Nobu Proposes Banning Left Turns Into Its Lot, Moving the Turning Traffic Towards The Pier
Written by 991KBU on March 3, 2020
The owners of Nobu are proposing a partial solution to the traffic knot in front of their popular restaurants.
Their traffic engineer proposes prohibiting left turns from P C H into the parking lot for Nobu and its neighbor … the Soho Little Beach House.
And that would mean patrons heading from L-A to the restaurants would have to make a U-turn somewhere.
Where?
That hasn’t been planned.
And what that would do to eastbound traffic … heading towards Santa Monica … also not clear.
At last night’s planning Commission meeting …. resident Ryan Embree says the owners of the reatsuarns are iperating a nuisance … and this solution is simply moving their problem back onto P C H.
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“It says we’ve got a problem here that we can’t fix on our own property.
“This is putting mitigations out in the middle of Pacific Coast Highway.
“This whole thing is nuisance driven.
“You’re creating safety hazards.
“You don’t address a safety hazard with some driving maze out in the middle of the highway.”
Last night … planning commissioners wanted to know last night … what is the ultimate fix.
The answer to that is … eight months after this was supposed to be settled … the city … Nobu and Soho still don’t have a final solution.
And the city’s traffic engineer could not say if forcing clients seking to make a left turn into Nobu or Soho – to keep driving down the road and make a U-turn later – would add to congestion on P C H.
The next U-turn signal is at the Malibu Pier.
Or drivers can make a mid-block U-turn before that.
Maybe at that new pedestrian traffic signal that the hotel installed without city permission???
City planner Bonnie Blue says there are talks about parking employee vehicles over at the Chili-Cookoff site and using shuttle buses.
In the meantime … the paddles might be installed in a month or so … depending on the whims of Caltrans … which owns the road.
