The Pacific Coast Highway winds between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains in Malibu, California, with restaurants, stores and multimillion-dollar homes dotting both sides of this 21-mile section. The six-lane road, though technically a highway, also serves as the Southern California town’s main street. Pedestrians frequently cross the highway or walk along its shoulders, darting across in places without crosswalks and sidewalks.
Heavy traffic and lack of pedestrian infrastructure have made the Pacific Coast Highway deadly for the beach community. Since 2010, 61 people, many of them pedestrians, have been killed along this stretch of the highway, and many more have been injured — especially along a 2-mile segment aptly known as “Dead Man’s Curve.” Last year, four Pepperdine University students who had been walking on the shoulder were killed by a speeding driver. The tragedy helped draw attention to the dangerous road, but the fatalities didn’t end here: This October, a woman walking on the side of the road was killed in a collision between a motorcycle and a car.
The woman who died that day was unhoused, part of an over-represented demographic among those killed along this highway. At least eight, and probably more, of the 60-plus people who died were experiencing homelessness at the time. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s most recent count indicated there were 69 unhoused people in Malibu, which has more than 10,000 residents and receives over 10 million annual visitors.
Some of the country’s most car-dependent cities are in the Western U.S., while parts of the region also have the highest numbers of unhoused people. And unsheltered people are more exposed to traffic danger, since they spend more time outdoors and as pedestrians than the general public — an under-discussed side effect of the West’s car-centered infrastructure.
“We still don’t have a really good sense of the magnitude of the problem, but I have a feeling that it probably is a serious problem. There’s been this pretty significant increase in pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries over the last 10 years or so,” said Julia Griswold, director of the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center.
This increase has coincided with the growing number of people experiencing homelessness and an “alarmingly high number” of pedestrian fatalities on freeways, according to Griswold, which could be due to people living near and along freeways.
In Los Angeles County, where Malibu is located, unhoused people are 18.3 times more likely to die from transportation-related injuries than the total county population, with deaths occurring nearly every other day in 2021 and 2022. And the problem is not confined to California: In Multnomah County, Oregon, in 2022, people experiencing homelessness were 44.8 times more likely to die from a transportation-related injury than the county population overall.
In Los Angeles County, where Malibu is located, unhoused people are 18.3 times more likely to die from transportation-related injuries than the total county population, with deaths occurring nearly every other day in 2021 and 2022.
“It could’ve been me,” said a 32-year-old in Malibu who goes by the nickname Medusa, reflecting on a recent close call while crossing a street near the Pacific Coast Highway that connects the library to a public park. The street has a crosswalk but no stop sign, only a pedestrian yield sign. The car came within a foot or two of Medusa, who is currently unhoused, before screeching to a halt. “They were so shocked that they did not hit me. They had their mouths open,” said Medusa.
Many unhoused people in Southern California have similar stories.
“It seems to me that Californians have no type of respect for the homeless and for pedestrians, period,” said Angela Noaker, 60, while waiting for a bus in Malibu on a recent Sunday. Noaker, who is unhoused, says she was hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk in Riverside, California, earlier this year.
“Almost by definition, if somebody is homeless, they’re probably on the street and on the sidewalk a lot more than someone that has a home,” said Michael Schneider, CEO of Streets for All, an advocacy group focused on bike and pedestrian safety in Los Angeles.
And yet, Schneider said, this hasn’t been “a huge focus” in discussions about the active transportation movement in Southern California, which works to make streets safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. “I haven’t heard any politician or really very few people have brought up the fact that one out of every 10 fatal crashes involves someone who is homeless.”
When Capt. Jennifer Seetoo started as captain at the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff Station in 2022, she noticed that nine pedestrians were killed on Pacific Coast Highway in 2021.
“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, nine deaths in one year? Why aren’t the bells sounding off? Why aren’t people jumping up and down, like, this is really bad, right?’” said Seetoo. “What I realized is that six of the deaths were from my homeless population, and it just struck me that nobody cares.” And that was just in 2021; the sheriff’s department hasn’t analyzed deaths from other years to determine how many of the fatalities involve the unhoused population.
Jimmy Gallardo, an outreach worker for The People Concern, a nonprofit that works with people experiencing homelessness in Malibu, estimates that in his two years on the job four to six of his clients have been killed or seriously injured by cars.
Many of the collisions in Malibu involve speeding; the speed limit along most of the Pacific Coast Highway’s stretch in the area is 45 mph, but drivers frequently go much faster, hitting 60, 70 or 80 — even 100 mph.
“People are just zooming past, and when I’m driving, I’m paying attention to all of this, and I see they’re just speeding,” said Gallardo, who spoke while driving a blue People Concern minivan north on the highway. “And then I see where they’re going, and they’re going to, like, a little boutique store, so you’re doing all this just to savagely park your car, putting people’s safety in jeopardy just because you want to go shopping.”
“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, nine deaths in one year? Why aren’t the bells sounding off? Why aren’t people jumping up and down, like, this is really bad, right?’”
The city of Malibu declared a local emergency in November 2023, following the deaths of the four Pepperdine students, even though the state, not the city, regulates the Pacific Coast Highway. Seetoo is hopeful about a newly passed piece of legislation that will install speed cameras in high-risk areas along the highway. The California Highway Patrol has increased traffic enforcement, and the state’s Department of Transportation is investing in lane separators, crosswalk striping, and more speed-limit and curve-warning signs. The sheriff’s department and The People Concern have also distributed high-visibility gear to unhoused locals.
Several people experiencing homelessness in Malibu said they want to see more changes, including more stop signs and traffic lights, lower speed limits, more crosswalks near bus stops, and pedestrian bridges that would enable people to cross the road while avoiding the traffic below.
In San Jose, California, officials analyzed the most dangerous intersections after noticing that transportation-related deaths among the unhoused population more than tripled between 2018 and 2021. The city is now adding a mid-block pedestrian crossing that will connect two halves of an encampment split by a dangerous roadway, even though the pedestrian volume in the area isn’t high enough to meet the typical threshold for such a crossing.
The Federal Highway Administration considers such changes in the built environment the second-most effective strategy for protected unhoused community members from traffic collisions. The most effective option, however, is to increase access to housing, thereby reducing the number of unsheltered people along roadways. In Los Angeles County, two-thirds of traffic-related deaths among people experiencing homelessness happened between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m., suggesting that “providing nighttime shelter and permanent housing … would help prevent these deaths,” according to a report from the county’s Department of Public Health.
Gallardo said that addressing the issue will also require more systemic changes to how housed drivers view unhoused pedestrians.
“When people are dehumanized, it allows for violence to take place, or inconsideration of their right to life. And when you’re driving in your supercar, you’re in your own rich world, you don’t see that person as an individual. You just see them as an inconvenience to your sight. You don’t see the value in that human being, which allows you to drive how you drive,” he said.
Medusa agreed.
“They need to realize that there’s a human walking,” she said. “I’m a vessel, too.”
