Got Time? Multiple PCH Delays on the Drawing Board

• Los Angeles City Agencies Plan Big Digs that Will Adversely Impact Malibu’s Main Artery

BY HANS LAETZ

City of Los Angeles engineers have announced plans that will significantly increase the anticipated agony quotient for Pacific Coast Highway drivers. Two separate projects—one after another—will dig up a two-mile section of the highway at its most crowded point starting next year.

The Los Angeles projects are still under design, but, as currently envisioned, could block one of the four traffic lanes on PCH for several months where the highway drops from six to four lanes. At least two huge trenches will have to be dug through the complicated intersection geometry where Chautauqua Boulevard, West Channel Road, Entrada Drive and PCH meet on a bridge over a flood control channel.

The two L.A. projects are in addition to the City of Santa Monica’s two major, successive repair jobs just to the south. Toss in a Caltrans repaving project, garnish with Santa Monica’s plans to put up a new traffic light, and the next two years appear to guarantee missed appointments and cold dinners for many PCH commuters.

The L.A. Department of Water and Power last week announced plans to build a new underground power line from Brentwood to PCH at Chautauqua, and then up PCH two miles to Sunset Boulevard. This nine-month project is to bury a high-voltage line that will head out to sea at Sunset Boulevard, connecting the West Coast’s largest electric circuit to existing seafloor electrodes off the coast (see story on this page).

The DWP project also involves burying the large conduit on San Vicente Boulevard and through Santa Monica Canyon via Seventh Street, Entrada Drive and West Channel Road to the beach. The total project will take nine months, PCH traffic will be restricted for about five months.

Engineers hope to route the new cable under the newly-repaved parking lot at Will Rogers State Beach, avoiding PCH delays there, DWP spokesperson Carol Tucker said. But the trench will have to be dug into one of four traffic lanes winding north of the PCH choke point between Temescal Canyon and Sunset boulevards, she said.

Tucker said she did not know why the underground power line can’t head out to sea at PCH/ Chautauqua, but noted that DWP engineers are newly aware of traffic concerns and are still designing the project.

When that is finished, the L.A. Department of Public Works plans to install a new five-foot-diameter sewage pipe to take dry-weather urban street runoff from several canyons away from the Pacific Ocean and divert it to the Hyperion Treatment Plant.

That DPW sewage line will plug into the sewer pipe in Santa Monica that snarled traffic for three years, starting in 1999, during earthquake damage repairs. DPW needs to extend it north under PCH and through the same intersections and narrow spots all the way to Sunset, said DPW spokesperson Jimmy Tokeshi.

DWP and DPW engineers are trying to coordinate their projects, but say it may be impossible to put very high-voltage power ducts and large sewer mains in the same trench.

“There are a lot of utilities in the road that have to be dealt with,” Tokeshi said. Among those is the pipe that supplies about 20,000 Malibu and Topanga residents with water, and buried communication lines that connect the city to the outside world.

While those two projects are going on in L.A., the City of Santa Monica will be coning off one northbound lane during mid-day hours to stabilize the bluffs along PCH between the McClure Tunnel and Entrada Drive. That will immediately be followed by demolition and reconstruction of the crumbling, 77-year-old California Incline structure adjacent to PCH.

After hearing protests from motorists and Malibu officials, the bluff stabilization project will now avoid a 24/7 lane closure, Santa Monica project engineer Mark Cuneo said.

“We are going to close one northbound lane during non-peak hours with cones, and pick up the cones and leave when traffic gets heavy,” he said.

“One thing we have learned is that traffic on PCH is highly variable, depending on things like the weather,” Cuneo said. “We really don’t want to cause backups.”

Although the California Incline project will not require PCH lane closures, he said, closure of the bridge from PCH to downtown Santa Monica is expected to put heavy pressure on Entrada Drive and West Channel Road. Those are the same narrow, twisting two-lane routes that DWP now plans to dig up for its electrical project that may restrict travel there for 4-6 months.

In addition, pothole-laden PCH is due for its once-every-10-years facelift this spring, when Caltrans plans to grind and resurface the road through Malibu and Pacific Palisades. Repaving the L.A. section may be delayed until after DPW and DWP tear it up.

On top of all this, the City of Santa Monica has won tentative Caltrans approval to install a new traffic signal at a civic beach club it is building on PCH about midway between the California Incline and Chautauqua Boulevard. There has been no formal opposition to the signal, which is undergoing final design.

All of this would almost be a comedy if it wasn’t affecting the primary route between Malibu and points east. PCH is traveled by more than 80,000 cars per day, and the main alternate route is U.S. 101 and Interstate 405, which turns a 12-mile drive from Malibu to Santa Monica into a 40-mile slog on these already-overwhelmed freeways.

Engineers, facing the possibility of major excavation projects piling up on top of each other, have formed a group called PCH Partners to coordinate closures and planning. The group includes various departments in the cities of Santa Monica and Los Angeles and Caltrans, as well as the contractors on the projects.

“All these activities will be worked out, so drivers will face a minimum of possible delays,” Tokeshi said. He said the City of Malibu is not a part of the group.

During the sewage line project that started in 1999, traffic was delayed up to an hour in each direction daily when Santa Monica refused to use reversible lanes, or allow through traffic to use a center left-turn lane. Controversy also arose when traffic lights frequently failed and Santa Monica Police refused to direct traffic, causing three-hour delays.

Traffic reporters said then that the PCH bottleneck caused measurable ripple-effect traffic jams on freeways from Calabasas all the way to Long Beach.

That sewer project was supposed to take nine months, but difficulties with underground utilities and the local geology stretched it into a three-year ordeal.