State Collects Data on PCH U-Turn Accidents
at Zuma
• Caltrans Explores How to Address
Growing Concern
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.
