Corral Canyon residents are split over the approved traffic signal at Pacific Coast Highway, and bicycle safety efforts continue with plans for a series of 26 signs.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
While the rest of the world was paying attention to the 162-mph Ferrari smashup on Pacific Coast Highway last week, local activists were tussling with the continuing traffic safety questions elsewhere on the 27-mile-long lifeline known as PCH.
Some county residents, unhappy that a traffic signal is going to be installed by the city of Malibu at Corral Canyon at PCH, said they plan to lobby the City council to reverse that plan.
Scott Palamar, who lives outside city limits on Corral Canyon Road, said a majority of the canyon residents he spoke to oppose the pending installation of a $200,000 traffic light near the BeauRivage restaurant.
Palamar has been collecting petition signatures against the traffic light, which has already been approved in concept by the City council and state Department of Transportation.
“People think that safety is improved with the installation of a traffic signal,” Palamar said. “In fact, the opposite is true, and traffic signals often decrease overall safety.”
City engineers are designing the signal, funded with 60 percent state and 40 percent federal funds, but plans must be accepted by Caltrans. City public works director Granville Bowman said his department would likely have its final plans approved by Caltrans officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento within 60 days.
But Palamar hopes to derail the approved project before that.
“Number one on our list of objections is the whole quality-of-life issue, the constant fight against citification,” he said. “The whole thing about Malibu is its ‘way of life,’ which is constantly under attack.”
But Latigo Beach resident Teresa Tuchman, who lives next to the intersection and said she has seen more than 15 accidents over the past decade, is astonished by that opinion.
“He says a traffic light ruins Malibu’s rural ambience?” Tuchman asked incredulously. “Where does he live, and does he realize that PCH is like a freeway down here?”
Tuchman said a serious broadside accident three years ago, in which a critically injured motorist was cut out of the wreckage with power jaws, convinced her the signal is essential to prevent major wrecks, even if there are downsides.
“Do I really want a traffic light next to my house, for the motorcycles to rev up at?” she asked. “No, but when I see all the kids in their parents cars at the stop sign, I have to wonder if that is so much less important than some ‘Malibu way of life.'”
Bowman said the signal is warranted because the long period of time drivers must wait at the existing stop sign for a break in the traffic, and to prevent someone from taking a chance on gunning it onto the highway. And he said that while there may be a slight up-tick in collisions there if a signal is installed, those crashes would be of the less serious rear-ender variety.
“There is nothing in either direction to provide a break in traffic for several miles, and the long delay in waiting for traffic breaks means this intersection is warranted for a signal,” Bowman said. “It’s on Caltrans’ list for installation, but they are so backlogged for engineering that it will take years.”
Share the Road signs to go up
Meanwhile, a call from bicycle club members for a pair of striped bike lanes on either side of the highway through the entire length of Malibu appears to have died, as members of state Sen. Sheila Kuehl’s PCH Safety Taskforce committee is favoring other alternatives aimed at promoting safety on Highway 1.
As many as 26 large “Share the Road” signs are to be installed soon along PCH between Santa Monica and Point Mugu to remind motorists that bicyclists have the legal right to use traffic lanes if necessary, an official said.
Bicycle riders associations are taking pictures and inventorying “pinch points” where shoulders are closed and bike riders are forced into traffic lanes, with the idea of the state widening the roads in those locations, Kuehl said.
“We’ve lost some of the road, over the years, to landslides and other problems,” Kuehl said. “No one has paid attention to the impact at those places on bicycles.
“In the words of Willy Loman, ‘Attention must be paid,'” she said.
Most of those “pinch points” are in the City of Los Angeles, with the stretch between Topanga Canyon and Temescal Canyon boulevards viewed as the worst due to long-standing landslide obstructions.
Kuehl reorganized the longstanding PCH safety committee after the deaths last fall of Scott Bleifer, 41, of Santa Monica, and Stanislav Ionov, 46, of Calabasas after they rode their bikes into traffic lanes because construction barriers had blocked the shoulder, and a catering truck hit them.
Current state law allows bicycles to use a traffic lane as long as they keep as far to the right as possible. Rep. Peter Nava, D-Santa Barbara, has introduced a bill that, if passed, would require vehicles to give bicycles a three-foot margin of safety at all times the bikes are legally operated.
Nava’s bill was prompted by the death of Kendra Payne, a Santa Barbara university student who was killed when a truck driver tried to pass her bike with less than one foot of clearance on a narrow road in Goleta.