This is the third piece in our Opinion format — personal takes signed in my own name, with the case laid out and the strongest version of the disagreement taken seriously. The first two covered Catalina Avenue's commercial potential and the hotel tax vote. This one is about the road that cuts our city in half.
Drive Pacific Coast Highway through Redondo Beach on a Tuesday afternoon and count what you see. Four lanes of through-traffic moving at 45 miles per hour. Strip-mall parking lots with driveways every hundred feet. Pedestrians waiting at crossings that don't exist, or standing at intersections where the walk signal gives them barely enough time to reach the median. No bike lane. No buffer. No trees worth mentioning. A state highway that hasn't been meaningfully reimagined in decades, running through a city that has changed enormously around it.
PCH is State Route 1. That designation means Caltrans owns it, Caltrans maintains it, and Caltrans has to approve virtually any change the city wants to make. Redondo Beach can pave its own streets, add its own bike lanes, redesign its own intersections. But PCH? The city has to ask permission from Sacramento, coordinate with LA Metro for funding, and navigate a bureaucratic process that has turned even modest improvements into multi-year ordeals.
The evidence is right there in the public record.
The corridor project that won't end
The city's main PCH improvement effort — the PCH Corridor Improvement Project, Job No. 40800 — is funded through LA Metro under Funding Agreement MOU.MR312.06. That agreement covers arterial improvements from Anita Street to Palos Verdes Boulevard. It's been amended at least eight times. Amendment No. 7 came in November 2022. Amendment No. 8 came in April 2024. Each amendment extends deadlines, adjusts scopes, and pushes completion further out.
As of May 2026, the council approved Change Orders 3 and 4 with the contractor — $277,286 for bus pads and concrete improvements at the PCH/Torrance Boulevard intersection. Bus pads. After years of amendments and millions in Metro funding, we're installing bus pads.
A separate project — the Anita Street/PCH Intersection Improvements (Job No. 41240) — was finally accepted as complete in March 2025. That one added westbound channelization. A turn lane. It took its own set of change orders totaling over $475,000 beyond the original contract, and its own Metro funding agreement that required at least three amendments.
These aren't bad projects. They're just small. They're the kind of incremental fixes you make when you've accepted that the road will never fundamentally change.
The crosswalk that's still a discussion
In March 2026, the Public Works, Safety and Sustainability Commission heard a discussion about potential crosswalk improvements at the PCH/Agate intersection. The agenda item specifically notes Caltrans involvement — because even a crosswalk on PCH requires state coordination.
That item was a discussion. Not an approval. Not a design. Not construction funding. A discussion about whether to potentially improve a crosswalk. On a road where people are trying to cross four lanes of 40-plus-mph traffic to get from their neighborhood to the beach.
PCH through Redondo Beach does not have the pedestrian crossing infrastructure that a road through a residential city should have. The intersections that do have signals were designed to move cars, not to protect people on foot. The gaps between signalized crossings are long enough that residents routinely cross mid-block because the alternative is walking a quarter mile to the nearest light.
No bike lanes. Not even planned.
Here is perhaps the most telling detail: the city has studied bike lane feasibility on Palos Verdes Boulevard. That discussion happened at a January 2025 commission meeting. Palos Verdes Boulevard is a city-owned street. The city can make changes there.
PCH? No feasibility study. No discussion. No agenda item. The idea of bike lanes on Pacific Coast Highway through Redondo Beach does not appear in the public record — not because nobody wants them, but because everyone understands that Caltrans would make it nearly impossible. So the city doesn't even try.
Meanwhile, commercial intensity on PCH keeps increasing. The council has approved conditional use permits for a dog daycare, fitness studios, a Chipotle, veterinary clinics, massage businesses, and mixed-use residential developments along the corridor. Each one adds trips, adds parking demand, adds pedestrians crossing to and from PCH. The road's function as a high-speed state highway and its reality as a commercial corridor are increasingly incompatible, and nobody is resolving the contradiction.
The neighborhood burden
PCH doesn't just affect the people on it. It affects every street around it.
In November 2025, the city discussed traffic striping modifications on Diamond Street between PCH and Prospect Avenue — to improve access and flow near Redondo Union High School. Diamond Street is absorbing traffic that PCH generates. Parking restrictions on Herondo Street between PCH and Francisca were adjusted in 2024 for the same underlying reason: the arterial is pushing pressure onto local streets, and the city keeps treating the symptoms instead of the cause.
West of PCH, the city has invested in landscaping the SCE right-of-way — a utility corridor that runs parallel to PCH. Phase 1 was approved in 2025. It's a nice improvement. It's also an acknowledgment that the PCH corridor is so hostile that the city is trying to make the back side of it less ugly, rather than fixing the front.
The case I'm making, in one sentence
PCH through Redondo Beach is designed to move regional traffic at the expense of the city it passes through, and the jurisdictional barrier that makes it Caltrans' road instead of ours is the single biggest reason it never gets better.
The honest pushback
“PCH is a state highway — it's supposed to move cars efficiently. That's its job.” Yes, and that was a reasonable design priority in 1950. It is not a reasonable design priority in 2026 for a road running through a city of 66,000 people, past homes, schools, and businesses. State highways through urban areas can be redesigned — Caltrans has done it in other cities. The question is whether Redondo Beach has the political will to push for it.
“The city is already spending money on PCH improvements.” It is. And after eight funding amendments, multiple change orders, and years of work, the visible results are a turn lane and some bus pads. The spending isn't the problem. The ambition is.
“Caltrans would never approve a major redesign.” Maybe not today. But Caltrans is under increasing pressure from the state legislature to prioritize Complete Streets principles on state highways through urban areas. The agency's own Director's Policy on Complete Streets (DP-37) says exactly this. The city's leverage improves every year — if it chooses to use it.
“Reducing lanes would create gridlock.” This is the argument that kills every road redesign conversation everywhere. And it deserves a real answer: PCH through Redondo Beach is not a freeway. It's a surface street with traffic lights every few blocks. The theoretical capacity of four lanes at 45 mph is never actually realized because of the signals. A well-designed three-lane road with a center turn lane, protected bike lanes, and better signal timing can move comparable traffic volumes more safely. The data from road diets in comparable cities supports this.
What I'm not saying
I'm not saying the city has done nothing. The corridor project, the Anita Street improvements, the crosswalk discussions — those are real work by real staff dealing with a genuinely difficult jurisdictional situation.
I'm saying the ambition doesn't match the problem. Redondo Beach deserves a Pacific Coast Highway that functions as a city street — with safe crossings, bike infrastructure, trees, and a speed limit that reflects the fact that people live here. That requires the city to stop treating PCH as someone else's road that happens to pass through town, and start treating it as a political priority worth fighting Caltrans over.
The current path — one intersection improvement at a time, one crosswalk discussion every few years, one funding amendment after another — will not get us there. Not in five years. Not in twenty.
That's the opinion.
— Samuel Thompson