Nightmare Ahead : Coast Highway Is Pushed to Limit in L.A. County

Pacific Coast Highway wends its way along the California shoreline for nearly a thousand scenic miles, offering motorists a leisurely, often spectacular drive. Then the highway crosses into Los Angeles County and the character of the route changes radically.

From the Ventura County line to Santa Monica, California 1 becomes a congested and dangerous stretch of road, its critics say.

Along this 28-mile stretch known as PCH, the highway snakes by Point Dume and Malibu Point, through urban areas with expensive homes and high-use beaches.

During rush hour, traffic often slows to a crawl and gridlock is only a stalled car, a fender-bender or a mudslide away.

Almost everyone ignores the 40 m.p.h. posted speed, police say. Cars zip along at 55 or faster on the undivided highway. And the number of crashes along most of PCH has climbed steadily, with a 15% increase over the last four years alone, reports show.

“It is a nightmare,” said Dave Roper, a California Department of Transportation official who oversees highway operations in Southern California.

The highway now carries as many as 75,000 cars a day, nearly double the peak flows of the 1970s, reports show.

Congestion is heavy, but Roper said there is no room to build more lanes.

“Essentially the highway is in the worst possible location,” he said. “On the one side is the beach, on the other a bluff of unstable land. . . . So all we can do is try to squeeze more (space) out of the existing right of way.”

Residents of the area blame the state for not solving the congestion problems.

“Caltrans talks a lot, but nothing is being done,” said Malibu Chamber of Commerce spokesman Richard Idler. “We’ve got a major commute problem in the mornings. There are bottlenecks all along the highway from Big Rock to Topanga Canyon . . . and that’s complicated by the Z traffic.”

“Z traffic” refers to San Fernando Valley commuters who drive a zigzag course from the Ventura Freeway over the mountains to PCH as a way to reach the Santa Monica Freeway heading downtown. This, the Z drivers say, avoids the congested Ventura Freeway. But coastal residents complain that Z drivers clog the canyon roads and PCH, causing 10-minute delays at some signal lights.

As congestion has increased, so has the number of accidents. Last year there were 762 accidents on the 26 miles of PCH patrolled by the California Highway Patrol, a 15% increase since 1985, according to CHP spokeswoman Donna Urquidi. During the same period, 11 people were killed in accidents, down from 13 in 1985, she said.

During rush hour, most accidents are fender-benders. But at other times, speed, unsafe U-turns and motorists driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol have contributed to head-on wrecks over the years, police say.

Most notorious is the two-mile stretch in the city of Santa Monica, where the Santa Monica Freeway feeds into the McClure Tunnel. Motorists traveling at freeway speeds flash through the tunnel and head north on PCH, then suddenly are confronted by the beach, the blue Pacific and six congested lanes of undivided traffic.

High bluffs are on the right; the beach, parking lots and expensive houses are on the left. For nearly two miles there are no cross streets, no place to turn around. And “No U-Turn” signs are everywhere.

Tourists bound for the Santa Monica Pier often find themselves heading the wrong way up the coast. Confused, they slow or pull into the double yellow-striped median lane, trying to turn back. Other drivers zoom around the slow-moving vehicles.

The speed limit is no longer strictly enforced, police said. “We’ve been told not to enforce the (40 m.p.h.) speed limit,” said Santa Monica Police Capt. Bill King.

The courts throw many tickets out because the posted speeds are not realistic and virtually everyone is speeding, King said.

For years the accident rate had been rising along this two-mile stretch. By 1987, Santa Monica police were reporting roughly 100 accidents and three fatalities a year on PCH, double the 1983 accident rate. Then the statistics dropped last year to 58 wrecks and two fatalities within the city’s jurisdiction on PCH. King credited a crackdown on drunk drivers with helping to reduce the number of accidents.

Although the annual number of accidents along the rest of PCH is rising, Caltrans engineers contend the rate of accidents per million miles driven is lower than average when compared to similar roads.

State crews have been trying for years to make traffic along PCH safer and smoother.

They made one change in 1983, after a jury awarded $2.1 million to the widow of stockbroker Donald Hillman, who died in a head-on wreck on PCH just north of the McClure Tunnel. In the 1977 accident, a collision in the northbound lanes knocked a car head-on into Hillman’s southbound vehicle, police reported.

During the trial, experts testified that 16 similar head-on crashes had occurred in the same stretch of PCH in the year preceding the Hillman accident. The jury found Caltrans liable for 75% of the damages. The $2.1-million verdict was appealed, and the state settled out of court for $1 million, officials said.

Within days of the 1983 verdict, Caltrans announced it would build a 1,200-foot-long median barrier to separate the six PCH traffic lanes north of the McClure Tunnel. The barrier was designed to prevent cross-over accidents and unsafe U-turns. Owners of beachfront homes and the city of Santa Monica had requested such a barrier more than a year earlier.

State lawyers decline to talk about the PCH problems, because at least two lawsuits are pending against the state.

Caltrans lawyers acknowledged that in addition to the $1-million settlement, the state had paid out $350,000 in another, similar PCH case. They would not say how many other PCH liability suits had been brought against the state.

In recent years, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Irving Shimer has presided over three liability suits filed against the state after accidents on PCH.

“More people will be maimed and killed (on PCH),” Shimer said from the bench in Santa Monica in January.

He criticized Caltrans for trying to squeeze more traffic capacity out of the road by making lanes narrower while failing to make the highway safer.

Shimer made the comments during the trial of a suit by two teen-age girls who were critically injured in a head-on collision. The three-car accident occurred in 1984 just north of the barricade built after the Hillman verdict. A van struck a car attempting to make a U-turn and then struck the girls’ car, experts testified.

Lawyers for the girls noted that there had been 22 accidents during the previous five years involving cars that were either making a left turn or a U-turn in this same area.

Carl McMahan, representing one of the girls, argued that the state, by earlier building the barricade, had acknowledged that the stretch of road was “unreasonably dangerous.”

Had the structure been extended even farther, the girls’ car would not have been hit, McMahan argued.

Although Shimer has not ruled in the case, he said construction of the barrier had only “pushed the problem farther north.”

While declining to talk about specific accidents, Caltrans officials say they are trying to find solutions to problems along PCH.

A variety of proposals have been discussed: building a double-deck freeway over the existing route or constructing a viaduct over the water. But these ideas were dropped because they proved too costly and controversial.

The latest idea is a $37-million Caltrans proposal to create “reversible lanes” on the most congested five miles of PCH, north of the tunnel. In the morning, four lanes of traffic would flow south to the Santa Monica Freeway, with two lanes going north. Automatic pop-up cones and overhead signals would separate the traffic. In the afternoon, the flow would be reversed and four lanes would be northbound, engineers said.

Skeptics point out that even if this solution did ease congestion, it would not solve the basic problem: there is not enough room between the bluffs and the beach to make way for more cars.

“These little devices (barricades, narrower lanes or reversible lanes) are not going to solve the basic problem. . . . There are too many cars going too fast,” Shimer said.

PCH TRAFFIC CRUNCH From the Ventura County line to Santa Monica, Pacific Coast Highway is a congested and dangerous stretch of road.

High bluffs are on one side; the beach, parking lots and expensive houses are on the other, making widening of the highway impossible.

The most notorious segment of PCH is in Santa Monica, where the Santa Monica Freeway ends at McClure Tunnel. Motorists traveling west exit the tunnel onto the northbound three lanes of PCH, a congested stretch of undivided highway. There are no cross streets for two miles. “No U Turn” signs are everywhere. Turning around is nearly impossible. Southbound three lanes are also congested.