How do you give a troubled road a new lease on life?
Overview
As part of Caltrans’ efforts to improve the safety and lifespan of its coastal roads, I led design and co-authored a first-of-its-kind plan that combines active transportation and resiliency solutions for a troubled stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California.
Role: Lead Designer, Co-Author
For: Caltrans
Date: 2023
Type: narrative strategy, urban design, visual storytelling
Design Team: Emanuel Papageorgiou, Alex Ford, Joanna Ferro, Ryan Coghlan, Ezgi Gul, Cansu Seki, Megan Waller
Resilience: Jack Hogan, Maggie Messerschmidt, Kara Slocum, Meg Ackerson
Active Mobility: Alta Planning + Design
Project Management: Paul Moore, Stella Yip
Setting
Despite being one of the most iconic coastal roads on the planet, the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California is notoriously unsafe for bicyclists and pedestrians and crumbling into the ocean at an increasing rate.
When waves or landslides damage the road, Caltrans’ “business as usual” response is spending millions of dollars in costly piecemeal repairs that may protect the road for another couple years or decades, but fail to provide enough space for bikes and peds to use the road safely.
In many areas, bikes and cars share narrow strips of road between the cliffs of the Santa Monicas and the crashing waves of the Pacific.
Opportunity
But what if there was a way to save lives and avoid costly repairs—simultaneously?
To answer this question, Caltrans commissioned my firm and our partner Alta to study the feasibility of this idea, focusing on a 7.5-mile stretch of the road in Ventura County. Based on the results of our study, we developed a cookbook of solutions and “planning-level” concepts that could guide further design.
Strategy
Working with transportation engineers and resiliency specialists that were not used to thinking outside of disciplinary boundaries, I served as a “bridge” between minds, helping the technical teams to synthesize their analyses and develop cohesive decision flowcharts, solutions, and concepts for the corridor.
Under the guidance of our project managers, I led a team of eight designers from the US, the UK, and Turkey; wrote entire sections on the transportation and climate histories of the area; and took ownership over the narrative flow and voice of the final report.
Typology Development
Solutions Toolkit
Concept Plan
Opportunity Zones
Look & Feel
Impact
This plan marks the first time that Caltrans combined active mobility and resiliency strategies, arming its project managers with a user-friendly blueprint for progressive approaches to planning for coastal roads.
The agency was thrilled with our work and recruited us to adapt our processes to other areas along the coastline.