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Santa Monica's rebuilt California Incline opens
A Santa Monica Big Blue Bus broke the tape to celebrate the reopening of the California Incline on Sept. 1, 2016, after a 17-month project that rebuilt the road with seismic retrofits, a new bike lane and a wider pedestrian walkway.
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City of Santa Monica
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An artist's rendering of the improvements to the California Incline, which include a new bike path and a wider pedestrian walkway.
(
City of Santa Monica
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Santa Monica's California Incline — only 1,400-feet long but one of the most popular stretches of road in Southern California — reopens today with seismic improvements, a new bike path and a wider walking path.
The new version of the steep road that runs between the Santa Monica Palisades Park area to Pacific Coast Highway was unveiled during a ceremony Thursday morning. After a day of festivities, the roadway opens to cars at 5 p.m.
"These types of complex infrastructure projects that involve federal funding and a lot of different people, it's really rewarding when we can actually open up these brand new facilities knowing that they're much safer and more usable for the future," said Santa Monica city engineer Lee Swain.
(See a video below of Santa Monica Mayor Tony Vazquez on the new California Incline.)
The project took 17 months of construction and nearly a decade of planning, with an estimated cost of $20 million — almost 90 percent of which qualified for federal funding.
As part of Thursday's day-long celebration, pedestrians will have full-run of the road before it is opened to cars in the evening. Festivities will include a ribbon-cutting, live music and displays of historic photos and, of course, stunning views of the Pacific Ocean.
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The former Incline was built in 1930. But the original path dated back 120 years, to a walkway known as the Sunset Trail.
"It's just a major piece of infrastructure that has taken a long time to develop and construct," Swain said. "But it is something that will be usable for multiple generations. It should have a useful life of maybe 100 years."
(See a time-lapse video below showing the progress of construction.)
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