Malibu Motorists Are Unwilling Participants
in Local Wedding
• Caltrans OK’d Permit to Shut
Down Lane Of PCH for Hours
Did you get your invitation?
Thousands of Malibu residents and beach
visitors were unwitting, unwilling participants at a huge
wedding that closed one lane on Pacific Coast Highway and
snarled traffic for hours on Saturday.
California Department of
Transportation officials defend the lane closure as
being far safer than allowing hundreds of wedding guests to
park on the roadside or wander across the road.
But members of the Malibu City Council said
Monday night that the closure was a bad idea, and they want
clarification of Caltrans policies for privatization of the
city’s main street—a road with no alternate route.
The closure began at 4 p.m. and lasted to
nearly midnight, blocking a southbound lane from Zumirez Drive
east past Winding Way. During the afternoon and evening,
traffic backed up nearly a mile as cars inched single-file past
the wedding site, a blufftop mansion east of Paradise Cove.
Aggravating the lane closure, private
security guards repeatedly stopped cars to allow shuttle vans
to stop in the one available eastbound lane. Vans, catering
trucks and other vehicles were given immediate priority over
cars that had waited 25 minutes to get to the head of the line.
“Are you kidding?” asked Zuma
Canyon resident Mandy Robinson, when told why she was idling on
the highway. “I think...it’s a travesty.”
“We’re on our way to a wedding,
a different wedding, and they wouldn’t do this for
us,” said Christine Hays, a Malibu West resident stuck in
a 25-minute delay with her family.
Other motorists interviewed in car-to-car
conversations used considerably less polite language. None
could be found with kind thoughts towards the state essentially
closing California Highway 1 to unimpeded travel.
Malibu Mayor Pro Tem Pamela Conley
Ulich saw the back-up while taking her daughter home from
ballet class in the opposite direction.
“I was surprised that they would let
a private entity take over the highway like that,” she
said. “I think it says a lack of sensitivity for issues
in Malibu surrounding traffic.”
Caltrans spokeswoman Judy Gish said the
road closure was allowed because it came after the Caltrans
moratorium on summer road closures that ends on Labor Day. She
said heavy beach traffic on PCH on a summer weekend day in
September “would not necessarily be predictable, would
it?”
Gish said Caltrans managers decided to
close one lane and ban valet parking at the site, so guests
would park off-site and be ferried to the wedding by shuttles.
“Instead of allowing valet parking on the highway
and having a constant flurry of people stopping to turn right,
this was considered much more effective,” she said
Monday.
“The guests arrived via shuttles and
our permits office says the backup was cleared by 6
p.m.,” she said.
But both of those assessments from the
Caltrans permit office are at odds with what some
observers say happened on the road. Valet parking was
clearly being conducted on the highway, and a reporter timed
the delay at 6:30 p.m. at 25 minutes.
Gish dismissed those direct
observations as “anecdotal evidence” and said
“it is our contention that the situation would have been
much worse without the closure.”
Malibu’s mayor pro tem said she would
ask the city manager, “What, if any, influence the city
can have on closures of Pacific Coast Highway. I think we can
make suggestions, but we don’t have any authority [on the
state highway],” Conley Ulich said.
The road closure permit was obtained on
behalf of David Saperstein, a broadcasting industry
magnate, for the marriage of his daughter, deputies said.
Signs warning of “road work
ahead,” a blinking trailer flashing the infamous
“< < <” message, and sheriff’s
deputies—paid for by Saperstein as a requirement of his
official permits—were stationed on Highway 1.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and
other politicians were on the guest list, deputies working the
front gate said.
Ironically, the father of the bride made
his fortune by founding Metro Networks, a company that offers
traffic reports and lane closure information to radio stations
across the nation.
