City staff prepares plan for PCH pedestrian underpass that council now appears to disfavor Play

For the second time, staff at City Hall is proposing to spend sales tax money to design a project on Malibu's state highway, a project that has at best lukewarm support from the current City Council.

This comes after Caltrans had spent time engineering a set of roundabouts on PCH in western Malibu, a proposal that was shot down by the city council after months of state effort.

At a meeting in June, several City Council members indicated they were not behind an earlier council's decision to build a pedestrian underpass on PCH at Corral Creek, next to Malibu Seafood.

There's a half-mile stretch of PCH at Corral Beach that is familiar to any driver: It's where pedestrians dodge across the highway to and from the parking areas along the beach and hillside, near the popular roadside fish stand.

Seven years ago Caltrans proposed putting in a traffic light for pedestrians at that location, but there was a big uproar at Malibu City Hall. Many self-appointed Malibu traffic experts said the proposed signal was an affront to the Malibu rural way of life.

There were grave predictions of rear-enders and sideswipe crashes as Pacific Coast Highway committed by drivers too dense to handle the concept of stopping near the bottom of a hill. One bicyclist, a Malibu resident, predicted cycling mayhem.

The City Council in 2019 rejected any talk of a pedestrian signal and instead started talking about an underpass. But in 2022 and '24 there were elections, and in 2023 came the death of four students.

Then, new huge clamoring for traffic lights, reduced speed limits, and driver behavior changes.

So city staff came back with a proposal from Caltrans to split the half-million dollars it'll take to draw preliminary blueprints for a pedestrian tunnel or some other pedestrian solution.

There's no place along the highway for a tunnel entrance, particularly on the inland side, so the pedestrian tunnel entrance would have to be placed 300 feet up Corral Creek, at the north end of the MRCA parking lot next to Malibu Seafood.

The current operating theory is that beach visitors that park on the inland side of the highway would walk along PCH, through the restaurantand its parking lot, and then stroll 300 feet away from the beach to find the pedestrian undercrossing entrance.

There are also unanswered engineering questions about how to keep high tide water and high creek water out of the pedestrian underpass.

The proposed contract with Caltrans goes before the city council next Monday night, Oct. 12.