ORANGE COUNTY SUMMER : Strand Stampede : Heedless Herd Drives Huntington Beach to Install Signals on Shoreline Walk

With 70,000 people packed onto three miles of oceanfront, Huntington Beach on a weekend has never been anyone’s picture of serenity.

But at least everyone seemed to get along. That is, they used to get along , because from all appearances there’s big trouble brewing down at the beach.

The problem is that Huntington Beach is literally suffocating from its own popularity. There are simply too many sunbathers, too many bicyclists and too many skateboarders.

So many, in fact, that the city has now installed traffic lights along the pedestrian walkway to keep bicyclists and skateboarders from running down walkers, joggers and each other.

And nobody, it seems, likes the idea of being herded together on the beach boardwalk like so many cars inching down a freeway at rush hour.

The cyclists blame the kids on the skateboards, the skateboarders blame the adults on the 10-speeds, and the pedestrians blame anyone who isn’t on his feet. The city thinks they’re all a bit at fault.

“There’s just too many people out here,” said Lt. Steve Davidson, a marine safety officer at the beach. “It’s a little bit of everyone’s fault. Some of the bikers go too fast, and the pedestrians don’t look where they’re going. All kinds of people are getting hurt out here.”

The yellow traffic signals are positioned along the most heavily traveled, half-mile stretch of the beach at Jack’s hamburger stand, Lake Street, the city pier and the restrooms near 6th Street.

When the crowds become particularly heavy--almost any weekend, for instance--lifeguards turn on the lights, signaling bicyclists and skateboarders to stop and dismount and walk their bikes and boards until the congestion clears.

If they don’t, they can be cited by the police and liable to a fine, the amount to be determined by the court. If the program is successful in reducing minor mishaps along the beach service road, which runs parallel to the ocean, officials said it could be extended to a 3.3-mile stretch of the beach.

On Saturday, the first day the new city ordinance went into effect, the flashing lights were turned on at 10:30 a.m. and remained blinking until 5 p.m. City police officers roamed the boardwalk-like service road looking for violators and issuing warnings that if they did it again, they would be subject to a fine.

Max Bowman, director of the city Community Services Department which oversees the beach, said it was not unusual to have two to three mishaps each weekend, usually the result of a pedestrian walking in front of a speeding bicyclist or someone jumping off a skateboard in front of a cruising cyclist.

“It’s not really the recreational (bicycle) rider,” said Bowman, “but the high-speed bicyclists with their 10 gears, really pumping, really moving down the road, and people on skateboards doing fancy maneuvering. People are getting hurt out there.”

Bowman said the lights were needed because most cyclists already are ignoring the posted 5-m.p.h. speed limit when the beach is crowded.

“The bike is like an automobile as far as we are concerned,” he said. “Bicycles are supposed to stop at stop signs, and they don’t. They need to move on up to Pacific Coast Highway.”

The whole thing is enough to send a serious cyclist into a rage.

“It’s absurd,” said Kyle Lundy, 23, a police dispatcher in Buena Park. “It’s the skateboarders and the people who walk in from the parking lot and don’t look where they’re going. They walk right in front of you.”

Lundy, who bikes 400 miles a week on a 16-speed Schwinn Paramount, said the problem rests with “people who just don’t pay attention to what they’re doing. Sure, some bikers go too fast down here, and they shouldn’t. But people should watch where they’re going.”

Barney Richer, 25, a Huntington Beach resident who regularly bikes down the coast on an Atala racing bike, enjoys the strip along Huntington Beach as a welcome respite from traffic on Pacific Coast Highway.

He, too, pointed a finger at the skateboarders.

“They don’t look,” he said. “Bikers watch where they’re going.”

Not so, says 19-year-old Mark Putz of La Mirada, who dismisses serious cyclists as “kooks” who should stay on the highway where they belong.

“They come down here really speeding,” said Putz, who visits the beach daily to skateboard. “Those guys are nuts. Wearing all that Spandex and those helmets. They’re crazy. They just come down here to look at the girls anyway.”

“If they really wanted to ride,” added his friend David Erlitz, also 19, “they’d ride up on the road.”

Cyclist Loses Toe

Bowman, the city’s community services director, said he had no statistics on the number of injuries caused by careless bikers or skateboarders but said it was not unusual for there to be several mishaps a week. Davidson, the marine safety officer, cited one bike accident several weeks ago when a cyclist’s toe was amputated after a bad spill.

“If we don’t control this, somebody is really going to get hurt,” Bowman said. “They think this is a bike path and it’s not.”

Another skateboarder, 19-year-old Bill Hooper, said he often sits with his friends near the beach and waits for cyclists to go careening off the path into the sand, or worse yet, into another biker.

“We’ll kick back and just sit here and sooner or later they’ll crash,” said Hooper, who lives in La Mirada. “They come flying down here, just jamming, and then they eat it. You see it happen all the time.”

Despite the threat of citations, it is not at all clear if either the cyclists or the skateboarders will comply with the new stop-and-dismount law. If they don’t, police say they will simply step up enforcement until everyone gets the word that they are serious.

Maggie Redden, a Fullerton teen-ager out with friends for a day at the beach, said the whole thing struck her as “a little bit silly.”

“If everyone would just behave and not try to be so macho, none of this would happen,” she said.