• The Publisher’s Notebook •

Traffic Is Top Woe in Malibu

BY ANNE SOBLE

Malibuites can find themselves hard pressed to find much wrong with this special part of the planet, but the most universal of the local woes tend to fall under the rubric of traffic, or what engineers who specialize in this realm call circulation. The problems are two-fold. The first is that there are too many vehicles in the so-called vehicle-to-road ratio. The second is that too many vehicles in this equation don’t adhere to traffic rules, a mark of indifference to or disregard for the law. Examples of these groups are the canyon carvers, some of whom received their comeuppance in last weekend’s California Highway Patrol traffic monitoring effort. In addition to solid ground reinforcements, aerial monitoring by a CHP helicopter helped put the chill on speeding. A similar effort by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Station in Lost Hills is now in order where it has jurisdiction on Pacific Coast Highway. There too, motorcycle exhausts should be ticketed for noise violations and the speeding, irresponsible passing and exhibitionism—burnouts, wheelies, doughnuts and the like—that especially occurs west of Trancas Canyon Road can be treated accordingly. Helicopter support would also work on the coastal front.

But not all of Malibu’s traffic woes are due to transgressors. Some of the problems are a result of the “one-solution-fits-all” mentality that is endemic in infrastructure bureaucracies. The Coast Highway is a state road under the direct supervision of the Department of Transportation, more familiarly dubbed Caltrans. It can take interminable pushing and prodding to correct problems, as has been the case with the dangerous stretch of highway across from Zuma beach that is finally expected to get U-turn barriers that are sorely needed.

Another example, which Malibuites who head north over Kanan Dume Road must now appreciate, is that tens of millions of dollars of work on the Ventura Freeway ramps there has done nothing to eliminate, and may even exacerbate, the summer beach traffic backup. Last Sunday, the line headed from the beach to the freeway had slowed to a crawl from well past Mulholland. Moving access ramps to the same side of the road is the current engineering vogue, but in this case, it appears to have created a worse bottleneck.