State Collects Data on PCH U-Turn Accidents at Zuma

• Caltrans Explores How to Address Growing Concern

BY HANS LAETZ

Traffic engineers from the California Department of Transportation have asked for recent collision reports and other data for the stretch of Pacific Coast Highway at Zuma Beach where three people were killed in a pair of similar collisions blamed on illegal U-turns.

Caltrans engineers will also review whether existing pavement stripes are obvious enough directions to drivers that U-turns are prohibited along PCH where it fronts one of the busiest public beaches in Los Angeles County.

“We want to look at each location along PCH separately, to determine what remedies may be appropriate for any problems that we might find,” said Caltrans spokesperson Judy Gish.

“We want to work closely with the city and county to solve any problems and make that road as safe as it can be,” she said.

The illegal turns issue at Zuma Beach has hit a responsive nerve among Malibu High School parents, and several said they sent letters to Caltrans this week to demand installation of either yellow plastic paddles or a curb median.

“This scares the living daylights out of me,” said Mary Ellen Sherry, parent of a 16-year-old novice driver. “I don’t think the tourists have any idea how dangerous this parking and turning situation is.”

Parent Pam Eilerson said her family had one car destroyed and another car damaged in two separate Zuma crashes caused by illegal U-turns. The second crash was caused when traffic braked suddenly after a fire truck emerged from the shoulder parking lane and made a fast U-turn, without benefit of lights and siren.

Malibu Public Safety Commission chair Carol Randall said the installation of some sort of physical divider on a few select sections of PCH may be necessary. “But down here at this end of town it would be a disaster.”

Randall lives on PCH east of Malibu Pier, where a continuous center left turn lane runs nearly the entire eight-mile stretch of PCH. Given that some intersections are more than a mile apart, Randall said median barriers there would be a bad idea even if they had frequent turn lanes for midblock U-turns.

“We need to be able to turn into our homes,” she said. “But certainly out there [in western Malibu], there are places where medians of some sort are very likely needed.”

Western Malibu residents expressed concern last week when news of the second fatal wreck spread. Some had written to Caltrans in 1999, when a center median along a short stretch of PCH near the beach was removed for a repaving project. After citizen complaints, Caltrans reinstalled median curbs near Morning View Drive and at Trancas Creek, but left three quarters of a mile between those spots marked only with quadruple yellow stripes.

The four-lane highway has a 50 mph speed limit, and hundreds of visitors daily take advantage of free roadside parallel parking to avoid the $8 entrance fee at Zuma Beach County Park.

Fire department drivers reportedly prefer the paddles over concrete curbs, because the plastic devices can be driven over and will bounce back if a fire truck or ambulance needs to head into opposing lanes to move around stopped traffic. Curbs break truck axles, a sheriff’s deputy said.

Traffic collision and citation data are accumulated by local law enforcement agencies and forwarded to Caltrans on an annual basis. But Gish said the agency has been made aware of the recent problems by a newspaper report and wants to act quickly, if warranted.

In the two recent cases, motorists who had parallel parked on the highway shoulder elected to make sweeping U-turns across all four lanes of traffic and over the painted median. Two people were killed last December, and a third person was killed at the same exact spot May 8.

A similar U-turn killed two Malibu men on a motorcycle near Gladstone’s restaurant in Pacific Palisades last year, and a young Pepperdine University student died when he U-turned on a two-lane section of PCH north of the Malibu city limits last December.