PCH has always been dangerous. But over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a distinct change in the attitudes of drivers. They are more aggressive and impatient than ever. We had a tragedy a couple of weeks ago when Mark Osborne, who was 33 years old, was killed in front of the house of his late father-in-law Carl Randall. This made me realize that something really had to be done. Not just talking about slowing down the cars, but actually slowing down the cars.
I’ve been scrutinizing the speeds to and from work every day and find that people go 60 to 65 on average. If you’re going 40-45 mph like me, they whip around you like there’s something wrong with you. I believe that there is a real public safety issue concerning PCH. We have a highway that at certain spots runs through neighborhoods and congested shopping districts as well as beach parking areas, and we have people going in and out of these various destinations like you would on Wilshire Boulevard or Montana Avenue. We also have commuters coming from a long ways away like Oxnard, Ventura, Santa Barbara, or coming over the canyons from Thousand Oaks, Agora, etc. who are using PCH as an alternative to the 101 freeway.
No wonder there are so many accidents.
If we just take perfunctory action, then we as a community are sanctioning the 60-mile per hour speeds on PCH. It’s wrong to allow drivers, ourselves included, to drive so fast on PCH. We need to take definitive action. I propose the city forces Cal Trans and the State to put up speeding cameras. Not hidden cameras, but well advertised cameras, strategically placed to slow down cars where they speed most frequently.
Norman Ollestad