Pull up to the light at Miss Donut & Bakery on Pacific Coast Highway some weekday morning and count how many people you see walking the sidewalk versus how many are doing exactly what you're doing: sitting in a car, waiting for green. That donut shop, at 1871 Pacific Coast Highway, was the site of an 8:10 a.m. pop-up meeting last December where planners stood outside taking notes on how people actually use this street. The notes they took line up with something anyone who lives in Lomita already half-knows without ever having said it out loud: this corridor carries the town's daily errands and almost none of its foot traffic.
That gap between how often people drive Pacific Coast Highway and how rarely they walk it is now the subject of an actual planning process, with a public meeting six days from now and a state agency's name attached to it. Here's what's been found so far, what's actually funded versus what's still just a study, and what it might mean for the walk you already make to Project Barley or the Target on the corner.
What the Spring Workshops Found, and Who Showed Up
The Southern California Association of Governments picked Pacific Coast Highway, State Route 1, as one of four corridors statewide for a program called Planning for Main Streets, a partnership with Caltrans to study state highways that also function as small-city downtowns. The Lomita segment runs from Pennsylvania Avenue through downtown Lomita and continues into Harbor City and Wilmington before ending near the Harbor Avenue and I-710 ramps in Long Beach, a stretch of roughly 6.5 miles.
In April 2026, SCAG held a virtual workshop specifically on the Lomita section of that corridor. Nine people showed up: representatives from the South Bay Cities Council of Governments, Caltrans District 12, the City of Lomita, and five residents. That small group is the entire dataset behind some of what follows, which makes it a snapshot of one evening's conversation rather than a citywide poll.
What that small group said tracks with what a lot of people who live here would probably tell you if asked directly. According to SCAG's own summary of the session, participants said they generally avoid walking Pacific Coast Highway because of personal safety and traffic concerns, especially during afternoon peak hours and school pickup and drop-off times. They flagged ongoing traffic signal synchronization problems and nighttime speeding when volumes drop. On the fix side, the same group pushed for protected Class IV bike lanes, meaning bike paths physically separated from car traffic rather than just a painted stripe, and they ranked sidewalk widening as a top priority, specifically for people using mobility devices or pushing strollers and shopping carts. They also asked for more trees and shade along the route.
A separate survey tied to the same study, open from December 2025 through February 2026, backs up the driving half of that split. Most respondents said they travel Pacific Coast Highway often or always, and the destinations they named most were Narbonne Avenue and Oak Street in Lomita, along with the Crenshaw Boulevard shopping center in Torrance. People are on this road constantly. They're just doing it from inside a car.
Two Different Projects, Two Different Clocks
It would be easy to read all this and assume construction crews show up next spring with new curb bulbs and bike lanes. That's not quite the timeline, and mixing up the two efforts moving through this corridor right now is an easy way to get the story wrong.
The SCAG Main Streets study is still in the planning phase. Its own schedule points to a final report, corridor fact sheets, and presentations to local governments and SCAG committees in winter or spring of 2027, not this year. What comes out of that process will be conceptual designs, cost estimates, and grant-ready materials, meaning the actual case for funding gets built after the study wraps, not before.
Running alongside that, and already funded, is a Caltrans pavement rehabilitation project that covers roughly 22 miles of Pacific Coast Highway across Redondo Beach, Long Beach, Torrance, Lomita, Signal Hill, and Los Angeles. According to Caltrans's project page, the work includes resurfacing, ADA curb ramp upgrades, new bus pads, sidewalk and bike lane construction, drainage and gutter upgrades, and new striping, with lane closures happening at night to limit traffic disruption. The listed cost is $48.2 million, with RJ Nobles Inc. of Orange, California as the contractor, funded in part through the state's SB 1 transportation program. This is a maintenance and accessibility project moving through construction now, separate from and faster-moving than the SCAG study, even though both touch the same stretch of asphalt.
So there are, in effect, two clocks running on the same road. One is fixing what's underneath your tires and adding baseline ADA access this year. The other is still gathering opinions about what the street should become, with real design decisions still more than a year out.
The Oct. 3 Pop-Up at the Railroad Museum
If the December meeting at the donut shop felt like an odd way to gather input, the next one leans into it. SCAG has scheduled a pop-up engagement event for Friday, October 3, from 5 to 7 p.m., set inside Country Night at the Railroad Museum at 2137 West 250th Street. Planners will be on hand to talk through the Main Streets project and take feedback the same evening steam engines and a Union Pacific caboose are open for the crowd that shows up for the museum's regular after-hours event.
Given that only five residents turned out for the entire spring workshop series, a two-hour window folded into an event people were already planning to attend is a low-friction way to have an actual say before the comment period closes and the design work gets locked into a report. Nothing about this meeting requires advance registration or special expertise. It requires showing up.
What Changes on the Walk You Already Make
None of this rewrites Pacific Coast Highway overnight. The pavement project is about resurfacing, ramps, and baseline accessibility, work that's useful but not transformative to how the street feels to walk. The Main Streets study, the one asking about bike lanes and wider sidewalks and shade trees, doesn't produce a funded design until sometime in 2027 at the earliest, and even then it still needs to compete for construction dollars afterward.
What's worth noticing in the meantime is how differently the city already treats its two main streets. This past June, Lomita's Founders Day celebration closed Narbonne Avenue to through traffic for the weekend, turning it into the pedestrian spine for carnival rides, food trucks, and the fireworks show. Pacific Coast Highway, a few blocks over and carrying far more daily traffic, past Project Barley's brewery and pizzeria, past the Target and CVS and Grocery Outlet that anchor the block, wasn't closed for anything. One street gets treated as the town square once a year. The other one, the one most people actually drive every single day, has never quite gotten that treatment, and the survey data suggests most residents have made peace with that split without ever being asked if they wanted to.
The workshop process happening right now, however lightly attended so far, is the first real chance in a while to say otherwise. Whether it changes the corridor's design in 2027 or just documents what residents already do without comment, the record being built this fall is the one planners will point back to when the next round of funding decisions gets made.
We've watched this stretch of the Peninsula's edge for a long time, and we'll be paying attention to how this one plays out. If you're curious how a corridor study like this tends to ripple into property values or neighborhood character down the line, the team at Mackenbach Group is always glad to talk it through.
