey barrier, and these are cheaper and arguably a better thing to install here. It's going to be difficult to do that though, because the homeowners here probably won't like the fact that it would require us to remove street parking. But they would be able to keep garage parking because we could just make openings in the K-rail or in the bollards so that cars can pass through.
But what I'm really interested to talk about last is the enforcement side of things. It's obvious to me that no matter how much we change this road, Malibu should still get more police patrols and definitely speed cameras to improve the speeding issue. The reason Malibu's been down 30% in Sheriff's patrols over the last few years is before Caltrans visited Malibu in late December, Malibu convened an emergency meeting along with the LA County Supervisor of the area, who were able to secure funding for three new California Highway Patrol officers to join Malibu's sheriffs. And in one morning, in a sting operation, they issued over 60 tickets in one stretch of PCH within just a few hours. Clearly, the amount of tickets that they gave out means that tons of people are constantly breaking the law and speeding like crazy. And while I definitely support the CHP being here and the Sheriff's patrols being restored to their few years ago levels, I think that speed cameras are a much better long-term solution and a more effective one as well. They're basically just cops that are fixed 24/7 at certain locations and which give out tickets way more impartially than the police do. I have a feeling that if just a few of these are installed at key locations like this, it'll dramatically cut down the amount of people who constantly speed through them. And actually, there is good news on this front: the County Supervisor for the area in Malibu was able to secure a promise from the governor that he will include Malibu as part of the list of cities which might get speed cameras next year. But if we don't continually put pressure on the state to actually implement these enforcement and road dieting changes, I doubt we'll see a bunch of them installed soon. In the meantime, though, I'm at least glad to hear that there's something being done to PCH. It just needs to be better.