Hermosa Beach to Stand Firm on PCH Parking

The stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway through Hermosa Beach--where every rush hour means a traffic jam--won’t be any less a bottleneck in the ‘90s than it is right now, the Hermosa Beach City Council decided this week.

Rejecting a report from a consultant hired to tell the city how to ease congestion on its cramped thoroughfares, the council indicated Tuesday that Hermosa Beach won’t join two other South Bay beach cities in banning rush-hour parking along Pacific Coast Highway.

Businesses along the street and residents made it clear that they opposed easing the bottleneck.

“I don’t care if they can’t get through our town,” said Wilma Bird, a Hermosa Beach resident for 30 years. “If they can’t get through Hermosa, maybe they’ll go somewhere else.”

For years, the city’s acceptance of parked cars on the busy thoroughfare has created one of the South Bay’s more notorious bottlenecks, pinching the highway from three lanes in adjacent cities into two lanes in Hermosa Beach.

The signal that the stall and crawl will continue came in the form of a council straw vote at a public hearing on General Plan recommendations for traffic and parking. The recommendations--submitted by city planners, the Planning Commission and the consultant, DKS & Associates--were to help the council decide how the city should accommodate traffic in the future.

But despite advice from both the consultant and the Planning Commission to ban rush-hour parking on the venerable beach highway, the council instead followed the call of residents and local merchants. Packing the meeting room, the homeowners said Hermosa Beach should make it harder, not easier, for out-of-town commuters to cut through their city streets.

Wesley Bird of the Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile, said that if Hermosa Beach eliminates its parking lane on Pacific Coast Highway, even for a few hours a day, the move will ruin business for the merchants along the thoroughfare. They depend on residents having easy access to parking and not on commuters who stop as they drive through the city.

The council also gave an unofficial thumbs-down to suggested improvements and widening of the two streets flanking the greenbelt, which runs parallel to Pacific Coast Highway, since they often absorb the overflow from the highway during the morning and evening commuter rush.