Ask a Westside neighbor if West Cliff Drive is fixed and most will say yes. The two-way traffic came back last June after more than two years of single-lane closures. The pathway is paved end to end again. People are back to walking the surfer statue loop, letting dogs loose at Its Beach, and catching sunset from the bluffs near the lighthouse the way they always have.

Ask the city's public works department the same question and you get a different answer. The repairs are done. The story is not.

That distinction matters if West Cliff is part of your week, because the stretch of coastline you're walking right now is scheduled to be in a different physical location within the next year, and the piece of it people care about most, the lighthouse itself, is sitting on a cave the city hasn't finished studying.

The Reopening That Wasn't the End

The damage started with the atmospheric rivers of January 2023, which tore out roughly 120 feet of pathway and eroded the road in multiple places. Repairs stretched on so long that traffic was shut down in at least one direction for about 30 months before the road returned to full two-way access at the end of June 2025.

Six months later, a new section of bluff gave way. On a Saturday in early January 2026, a chunk of coastal bluff near the Getchell Street intersection, just west of Fair Avenue, crumbled and fell to the shore below during a run of rain and rough surf. The city set up a line of orange, water-filled barriers along the pedestrian path to buffer walkers and cyclists from the eroded edge. Officials said the path would stay open, and it has, but the barriers are still there, and staff are still watching the site for further movement.

The lesson buried in that timeline is simple: a "repaired" West Cliff is not the same thing as a stable one. The cliff itself is still eroding underneath the fixes.

Why the City Stopped Trying to Rebuild What Was There

Most of the money that funded the 2023 to 2025 repairs came through emergency disaster channels, the kind that pay to put a road back the way it was. The next phase of work near Lighthouse Field is funded differently. It comes through a Caltrans program built for permanent solutions rather than patch jobs, and the city is using that money to do something it hasn't done on this stretch before: move the road inland instead of defending it in place.

The project covers roughly 600 feet of West Cliff Drive east of Columbia Street, past the parking area across from Lighthouse Field State Beach. The road will shift about 60 feet inland and the adjacent pedestrian path about 30 feet, pulling both away from a coastline that keeps shrinking underneath them. Assistant Public Works Director Kevin Crossley put the strategy plainly:

"Generally speaking, we're pushing everything as far back as we can within reason from the coastline."

The roughly $1.8 million project is a multi-agency effort, since the land involved belongs to California State Parks. The city expects Coastal Commission approval to land in October 2026, with bidding planned for winter and construction targeted for spring 2027. As of January 2026, design work was already more than 60 percent complete, according to Crossley, enough for the city to begin property appraisals and right-of-way purchases. Crossley has said the road will not see a full closure during construction, though the city plans neighborhood-level outreach on detours once a contractor is on board.

Here's where each piece of the coastline stands right now:

The Piece Nobody's Scheduled Yet

The most-photographed spot on the whole route, the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse and its Santa Cruz Surfing Museum, sits directly above a sea cave that's been a known concern since studies in 2006 and 2016. Those earlier reports found little change in the cave's condition, but a fresh geotechnical study was originally supposed to start in the summer of 2025. It's been delayed, and Crossley has said the reason is straightforward: staff bandwidth is stretched across other major projects, including the Murray Street Bridge seismic retrofit.

Al Ramadan, a leader of the resident group Save West Cliff, has pushed back on the timeline, arguing the cave has grown to more than 60 feet deep and now threatens the point itself, not just the lighthouse. City staff have said they don't expect the study to reveal an imminent risk, but they've also acknowledged that if it does, they'll move to a design phase for relocating the lighthouse rather than defending its current footprint.

Nobody is saying the lighthouse is moving soon. But the fact that "moving the lighthouse" is even a phrase city staff use tells you how far the conversation has shifted from patch and repair toward long-term retreat.

Why the City Keeps Spending on a Path You Can Walk for Free

It's worth understanding why this keeps getting funded, permitted, and studied instead of quietly deferred. A report from the nonprofit Save the Waves found that the surfing industry generates more than $190 million a year in the city of Santa Cruz, with about $22 million of that tied specifically to visitors drawn by West Cliff's surf breaks, Steamer Lane chief among them. That's the economic case the city is weighing against the cost of armoring, relocating, or eventually retreating from pieces of this coastline.

There's also an unresolved argument about who the road is actually for. In a 2024 resident survey, more than 60 percent of respondents said West Cliff should become a one-way street, ranking walking, cycling, and beach access above car traffic. The city council had already rejected a pilot program in April 2024 that would have converted the eastbound lane into a protected bike lane while keeping westbound car traffic. The five-year roadmap now underway doesn't touch the one-way question at all. If you've ever felt squeezed on a bike here with cars passing close on one side and pedestrians on the other, that's not an accident of design. It's an argument the city hasn't settled.

What This Means If You're Out There This Year

A few practical notes for anyone who treats this as their regular loop, run, or bike ride:

• The Getchell Street barriers aren't temporary in the sense of "gone next month." Expect them to stay until the erosion there stabilizes or the city adds permanent protection.
• The Columbia Street to Lighthouse Field stretch is the one to watch for actual construction activity. Based on the current timeline, expect contractor mobilization to become visible sometime after the winter bid process, with work starting in spring 2027 and no full road closure planned.
• If you want a shorter, unaffected loop in the meantime, Its Beach remains a dog-friendly favorite and Mitchell's Cove down the road is the route's off-leash spot, and neither sits near the current construction zones.
• For a change of scenery while sections shift, East Cliff Drive through Pleasure Point offers a quieter, mile-long paved stretch with its own surf breaks. Santa Cruz already converted that road to one-way back in the 1990s, which is worth remembering the next time someone floats the idea for West Cliff.

None of this is new information to Bob Pearson, who has walked this stretch of coastline nearly every day since 1964. He's watched the cliffs change shape for six decades, through storms, seawalls, and now a formal city strategy called managed retreat. His read on it is about as plain as Crossley's:

"I'm there damn near seven days a week."

That's the real shape of this story. West Cliff Drive isn't a fixed backdrop to daily life on the Westside. It's one of the most actively engineered strips of coastline in Santa Cruz, quietly redesigning itself a few hundred feet at a time, with the next visible chapter arriving as early as next spring.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near the coast, whether it's how close a property sits to an erosion zone or how a changing shoreline might affect long-term value, the team at Moles Group knows this stretch of Santa Cruz well beyond the headlines. Reach out for a complimentary consultation, or browse our Santa Cruz neighborhood guide to see what else is worth knowing before you make a move here.