"Coastal armoring isn't in vogue anymore, and that's the reality that needs to be acknowledged in this analysis." That's how Santa Cruz Assistant Public Works Director Kevin Crossley described the thinking behind the city's next move on West Cliff Drive, and it's a strange thing to hear about a road that just spent two and a half years getting patched, walled, and paved back into shape.
If you walk, bike, or drive this stretch regularly, you already know the headline: West Cliff Drive is open, all of it, both directions, for the first time since January 2023. What you may not know is that the reopening was never meant to be an ending. It was a pause between one repair and the next one, and the next one already has a rough start date.
What actually reopened, and when
The damage that closed West Cliff Drive traces back to a specific stretch of January 2023, when a run of atmospheric river storms tore into the bluffs and left the city with initial repair estimates north of $5 million. The road was rerouted, sections were fenced off, and for a while the only way past certain blocks was through the neighborhood streets behind them.
The recovery happened in pieces, not all at once:
- April 2024: The Columbia Street to Woodrow Avenue segment, which had been running one-way since the storms, goes back to two-way traffic after the city's own count showed 35 percent fewer westbound trips past the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse than expected under normal conditions. The same month, the Santa Cruz City Council rejects a separate, larger plan to convert the entire corridor to one-way traffic, turning down a $3.5 million state grant that would have funded the pilot.
- Through 2025: Crews worked through the last and hardest section, near Bethany Curve, where a sea cave had opened beneath the roadway itself.
- End of June 2025: The final stretch reopened to two-way traffic, closing out roughly 30 months of construction, detours, and neighborhood arguments about where the detoured cars should go.
By the time 2026 rolled in, Lookout Santa Cruz was reporting on it as settled news. West Cliff was fixed. The 50-year vision the city adopted back in 2021 had produced its first complete cycle: storm, closure, repair, reopening.
The argument that never actually ended
Here's what got lost in the relief of that reopening. The city's own traffic data showed people liked having fewer cars on West Cliff. The survey the city ran during the one-way pilot found most respondents wanted to keep parking and driving lanes reduced in favor of separated bike and walking space. The politics didn't follow the data. Residents on Oxford Way, Alta Avenue, and Delaware Avenue had absorbed the detour traffic for over a year, and by the time the council voted in April 2024, the backlash from those streets carried more weight in the room than the survey numbers did.
So the vote restored things to how they were before 2023: two lanes, two directions, the full length of the road. City staff have said the one-way idea isn't dead, only shelved, which is a way of saying the argument about how much of West Cliff belongs to cars versus bikes and feet is still open. It just isn't being litigated in public right now.
Four stretches, four different clocks
The corridor doesn't move as one piece. Each segment is on its own repair-and-plan timeline, and knowing which one you're walking past changes what you're actually looking at.
| Stretch | What happened since 2023 | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Columbia Street to Woodrow Avenue | One-way after storm damage, restored to two-way in April 2024 | Two-way, but slated for a 60-foot inland shift starting 2027 |
| Woodrow Avenue to Almar Avenue (Bethany Curve) | Fully closed for roughly a year after a sea cave opened beneath the road | Repaired and reopened with the rest of the corridor by end of June 2025 |
| Near Getchell Street, Lower Westside | No major incident until a bluff section gave way in January 2026 | Path open behind water-filled safety barriers, city monitoring |
| Lighthouse Point / Steamer Lane | Known erosion risk for decades, last formally studied in the 1980s | New study proposed in January 2026, staff aimed to bring it to council by spring |
The bluff moved again, three days into the year
On January 3, 2026, a section of coastal bluff near the Getchell Street intersection, just west of Fair Avenue, crumbled onto the shore below during a run of rain and rough surf. City crews responded by setting up a line of orange, water-filled barriers between the eroded edge and the pedestrian path, which stayed open. Public works staff called 2025 a relatively quiet year for the road. January 2026 didn't wait long to make up for it.
That incident sits inside a larger question the city is only now getting around to asking properly. Lighthouse Point, the outcrop that shelters Steamer Lane, has a sea cave running beneath its western side, and nobody has done a serious study of it since the 1980s. A group that includes surfing figures Nat Young, Peter Mel, and Anthony Ruffo, alongside neighborhood organizer Deborah Maddock Elston, spent early 2026 pushing the city to commission an updated one, arguing that if the caves beneath Its Beach and Steamer Lane connect, the current shifts and the wave itself changes for good. A Save the Waves economic report puts the surfing industry's citywide value at more than $190 million a year, with roughly $22 million of that tied specifically to visitors coming for West Cliff's breaks. As of that January push, city staff said they hoped to bring the scope of a new Lighthouse Point study before the council by spring.
The next fix already has a start date, sort of
While Lighthouse Point waits on its study, the city is moving ahead on the piece of road it already knows it has to move. A roughly 600-foot stretch of West Cliff Drive east of Columbia Street, across from Lighthouse Field State Beach, is set to shift about 60 feet inland, with the adjacent pedestrian path moving about 30 feet inland alongside it. The $1.8 million project is a small-scale test of what planners call managed retreat, moving infrastructure back from a coastline that keeps taking ground rather than trying to hold the line with more concrete.
Earlier estimates had construction starting as soon as May 2026. As of this summer, the city is now targeting 2027. Crossley has been direct about what that trade-off looks like in practice: the road is being pushed back into what's currently park space, because there isn't a version of this that avoids giving something up.
What this means for your next walk down there
None of this changes what makes West Cliff worth the trip on any given evening. Its Beach still draws the dog walkers and the sponge-boarders down onto the sand. Steamer Lane still draws a crowd to the point above the break most afternoons, and the lighthouse still houses the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum if you've never been inside. Head toward Natural Bridges as the fall settles in and you'll catch monarch season in the eucalyptus grove near the state beach.
Bob Pearson has walked this stretch nearly every day since 1964, long enough to watch the cliffs change shape more than once. "I'm there damn near seven days a week," he said, which is about as good a summary as anyone's given for what this road means to the people who actually use it. The difference now is that if you notice a new barrier line, a narrower path, or a construction crew where there wasn't one last month, you'll know it isn't a surprise. It's just the next stretch on the list, right on schedule, or close enough.
If you're weighing what a home on the Westside or anywhere else in Santa Cruz actually means for your day to day, that's the kind of local detail worth having before you make a decision. Caroll Basile has spent more than 30 years in this county and can walk you through what a neighborhood is really like to live in, not just what it looks like on a map. Reach out for a free home valuation and a conversation grounded in the place itself.
