Driving Change: Show me the bodies first

By Michel Shane · Mon Sep 28 2026

Joshua Farmer was crossing Pacific Coast Highway in the dark at Winding Way one night in February. A car hit him, and he died. The driver was not speeding or drunk. The driver could not see him. Winding Way sits inside the Caltrans repaving and safety project this city approved last November, 15 miles of PCH from Serra Road at Cross Creek to the Ventura County line. I wrote in February that Caltrans had planned a light there and cut it during the appeal. I went back through everything Caltrans presented to this city, and I cannot find a light at Winding Way in any of it. I had that wrong. Caltrans thinned its own lighting plan last fall, after the Planning Commission, the Township Council, and residents' groups pushed back at three public meetings, before the Commission ever voted. The Commission approved 27 poles. When the Malibu Township Council appealed and asked to strip more, the Council refused and kept all 27.

And I had something else wrong. On the night the Commission voted, I carried an empty chair to the podium, set it down beside me, and asked for limited lighting. I said it because I wanted the project to pass, and I thought the lights were the thing to give up to get it. It is in the record. I stood next to that chair and traded away the wrong thing, and three months later Joshua Farmer died in the dark on the stretch I was willing to trade.

After a death on this road, someone always asks for speed bumps. Federal and state engineering guidance rules them out on arterials, emergency routes, truck routes, and roads with curves shorter than 300 feet, and caps design speeds at 30 to 35 miles an hour. PCH is all of those at once and posted at 45 and above. A hump a car takes at 20 becomes a ramp at 55. When Caltrans says no to speed bumps, Caltrans is right. But that guidance doesn't stop at no. For a road at 45 and up, it names what belongs there instead: crossings that go over or under the traffic, pedestrian signals and beacons, median refuges, curb extensions, and lighting. Malibu already has tunnels under PCH. Nobody uses them, and the ones that open onto the beach take in sand and sea before they take in a pedestrian. People cross where they are going, not where the road tells them to. They cross PCH the way they would cross a country road because for most of its length PCH gives them nothing else: no signal, no refuge, no light. We spent last fall arguing about whether we could bear to have the last one.

Look at how a light gets decided on PCH. Caltrans places a pole where its collision history meets its lighting warrant. A warrant is a formula. It counts the crashes at a spot, and when the count is high enough, the spot earns a light. It does not count the people who cross there every night. It counts the ones who did not make it. When this city asked for a hard look last fall, Caltrans ran every proposed light through that formula again. Zumirez dropped from ten poles to two. Twenty-seven locations earned their light. Winding Way was never one of them. By the standard Caltrans stated at that hearing, the crossing where Joshua Farmer died had not met the warrant. I have driven that stretch at night more times than I can count, and I could not tell you what a person in the road looks like there, because you cannot see one.

The federal guidance says a road at 45 miles an hour should be lit. The Caltrans warrant says "show me the bodies first." Both rules sit in the same building, and the second one decides. A formula that looks at a crossing, finds it safe enough to leave dark, and is then proven wrong by a death at that exact spot has been tested by the only test there is. Caltrans will say one death does not change the count. That is the problem with it.

This is not about Dark Sky. The commission and the council already adopted the conditions any light on this road must meet: fully shielded, 3,000 Kelvin, aimed at the pavement, no spill past the right of way. That fight is over. What remains is 27 poles across 15 miles.

Now go east of Cross Creek. Las Flores, Big Rock, Carbon Beach, the stretch the Palisades Fire took. Most of it is a rebuild zone now, and the families coming back will come back to a different road. Edison is putting the power lines underground from Las Flores through Carbon Beach, as it already has at La Costa, so the poles that carried what little light there was are coming down. Caltrans is repaving the same stretch in a second project that runs from the McClure Tunnel to Serra Road and has not yet come before this city. Caltrans's own list of the safety work in that project includes one lighting item: upgrades to two pedestrian tunnels in Santa Monica and Los Angeles. In Malibu, none. The power trench is open. The pavement trench is next. Nobody has said a word about a light in either one.

Somerville, Massachusetts, has gone three years without a traffic death. Hoboken has gone nine. The woman who founded the Vision Zero Network said of Somerville that they are "not using some magic toolbox." They read the list for their roads and installed what was on it. Ours sits in a file at Caltrans District 7 with 27 poles checked off.

Here is what this city can do without asking anyone's permission.

We say the city does not own PCH as if the sentence closes the subject. The synchronized signals prove it does not. Malibu led that project on state right-of-way, paid for it with county measure money, and turned it on from Topanga to John Tyler. Cooperative agreements and encroachment permits are how a city builds on a state highway, and this city has already done it once on this road.

The proposal is narrow. The city leads on lighting and only lighting, and only where Caltrans has left the road dark: intermittent poles along the stretch from Las Flores to Trancas, where people live now and where they are coming back, every one built to the conditions the Council already adopted, so that a driver at Winding Way can see a person crossing and the sky over Point Dume stays black. Where Caltrans is lighting, the city does nothing. Where Caltrans is not, the city fills the gap.

The clock is Caltrans's own. Design on the eastern project closes at the end of 2026. When it reaches the Planning Commission, the city can do what it did last November: strike lights it does not want. It will not be able to add one. The city attorney said so from the dais, and Caltrans confirmed it. So the ask cannot wait for the hearing. The motion is one line: direct staff to open a cooperative agreement with Caltrans District 7 for city-funded lighting on the segments the state left dark, and bring the terms back before the year ends. Edison's conduit is going into the ground now. A lighting circuit belongs in the same trench, and it costs a fraction of what it will cost to dig the road up again to add one later. Miss the window, and the next chance comes when the asphalt wears out again, 20 years from now.

Someone will ask why the city should spend a dollar on a state road. The answer is a date. Oct. 17 will be three years since four young women were killed standing beside this highway, and four families joined the Empty Chair Club. In those three years, the state has repaved, the county has paid for signals, this council has approved a permit and defended it on appeal, and Joshua Farmer still died in the dark at Winding Way because the formula had not counted enough bodies at his crossing. Somewhere there is a chair for him too.

We have built a system on this road in which the dead are the application and a streetlight is the approval. The state owns the road. The dark is ours.

I can be reached at michel@21milesinmalibu,com