PACIFIC PALLISADES, CA – September 14, 2018 – They said it would never happen, but today there must be flurries forecast for hell, because CalTrans fixed the PCH.
We know that “fixing the PCH” is a little like “finishing eating” – there’s always going to be more. But that didn’t keep the cyclists, skaters and even a few runners from cheering the ribbon cutting ceremony that completely closed the major thoroughfare yesterday morning from 10am to 11am between Sunset and Temescal Canyon Drive. Drivers didn’t seem to mind too much, as jams due to construction on this section of the PCH have been S.O.P. since the city of Santa Monica wrecked the old California incline in ’10, beginning a 5 year nightmare of traffic problems, construction delays and of course, cost overruns. That construction did however make it much easier for CalTrans to push through repair projects which had languished for years due to legal challenges and political red-tape.
Since 1985, when a series of storms dropped earth, backyards, trees, and small structures – even a swimming pool – from their perches on the bluffs overlooking the ocean in Pacific Pallisades, three massive slides of mud have re-routed drivers. Several prominent properties tumbled down the hill, as did roadways, driveways and in some cases, access to homes. Until recently however, many drivers didn’t even realize that the curvy parts of the PCH between in Santa Monica Canyon and Topanga Canyon aren’t all that way because of the beach. Time has a way of fading memories, and 30 years of plant growth had masked most of the slides to the point that they weren’t obvious to the casual observer.
That changed five years ago, when a group of approximately 50 cyclists were plowed into by a hit-and-run driver, who was later quoted as saying, “they were in my lane”. Several people were killed, and more than a dozen badly injured. Shortly thereafter, 10 members of the same local cycling club were mowed down in a fit of irony, by a different hit-and-run driver while holding a commemorative service at the site of the accident for the previously fallen riders. In court, the second driver exclaimed, “they should have been on the sidewalk”. Of course, there was none.
Actually these were only the most spectacular in a series of incidents along this section of the PCH, which is an extremely popular route with both recreational and commuter brands of human-powered traffic. Since 1985, over 200 people have been killed or gravely injured in crashes involving automobile traffic and cyclists along the PCH in west Los Angeles county, but the 2010 crashes brought a storm of criticism, complaints and political wrangling over the mixed use highway, and its future.
Community outrage was quickly redirected when it was realized that the almost one-third of these crashes all occurred at that same spot, the site of the November 1985 slide across from the Bay City Beach Club (BCBC). The slide had blocked the northbound lanes completely, and there were several other major landslides in Malibu that needed clearing at the same time.
Previous closures shut down the PCH for three months in 1979, facilitating the need for a ferry service from Santa Monica to Malibu, and that was still fresh in people’s memory. Then, when the rains came again in 1985, Malibu residents were already beginning to allege that it was Caltrans construction that collapsed the hillside above Rambla Pacifica in the previous year, requiring its permanent closure.
Caltrans had its hands full, impending legal liability and had a lot of work to do all at once. Needing a pro tem solution while they cleaned up the more spectacular slide blocking the northbound lanes farther south at Chautauqua, Caltrans ordered the 100 foot section of road next to the BCBC – which had 4 lanes, a turn lane and twin 10 foot shoulders before the slide – to be scraped, washed and re-striped into a 4 lane road with no turn lanes or shoulders. It was ugly, but it was quick, cheap and sufficient for the short term. And, for 30 years, it stayed that way.
Contentiousness however, began a hundred years before, a little farther up the coast in what would later be known simply as “Malibu”.
The PCH between Port Hueneme and Santa Monica has been, since its very inception, a sore spot for all those who need it most. It was constructed, several times in fact, on exceedingly unstable ground, a thin slice of land pinched between the pounding surf and steep bluffs that adjoin it. First, a dirt path, the future PCH was used by the landowners and their neighbors. Malibu was an island of nature, and it was set in the mind of its owners that it should stay that way.
“Oh, the happy vaquero! Who would be a banker when he could ride the smiling hills and hide himself and horse in the tall mustard! Who would be a slave to desk and electric light darkness in a back room, when sunshine is free to all? Aye, a liberal competence is splendid, but slavery is often it’s price. But then we cannot all be vaqueros” . . .
Frederick Hastings Rindge, 1898
Those sentiments notwithstanding, all through its history Malibu residents have managed a contentious existence between them and their neighbors, their government and even the land itself. It remains the only stretch of southern California coastline not decorated with rails and trestles, ironically enough, because the former landowners built their own private railroad to prevent Southern Pacific (SP) from doing so. In the first decade of the 20th century, their tiny and long extinct railroad from the lagoon to Tracas Canyon forced the SP to connect their Santa Barbara terminus south into Los Angeles via the Santa Susana pass and through the San Fernando Valley.
That special local brand of contentiousness is exactly why it’s taken 30 years to move some mud out of the road.
Originally opened as a private road in 1890, the road through Malibu wasn’t public, but was owned in whole, as was all of Malibu, by a family whose land deed came (after passing through a few hands) from Spanish government in the 1830’s, the infamous Rindge family. As the last family holding an intact and validated Spanish land deed, the Rindge family had no intention of quitting their proud claim to any of the land.
From 1907 to 1917 the county of Los Angeles unsuccessfully fought suits brought by the Rindge’s to stop the public use of the road through Malibu. In 1919 the City tired of trying to force Mrs. May Rindge to open her private roads, and condemned the right-of-way. The Rindge’s later went so far as forming an armed resistance to the construction crews, but only delayed the inevitable, and in 1921 the road opened to the public. The fight went on for another 6 years, and actually wound up in the US Supreme Court, where the SCOTUS found that the state’s rights to a “necessary transportation corridor” trumped Ms. Rindge’s right to be stubborn.
Stubbornness however has remained a motivating force in Malibu history, and that spirit extends down into the cities south of it as well. The Bay City Beach Club slide was never moved. Ostensibly this was a money issue at Caltrans, but ultimately it came to light that the repair was delayed because of legal disputes regarding whose responsibility the slides were. Those suits dragged on for decades.
In fact, one of the homes still teetered on the edge of the slide until the day Caltrans’ repairs began, while the descendants of the property owner, who died in 2011, continue their fight to “reclaim their land” to this day – even though their property fell onto the PCH some 30 years ago. The ruins of that structure was razed and the property has been terraced and reinforced as part of the hillside stabilization work.
When community activists began working to improve biking conditions north of Temescal in 2010, they were looking for 4 feet on either side of the roadway on which to paint “Bikes Only”. They were working on the behalf of their injured friends and acquaintances, and to prevent others from suffering the same fate. They had no idea their efforts would result in the North Bay Bike Path being extended another three miles to the Malibu city limit.
Nonetheless on this morning, they toodle along, dozens of happy little bi-directional human-powered commuters zipping along the new bike path. Auto traffic runs freely and safely, separated from the path with a concrete barrier from the Bay City Beach Club to the Topanga Canyon Metro Station, where the path gives way to shared traffic lanes.
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