There is a lot of talk about making the beaches and mountains accessible to the public. There is a website that tells you where all of the accesses are located and the Coastal Commission is constantly pontificating about the public’s right to both the beaches and mountains. There is one thing, however, that none of them like to talk about, which is, where do they all park their cars? So, unless you walk the 10 to 30 miles from Santa Monica or swim here, you’re going to get here the way most everyone does and that is by automobile.
To put it in perspective, there are 13,000 citizens of Malibu and an estimated 15,000,000 visitors come to Malibu every year. As I do the arithmetic, it would appear that for every one of us, there are 1,154 visitors each year, or an average of a little over three visitors per day. Now, if you invited 1,154 people to your home over the year with their children, their animals, their beach umbrella and other beach equipment, and their cousins, there are certain things you can absolutely bet on.
First, if they are anything like my family, or probably your family also, about 90% are going to be wonderful, thoughtful, appreciative guests and the other 10% are going to be total slobs. The slobs are never going to put garbage in the garbage cans, but will manage to throw some of it into the toilet, which will guarantee your septic system backing up. It’s not as bad on the beaches because there is always the underside of someone’s house or the ocean, which, although the ocean is too pure to be able to absorb Title 22 water (meaning practically drinkable water) on any hot summer day, the ocean probably processes as much urine as the Los Angeles City plant in Playa del Rey.
But I digress … back to the parking. Recently, Karen and I rented out our house and downsized into renting a one-bedroom condo on the beach side of Carbon Beach. We’re also just down the street from the fabulously successful and expensive Nobu Restaurant, with their very large staff. The parking lot they have barely accommodates their patrons, so, of course, all of their very large staff park on the Pacific Coast Highway and any afternoon, you can see them pulling into every parking spot on the highway.
The fight for parking spots on PCH is brutal and to complicate it all, there are loads of red painted curbs on the highway, many of which are so faded, they look like they were painted 30 years ago, or perhaps have been painted by midnight painters, exercising a little self-help in front of their own homes.
As you can guess, I recently got ticketed for parking next to one of these red curbs, which was more like an old grayish pink curb, from someone referred to on the ticket as V14871, which brings up the next part of this column. There was a time when if you got a parking ticket, it had an officer’s name on it, and if you wanted to fight it, you went before the local Malibu judge and made your pitch. Today, there is no name on the ticket; there is no Malibu judge. There is a dollar amount on the ticket, which means that somewhere, there is a price sheet, and if you want to protest your ticket, this computerized ticket tells you to send a letter with all supporting documentation to something called pticket.com/malibu at a post office box in Tustin. I must confess that I have a deep suspicion that pticket.com is not part of the judiciary of the State of California and what they refer to on the back of the ticket as an “Initial Review” consists of a large round file.
The point of all this is that the City of Malibu is seriously under parked if you just consider the residents, the businesses and their employees. When you add in 15 million visitors, which is probably another five to seven million cars, there is no way everyone fits into the spaces we have in Malibu. But let’s be honest. Traffic and parking ticketing appears to have changed from a traffic enforcement measure to a strait revenue raising measure, not just in Malibu, but everywhere, including Ferguson, Miss. So let’s take the middleman out of this and face up to the fact that we need parking structures and perhaps shuttles in Malibu. I think the City should build them or contract with someone to do it. Traffic is only going to get worse so let’s deal with it honestly and not just go around mooching money from the citizenry under the guise of traffic enforcement.
P.S. I’d like to hear about some of your traffic ticket and parking ticket experiences. You can either add a comment when this column goes up on our website or email me directly at agyork@malibutimes.com. Has anyone ever filed an appeal?