Last week, a motorcyclist was badly injured on PCH at Guernsey Avenue, when an SUV apparently turned in front of him. The dried puddle of blood is still there.
The State of California—Caltrans—created a dangerous situation at that corner, with the installation of big yellow paddles that obstruct vision of oncoming traffic. Those yellow paddles helped kill a motorcyclist near Paradise Cove several years ago, and they likely have contributed to other crashes as well.
The paddles are four feet high and wide. They provide an important safety function in preventing U-turns, which have also been a deadly problem along PCH. But they don’t have to be so high or wide as to block the view of traffic.
In about 2008, when they were installed, I noticed this problem. I took pictures of cars emerging from behind the yellow paddles on PCH at Guernsey. The paddles block the view of traffic from either direction, particularly from a low car, particularly of a small object, like a motorcyclist.
The paddles also create one-way roads—not a bad thing, but Caltrans has failed to mark the one-way roads with signs, as required by the state highway design manual.
Eight years ago, I took these pictures to the Malibu Public Safety Commission. I took them to the city council. I took them to the PCH Task Force. I sent them to Caltrans.
Nothing happened. The Public Safety Commission had requested the paddles, and ignored me. Caltrans told me that smaller, less-obstructive paddles were easily available, but the boss decided to go with the tall, wide ones.
In 2011, a 41-year-old Malibu man named Joseph Annocki was killed at Geoffrey’s when his motorcycle hit a car, whose driver had been confused by the paddles. Terry Turner, 50, was a church minister from Oklahoma who took his daughter, a Pepperdine student, to dinner at Geoffrey’s. He doesn’t drink alcohol.
Turner drove out the wrong driveway, into oncoming traffic. The paddles were perpendicular to him, coming up the hill from the restaurant’s angled driveway he could not see them. And the paddles are not in the manual of uniform traffic devices, in some states they appear on the right side of the road to mark hazards. He was confused, he turned left into oncoming traffic.
Turner realized his mistake, and was backing up into the driveway when Annocki came around the slight curve. Annocki probably could not see the maneuvering sedan, because the paddles were blocking his vision. We’ll never know; he died on the pavement.
Two weeks later, I sent Caltrans a letter, saying they had just caused a fatality by failing to remove their hazards.
A lawyer can guess what happened next: Annocki’s family sued the state, and tried to introduce my letters as evidence. Caltrans filed a court order on me, demanding that I produce every email, photo, article from the years I had been working as a reporter. They demanded that I produce copies of 85,000 items—literally.
That will teach you, Mr. Citizen Journalist. Caltrans used seven state attorneys to go after me.
I defied the court order, as the state shield law is supposed to protect a reporter. It cost me $700 out of pocket to defend myself from the state trying to get into my protected files. The subpoena was dismissed. But Caltrans made it clear—it would defend itself from critics at any cost.
The state has paid Annocki’s family an undisclosed settlement. The trial against Geoffrey’s starts soon—the state Supreme Court has ruled they had a duty to warn the motorist not to turn left off of its property. The tourist from Oklahoma is also being sued.
The next time the city council or public safety commission tells you they want to hear from you about road hazards, think about the $750 it cost this Malibu reporter to protect his files. Think about how years of effort about an obvious safety hazard just gets ignored, because once the city and state take action, that action must be defended at all costs.
But far more importantly, the yellow paddles are still there, and so is the puddle of dried blood.
Hans Laetz
Reporter, KBU radio, Malibu