Malibu Motorists Are Unwilling Participants in Local Wedding

• Caltrans OK’d Permit to Shut Down Lane Of PCH for Hours

BY HANS LAETZ

Did you get your invitation?

Thousands of Malibu residents and beach visitors were unwitting, unwilling participants at a huge wedding that closed one lane on Pacific Coast Highway and snarled traffic for hours on Saturday.

California Department of Transportation officials defend the lane closure as being far safer than allowing hundreds of wedding guests to park on the roadside or wander across the road.

But members of the Malibu City Council said Monday night that the closure was a bad idea, and they want clarification of Caltrans policies for privatization of the city’s main street—a road with no alternate route.

The closure began at 4 p.m. and lasted to nearly midnight, blocking a southbound lane from Zumirez Drive east past Winding Way. During the afternoon and evening, traffic backed up nearly a mile as cars inched single-file past the wedding site, a blufftop mansion east of Paradise Cove.

Aggravating the lane closure, private security guards repeatedly stopped cars to allow shuttle vans to stop in the one available eastbound lane. Vans, catering trucks and other vehicles were given immediate priority over cars that had waited 25 minutes to get to the head of the line.

“Are you kidding?” asked Zuma Canyon resident Mandy Robinson, when told why she was idling on the highway. “I think...it’s a travesty.”

“We’re on our way to a wedding, a different wedding, and they wouldn’t do this for us,” said Christine Hays, a Malibu West resident stuck in a 25-minute delay with her family.

Other motorists interviewed in car-to-car conversations used considerably less polite language. None could be found with kind thoughts towards the state essentially closing California Highway 1 to unimpeded travel.

Malibu Mayor Pro Tem Pamela Conley Ulich saw the back-up while taking her daughter home from ballet class in the opposite direction.

“I was surprised that they would let a private entity take over the highway like that,” she said. “I think it says a lack of sensitivity for issues in Malibu surrounding traffic.”

Caltrans spokeswoman Judy Gish said the road closure was allowed because it came after the Caltrans moratorium on summer road closures that ends on Labor Day. She said heavy beach traffic on PCH on a summer weekend day in September “would not necessarily be predictable, would it?”

Gish said Caltrans managers decided to close one lane and ban valet parking at the site, so guests would park off-site and be ferried to the wedding by shuttles. “Instead of allowing valet parking on the highway and having a constant flurry of people stopping to turn right, this was considered much more effective,” she said Monday.

“The guests arrived via shuttles and our permits office says the backup was cleared by 6 p.m.,” she said.

But both of those assessments from the Caltrans permit office are at odds with what some observers say happened on the road. Valet parking was clearly being conducted on the highway, and a reporter timed the delay at 6:30 p.m. at 25 minutes.

Gish dismissed those direct observations as “anecdotal evidence” and said “it is our contention that the situation would have been much worse without the closure.”

Malibu’s mayor pro tem said she would ask the city manager, “What, if any, influence the city can have on closures of Pacific Coast Highway. I think we can make suggestions, but we don’t have any authority [on the state highway],” Conley Ulich said.

The road closure permit was obtained on behalf of David Saperstein, a broadcasting industry magnate, for the marriage of his daughter, deputies said.

Signs warning of “road work ahead,” a blinking trailer flashing the infamous “< < <” message, and sheriff’s deputies—paid for by Saperstein as a requirement of his official permits—were stationed on Highway 1.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and other politicians were on the guest list, deputies working the front gate said.

Ironically, the father of the bride made his fortune by founding Metro Networks, a company that offers traffic reports and lane closure information to radio stations across the nation.