Quick Take
Santa Cruz’s iconic West Cliff Drive should remain a two-way street, writes Bob Goldbeck, who lives in the surrounding neighborhood. He believes diverting traffic into neighborhoods – including his – will create safety and quality of life issues for residents and limit access for everyone else. He thinks the city’s 50-year vision plan, currently on hold, is shortsighted and as costly as maintaining the road.
Santa Cruz residents need a two-way West Cliff Drive to preserve both public access and safe neighborhoods. The daily costs to safety and quality of life for nearby residents and to the access of most users exacted by the city’s proposed one-way plan outweigh any benefits it presents for some recreational visitors.
West Cliff Drive serves as a vital arterial for the lower Westside, typically carrying more traffic than Delaware Avenue, the nearest alternative arterial, with more than 5,000 trips expected daily after the Bethany Curve closure reopens. Closing it to eastbound traffic would divert thousands of trips into surrounding neighborhoods and invite havoc on side streets and intersections not designed to safely handle such volumes. This would permanently degrade the quality of life for residents.
The idea that this plan reflects the urgent reality of Mother Nature coming for West Cliff seems based on a hope of preserving public access by using less bluff top space or that a one-way road would be easier to maintain. That hope appears unfounded.
Plans unveiled at an April 9 Santa Cruz City Council meeting and now on hold showed a Class-IV, two-way bike path with side clearances that is considerably wider than the vehicle lane to be sacrificed. This could hasten the day that Mother Nature calls for modifications.
The costs of Class-IV paths and roadways are broadly similar, and the proposed one-way pilot installation would cost over $1 million per mile. So, we can anticipate that it may be no cheaper to maintain than the roadway it would replace, nor would it stave off the day that erosion impacts public access.
This confusion may underlie a rhetorical sleight of hand in the city’s 50-year vision for West Cliff.
The city lacks resources or latitude to proactively protect the bluffs from erosion to any great degree. However, waiting to repair or retreat from future damage is not an appealing outlook.
The 50-year vision instead shifts the focus from this issue to a charismatic centerpiece: a bicycle autobahn stretching the three miles of West Cliff. This conflates the two issues. The appeal for speedy bicyclists and e-bikers is undeniable. But the plan doesn’t substantively address the problem at hand, the future advance of bluff erosion, nor is it worth the tradeoffs, particularly as a rail-trail to serve bicycle commuters already nears completion nearby.
Though the one-way plan also has a climate action goal, it’s waylaid by an inherent flaw.
One-way conversions like this that lack an immediately adjacent avenue for equal return traffic make drivers travel farther. This increase in carbon footprint, particularly from the many drivers visiting Lighthouse Point forced to circle way around the neighborhoods surrounding Lighthouse Field, could offset the impact of any switch to cycling.
Mother Nature is indeed coming for West Cliff, but when? Future erosion rates and their acceleration under climate change are difficult to predict. On the one hand, simply extrapolating from the extraordinary damage experienced near Mitchell’s Cove during the January 2023 storms seems alarmist. On the other hand, the city had to look eight decades out to the year 2100 to find erosion estimates high enough to favor the one-way plan over something even wider, a two-way bike path and two traffic lanes.
The less right-of-way hungry option, keeping the present two-way configuration, wasn’t even considered in the meeting presentation. With such a wide range of uncertainty, the time frame for unmanageable climate impacts could easily be decades out.
In that light, an analogy to the present situation might be a doctor telling you that age, disease, or accident are inevitably coming for your limbs in the coming decades, so you need to face reality, take action and amputate now to make room for other possibilities. You’d be forgiven for pausing to consider the downsides to that advice.
Most important to consider now for West Cliff are safety and accessibility. Bicycle advocates and residents living away from traffic impacts naturally like the idea of unimpeded speed on two wheels. But the great majority of West Cliff public access is by vehicle, most essentially so for those unable to bike or walk, followed by walking. Maybe 10% tops is by bicycle.
City planners seem intent on retreating from half of West Cliff’s major mode of access far in advance of a pressing need to do so, while reframing early retreat as a promotion of access for the smallest group of users. Whatever the calculation in pushing to amputate now, as it were, it overlooks a crucial externality: the long-term harm to the safety and quality of life of the thousands of residents living close by whose neighborhoods would every day be forced to absorb the unacceptable traffic impacts of partially severing this major artery.
Bob Goldbeck lives on Santa Cruz’s lower Westside where he’s experienced firsthand the chaos that diverting traffic from West Cliff Drive can cause in surrounding neighborhoods. A retired UCSC research scientist in physical chemistry he’s long enjoyed driving, walking and bicycling both directions of West Cliff.
https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/saferjourney1/library/countermeasures/13.htm