In Hermosa Beach, PCH Turns Into a Parking Lot

There was a time when a South Bay commuter on the Pacific Coast Highway could blink and miss Hermosa Beach. Not any more. These days, some say, the city’s mile and a half of highway seems to go on f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

To commuters, Hermosa Beach has become notorious as one of the most aggravating bottlenecks along California 1.

Each day as the afternoon rush hour descends and the highway’s three southbound lanes begin to fill, thousands of aerospace engineers, airport employees and other work-weary commuters reach the Hermosa Beach city line and find the right lane clogged with parked cars.

For years Caltrans has nagged Hermosa Beach to rectify the problem by banning parking on its stretch of the coast highway. The city has refused, arguing that clearing the far west lane would put local merchants out of business and create an expressway in the heart of town.

But Caltrans keeps coming back, as it did this week--armed with two recent studies showing that Hermosa Beach’s stretch of PCH has a higher accident rate than any similar stretch of the coast highway in Los Angeles County.

“We have almost double the amount of accidents that we would expect at this location,” said Karl F. Berger, an associate transportation engineer for the state Department of Transportation. Berger said Hermosa Beach’s section of the highway has 5.33 accidents per million vehicle miles, higher than the expected rate of 3.30. (A vehicle mile is a measure of the average amount of traffic on a stretch of roadway each day.)

Berger said the finding was based on two studies: one that compared accident rates for similar stretches of the highway in 1988, and a more recent comparison of accident rates between January, 1985, and March, 1990.

The reports, which were discussed by the City Council at its regular meeting last week, received the usual half-hearted welcome in Hermosa Beach.

“We’ve already addressed this issue,” Councilwoman Kathleen Midstokke said crisply. “I find it pretty peculiar that they’re coming at us again.”

Anthony Antich, the city’s public works director, said safety is just Caltrans’ latest excuse for continuing to nag Hermosa Beach. The stalemate between the city and the agency, he said, “goes back--whew! Maybe 20 years?”

“Karl Berger feels Hermosa Beach is just being a group of (intransigents) for not removing parking,” Antich said. “But nobody is really convinced that an additional lane will help traffic conditions in this area. Even Caltrans admits that a third lane is only a temporary fix.”

Antich said there are several reasons the city is reluctant to effectively widen its stretch of the highway. The primary one is that Hermosa Beach is less than a mile and a half square, and it is split down the middle by PCH.

“In many communities, having a large highway has a tendency to divide the community,” Antich said. “Parents of schoolchildren say they don’t need something like that because the children are in danger crossing the street as it is.”

Moreover, he said, Hermosa Beach has narrow sidewalks, and pedestrians might be endangered if traffic were brought too close. And, he said, local merchants have complained that they would lose customers and money because there isn’t room on their small lots for off-street parking and the only place their customers can park is along the highway.

The local Chamber of Commerce made that last argument earlier this year when the City Council held a public hearing on the traffic and circulation portion of the city’s General Plan. The hearing was intended to set the city’s policies for managing traffic in the 1990s, and a report from a traffic consultant hired by the city recommended that parking be banned on the coast highway during rush hours.

The city’s planning staff agreed. For several years, they noted, parking has been prohibited during the morning rush hour on the east side of the highway and no one has complained.

But Wesley Bird, a spokesman for the chamber, said business would be ruined for local merchants if parking were restricted on the west side of the highway too. The morning restrictions, he noted, occurred before business hours, and therefore didn’t drive away any customers.

And Wilma Burt, a longtime resident, voiced what for many Hermosans has become a refrain in the stubborn little community: “I don’t care if they can’t get through our town,” she said “If they can’t get through Hermosa, maybe they’ll go somewhere else.”

The council agreed, and refused to get rid of the 66 parking spaces that line the west side of the highway.

Caltrans’ Berger says such arguments are misinformed. Caltrans studies have shown that the people who park on PCH are not customers, but employees who work for businesses along the highway.

Moreover, he said, that single lane of parking is inconveniencing about 56,000 drivers a day and costing them more than $650,000 a year in wasted gas and vehicle maintenance.

Technically, he said, Caltrans has the authority to ban parking whether the city likes it or not. But the agency would have to rely on the city to enforce the restriction, he said. And, for political reasons, the agency prefers to act jointly with local governments.

But, Berger said, Caltrans is getting increasingly impatient, as are commuters in surrounding cities.

The El Segundo Employers Assn., for instance, has discussed the Hermosa Beach bottleneck with Caltrans, the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the city staff, said Don Camph, the group’s executive director. And Berger recently forwarded to the city a copy of a recent letter to Caltrans from a Lomita man who wrote: “I always know when I enter the city of Hermosa Beach because the traffic just stops.”

Even a few Hermosans agree with Caltrans.

“I think it’s high time something was done,” said Roger Bacon, a local businessman who owns the Alpha Beta shopping center at 1100 Pacific Coast Highway. Bacon acknowledged that, unlike other merchants, he has plenty of parking.

But, he said, “I think if Hermosa Beach just gave it a trial run, they would have fewer wrecks, fewer calls to the paramedics and fewer people cutting through the residential areas around PCH.”

Berger said that other cities have been willing, even eager, to accommodate Caltrans. Manhattan Beach, for example, has banned rush hour parking on the west side of the highway since 1970, and in 1985 extended the restriction and approved a long-term plan to widen the thoroughfare. El Segundo also restricts peak hour parking.

But not Hermosa Beach.

And Berger said he’s beginning to doubt that the city will ever see eye to eye with him.

“This city still perceives itself as a sleepy resort nestled up against the Pacific Ocean,” he fumed in a recent interview, while admitting that there is not much Caltrans is likely to do on its own.

“Just as if we were still in the 1880s. As if the rest of the world didn’t exist.”