The Causeway project was one of several transportation proposals on the table towards the end of Gov. Pat Brown’s administration, under whose auspices most of our existing freeways were built back when land and construction costs were reasonable and the state government was flush with cash.
Some of the other aborted projects would have also had significant impacts on Malibu. One was a freeway through Malibu Canyon. Another was a cross-mountain highway that would have connected the Ventura Freeway with either a potential Pacific Coast Freeway or the Causeway. The cross-mountain proposal, which would have partially paralleled Mulholland Highway, was still garnering support as late as 1983 when Los Angeles County was preparing its Local Coastal Plan for Malibu. Like the city’s later efforts, the county would also find no success in getting its plan certified.
Yet another proposal would have extended Reseda Blvd. through the Santa Monica Mountains, with a southern terminus at Sunset Blvd. This would have alleviated much of the “Z traffic” that plagues our morning commute to Los Angeles (as well as the bottleneck in the Sepulveda Pass. However, the Palisades would have never been the same. In a coalition of right and left, the new Reagan administration in Sacramento combined with the first flowering of citizen activism and environmentalism to kill all of these proposals (as well as a nuclear power plant to be built over an earthquake fault in Corral Canyon, and a Beverly Hills Freeway paralleling Olympic Boulevard).
Despite these missing pieces of infrastructure, the growth in the region’s population has vastly exceeded even the expansive expectations of the mid-1960s everywhere but in Malibu, where the county’s projections, according to a 1965 land use document, foresaw 300,000 Malibu residents by 1970! Some failures are just not meant to be mourned, such as the many mislaid “plans of mice and men.”
B. Harlan Field