West Cliff Drive Is Two-Way Again. It's Also Still Moving.

If you walk, run, or bike West Cliff Drive on any kind of regular schedule, you already know the headline from last year: the road reopened to two-way traffic at the end of June 2025, closing out more than two years of single-lane detours that started when the January 2023 atmospheric river storms tore out chunks of pavement and pathway between Woodrow Avenue and Columbia Street. Locals treated that ribbon-cutting the way you'd treat the end of a long renovation. Doors open, crews gone, back to normal.

Except normal isn't quite what's happening out there this fall. The city hasn't stopped working on West Cliff. It's just stopped calling it emergency repair and started calling it something closer to permanent planning, which means three separate stretches of your daily route are being watched, studied, or redesigned right now, in ways that will change what the path looks like well before the decade is out.

The Reopening Wasn't the Ending

It's worth being specific about what actually got fixed in 2025, because the scope was bigger than most people realize. Traffic was shut down in at least one direction for roughly 30 months. Crews spent that stretch repairing sinkholes, slowing erosion, rebuilding damaged culverts, and rehabilitating the pedestrian path itself, not just the roadway. That's a real accomplishment, and it's why the city hosted a ribbon cutting when the last stretch reopened.

But the city's own public works staff have been clear that 2025's work closed out the emergency phase, not the erosion problem. Assistant Public Works Director Kevin Crossley has said the department is now studying environmentally sensitive areas along the bluff and taking early steps toward relocating parts of the roadway rather than continuing to rebuild it where it already sits. That's a different posture than patch-and-reopen. It's called managed retreat, and it shows up in three concrete places along your walk this year.

Three Stretches Still Being Watched

Getchell Street: the newest crack

The most recent collapse happened at the start of this year, on the Westside stretch near Getchell. City spokesperson Ashley Hussey told reporters at the time that pedestrian and bike access along the path was still open and unaffected, and that a full closure wasn't on the table unless conditions changed. That's the pattern you'll notice if you walk this section regularly: barriers go up around a specific eroded patch, the rest of the path stays open, and the city waits to see whether the ground keeps moving before it commits to a fix.

Columbia to Lighthouse Field: the road that's about to move

This is the stretch where the biggest physical change is coming, and if you've walked past the parking area across from Lighthouse Field State Beach recently, you've probably already seen it. A section of the pedestrian path there has crumbled and sat behind orange barriers for months while the city finalizes a permanent fix. The plan is to shift about 600 feet of West Cliff Drive and its adjacent path inland rather than keep rebuilding on the same footprint. The funding source matters here too. Crossley has noted this project draws on a different pot of federal disaster money than the earlier emergency repairs, one that allows for a genuinely new design rather than restoring what was there before. That's the clearest sign yet that the city isn't trying to hold the coastline in place. It's trying to get out of its way.

Under the lighthouse: the cave nobody can rush

The most watched spot on the whole route sits right at Lighthouse Point, home to the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse and Santa Cruz Surfing Museum. A sea cave has been eating into the point's west side for decades, with prior studies in 2006 and 2016 showing little change. Local advocacy group Save West Cliff has pushed the city to move faster, describing the cave as more than 60 feet deep and a threat to the point as a whole. The city's response, delivered by Crossley at a recent public works open house, was more measured. Asked whether the cave would eventually swallow the lighthouse, he said the answer is not anytime soon, while acknowledging the study needed current data rather than relying on decades-old surveys. The $387,000 contract with Environmental Science Associates is meant to settle that question with real measurements instead of guesswork.

The Philosophy Shift Underneath the Concrete

What ties these three spots together isn't just proximity. It's a change in how the city thinks about the coastline itself. Crossley put it directly when discussing the Lighthouse Point study:

"Coastal armoring isn't in vogue anymore, and that's the reality that needs to be acknowledged in this analysis."

That's a notable admission from the department responsible for the road. For decades, the default response to erosion here was to armor the cliff, build a wall, hold the line. The Columbia Street relocation is the clearest evidence that approach is changing. Rather than another seawall, the city is moving the infrastructure back from the edge and treating the coastline as something that will keep shifting no matter what gets built. Surfers along Steamer Lane and Its Beach have been raising a related concern in recent months, worried that connected sea caves and cliff collapses could eventually reshape the reef breaks that make this stretch of coast famous for surfing in the first place. The erosion isn't just a roadway problem. It's a shoreline problem, and the road is just the part residents interact with daily.

What This Actually Changes About Your Walk

For day to day purposes, the path is functional and the loop from the Boardwalk end out to Natural Bridges is walkable and rideable without a detour most days. Parking near the lighthouse and along the Getchell Street stretch is still tight, storm season or not, so if you're headed out for a sunset walk on a weekend, don't count on finding a spot right at the point. Dogs are welcome on the path on leash, and the small beach area near the lighthouse remains a popular unofficial dog spot even though it isn't a formal off-leash beach.

The bigger practical note is seasonal. During high surf events, sections of the path near Columbia and David Way have been closed to pedestrians on short notice until tides recede, a pattern that predates this year and is likely to continue given the ongoing work near that stretch. If you're planning a walk during a big swell forecast, especially between fall and early spring, it's worth checking conditions before you go rather than assuming the whole loop is open.

None of this means the coastline is in crisis. It means the city has moved from crisis mode into a slower, more deliberate phase, and the visible signs of that, barriers around a crumbled section of path, survey equipment near the lighthouse, occasional closures after a big swell, are going to be part of the scenery here for at least another year or two while the Columbia Street relocation moves toward its 2027 construction target and the Lighthouse Point study runs its course.

If you've lived on the Westside long enough to remember the 2023 storms, this is probably the update you've been waiting for. The road came back. The coastline underneath it didn't stop changing, and the city has finally started planning like it knows that.

For more on the ongoing work, the city maintains a public project page through its Resilient Coast Santa Cruz initiative, and Lookout Santa Cruz has been tracking the relocation project in detail as design work continues.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a home on or near West Cliff Drive, that's a longer conversation, and one I have often. Jessyka Sommers has spent years watching this stretch of coastline change alongside the neighborhoods around it. Let's Connect if you want to talk through what it means for your street specifically.