State Rejects Bikeway Link, Calls for Wider Access

The state Coastal Commission has rejected the last link in the 17-mile beach bikeway, contending that the proposed 1.3-mile path must provide access to joggers and handicapped people in wheelchairs.

Commission Chairman Michael Wornum said there is room on the beach to build a path wide enough to accommodate more than just bicyclists. The proposed link is between Californa Avenue and the northern Santa Monica city limits and would complete a path that now runs from Torrance to Pacific Palisades.

“The commission has always supported multiple use of recreational facilities,” Wornum said in an interview Wednesday. “The bikeway as it is proposed would set a very bad precedent in restricting use to bicycle riders.

Wornum said he knew of “bike paths elsewhere in the state where joggers jog right alongside bicycle riders. The commission very recently approved a pathway in Upper Newport Bay in Newport Beach that will accommodate equestrians as well as bicyclists.”

The city of Santa Monica drew up the proposal and will try to come up with a revised plan that’s satisfactory to the commission, said Vivian Rothstein, assistant to the director of the city’s Recreation and Parks Department. But she added that it may not be possible.

Rothstein said state laws limit the use of major bikeways to bicycle riders. She said the city has been told informally by a state Parks and Recreation Department official that the department would oppose widening of the 14-foot-wide path to accommodate other uses.

“Sure, we could easily draw up plans for a wider pathway,” Rothstein said. “The problem is that opposition would be so intense that the bikeway will never be completed. We are not even certain that the county funding for the project will be available to finance the widening.”

Completion of the 1.3-mile section has been blocked for more than a decade by various groups. Litigation between the state and homeowners over the location of property lines is still unresolved.

Beach property owners have endorsed the proposed route of the bikeway but only because the plan stipulated that it would remain an average distance of 200 feet from their property lines. However, the Coastal Commission staff recommended that the pathway be built within 50 feet of the property lines.

Rothstein said the bikeway will never be built if the commission adopted its staff recommendation because it would trigger additional time-consuming lawsuits.

“Our proposal is the result of a compromise, taking into consideration that if we wanted a bikeway we were not going to be able to put it in the optimum location,” Rothstein said. “We have had to be practical.”

Wornum said the commission was willing to bow to “pragmatism” over the location of the path, even though “many of us felt the threat of lawsuits was a form of blackmail.”

But he said the commission is not convinced that the pathway should be used solely by bicycle riders.

The city in February will offer the commission a revised plan or the same one, depending on interpretations of legal statutes governing the use of bikeways, Rothstein said.

The proposed bikeway runs along the so-called Santa Monica Gold Coast, a collection of expensive homes built by motion picture moguls in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, among them Louis B. Mayer and Darryl F. Zanuck.

Also located there are the Jonathan Club and the Beach Club, private beach facilities, and the Sand and Sea Club, a semi-private beach club operated on property once owned by the late Marion Davies, an actress and longtime companion of press lord William Randolph Hearst.