We just got the first report from the traffic engineers commissioned to study the Pacific Coast Highway and try and find a way to make to safer, because something is very wrong with the PCH.
Before diving into some of the specifics, let’s take a step back and take a look at the larger view. The PCH is a highway designer’s worst nightmare. No sane traffic engineer would design a street to be both a freeway and also the main street of a town. But we all drive it so often that we lose sight of its conflicting goals. Time and familiarity sort of deaden our perceptions of the dangers, so let me see if I can put it back into perspective.
Imagine that you driving on the San Diego Freeway (I-405) going north, passing Santa Monica Boulevard and getting off at Wilshire Boulevard to go to Westwood. The exits are about a mile apart, there is a separate transition road to the exit, good signage and the road geometrics are fine because it’s pretty straight, so you can look ahead and anticipate traffic backing up, if that’s what is happening. And there is no one parked along the highway obstructing views. It’s also designed so the entering traffic and leaving traffic don’t get in each other’s way.
Now instead of the 405, take an equally sized piece of real estate along the PCH, say between McDonald’s golden arches and Civic Center Way-roughly about the same sized piece of real estate as between SM Boulevard and Wilshireand what do you see? To begin with, there are probably 25 driveways on one side of the highway, and another 25 or so on the other side of the highway. None of these driveways, whether to a road, an apartment building, a store parking lot or a small shopping center entrance or exit, are gradual; in fact, they’re almost all at right angles. Whereas on the freeway sight distances are uncluttered with parked cars, PCH is always filled with parked cars, panel trucks and larger trucks, so to see down the road to check oncoming traffic, you sort of have to edge your nose out into the slow lane to see what’s coming toward you. If that isn’t difficult enough, throw in bicycles riding along the side of PCH near the corner of the slow lane or on the fog line, which is the line on the sidewalk side of the lane, if there is a sidewalk, which is not always the case. And just to make it interesting, add in pedestrians trying to cross the road hightailing it to the center turning lane and then waiting to work up the energy for a second burst of speed to get them across PCH. Lastly, let’s not forget those fearless valet parkers, who should be tipped liberally just for surviving.
Now, put your self back on the 405. Put in some parked cars, the bikes along the slow lane and the valet parkers dashing across the five lanes of freeway travel, and you begin to get back in touch with the problem we have in Malibu.
The question probably should not be why are many of us are injured, but the opposite, how is it that so many of us survive? I don’t mean to be facetious, because the consequence of this collision of opposing uses is often dire and occasionally fatal.
There are all sorts of things they’re beginning to think about, but the basic conflict remains. If Caltrans needs this as a major traffic artery, as it obviously does, then you don’t want to reduce the traffic speed too much, or you create problems on the 101 Freeway, since we carry so much of the Z-traffic going into town. Additionally, traffic patterns are changing. I can remember when all the traffic in the morning was headed into Santa Monica, and in the evening headed back the other way, but not anymore. Now there seems to be as much traffic going west, toward the valley and Ventura County, as there is going the other way. At one time I thought that the problem was that everyone is living in the wrong place, and if everyone on this side would move to that side and vice versa, there would be no more traffic problem. Well, people have move to the other side and the traffic, if anything, seems worse.
There are all sorts of things being talked about, signage, crosswalks, lighting, no turn areas and many more, and we’ll be talking about those specifics in the future. But the basic problem doesn’t change. That is, we need PCH to be a major traffic artery, and at the same time to be our main street, and there is no way to keep those two opposing goals from coming into conflict.