Beach Buggies--They’re Cute, But They’re Illegal : Traffic: Firms want to rent them. People want to ride them. But Hermosa Beach officials say they’d be too much of a hazard on the crowded Strand.

The red-and-white carts look more like kid-sized Model T’s than the latest in boardwalk fun, but Jeff Pendleton had a good feeling this year when he decided to stock beach buggies at his seaside Hermosa Beach rental store.

Brightly colored and pedal-driven, they were reminiscent of that song about the surrey with the fringe on top. “Everyone who looked at it, it brought a smile to their face,” recalled Pendleton, the proprietor of Jeffers Beach Rentals.

But within a few days, the local police threatened to ticket Pendleton if he continued renting the little vehicles on the beach. For one thing, he was told, a city ordinance prohibits four-wheeled carts on The Strand; and for another, the Hermosa Beach City Council felt the oceanfront promenade was crowded enough.

Now Pendleton is stuck with two little quadricycles that everyone wants but nobody can legally rent. He is hoping city officials will make an exception for him, but council members say that’s not likely.

The dispute in Hermosa Beach is not an isolated case. The quadricycles are small, they’re slow, and--even detractors acknowledge--they’re awfully cute. But to a growing number of communities up and down the coast, they loom as the latest in beachfront menaces.

In Venice, one beach rental business was forced to sell off all of its 16 buggies this year, after coming up against Los Angeles city ordinances prohibiting such vehicles along the boardwalk. Monterey, meanwhile, has restricted the number of buggies that can be rented at any one time on its Cannery Row bike path. Each of the four vendors is allowed to rent 12 buggies, for a total of 48.

The problem, various city officials say, is not the buggy itself, which is available in two widths and spacious enough to seat a family of four. Rather, it’s the condition of the state’s most popular beaches, which, in a word, are crowded.

With the first rays of summer, beachfront walkways become crammed with people on wheels of every shape and size: bikers, skaters, skateboarders, Rollerbladers, jogging parents pushing three-wheeled baby buggies, cyclists on tandems and side-by-side “buddy bicycles” built for two.

“The problem is,” said Kay Russo, Monterey’s recreation and community services director, “you get a quad going one way and a quad going the other way, and they take up the whole trail.” Add to that the fact that they don’t exactly burn rubber and you end up with a boardwalk version of the SigAlert.

Merchants who specialize in renting wheeled entertainment say the scene looks more hazardous and congested than it actually is, and add that the real boardwalk menace is the careless pedestrian who doesn’t keep clear of oncoming traffic.

Moreover, they say, the buggies are a big draw for families on the beach.

“There’s tons of them in Santa Barbara--in fact, that’s where we saw them first,” said Susan Perea, owner of the Beach Shack at Venice Beach. “My daughter had started school at UCSB, and we were sitting in a little cafe, and everybody was going by us in these things, all laughing and smiling.

“Families with little kids in the front, students riding with Grandma in her dress and her purse in her lap. You couldn’t count ‘em, there were that many going by, and all I could think was ‘There goes 10 bucks, there goes 10 bucks, there goes 10 bucks.’ ”

Perea said the buggies were among the most popular rental items at her store for a month or so until a competitor called the police and complained that, if he couldn’t rent pedicabs on the Venice boardwalk, Perea shouldn’t be able to rent beach buggies.

Citing a Los Angeles ordinance prohibiting bicycles with side-by-side seats, police forced Perea to stop renting the buggies. She sold the last of her 16-buggy fleet this year.

“It’s still a very big disappointment to me,” she said. “We practically got down on our knees and begged.”

Brian McInerney, president of the Ventura-based firm that distributes the Italian-made buggies on the West Coast, said the firm had bent over backward to accommodate Hermosa Beach’s Municipal Code, designing a special 35-inch-wide buggy because wider ones were prohibited there.

But it wasn’t until Pendleton began renting the narrower buggies that police notified him of the city’s four-wheel vehicle ban, McInerney said. He added that the city may be undermining its best interests, since other distributors offer a three-wheel surrey that would technically meet the city’s standards, but would be less stable and less safe than the four-wheel model.

But city officials in Hermosa Beach and elsewhere say that at some point, they have to draw a line. Summer in the beach cities, they say, has become a kind of hell on wheels, and, although it may not be fair, the modest little beach buggy is the final straw.

Steve Wisniewski, Hermosa Beach director of public safety, said this is not the first attempt to introduce the beach buggy to The Strand. Three years ago, he said, a local organization asked the council to amend its ordinance to allow the vehicles. But the proposal was rejected to cut down on traffic, he said.

“I think they’re kind of cute,” conceded Mayor Chuck Sheldon. “I just don’t know if The Strand would be able to absorb three or four of these.”

Added Councilman Roger Creighton: “I think they should be banned. I just can’t see the council modifying the ordinance to allow congestion to increase.”