Note at the bottom, this article was financed by a special interest group that lobbies on environmental issues—then gave money to Bloomberg to run this story.
We were told the iceberg would flood our shores—and they didn’t. We were told climate change would melt Greenland—it didn’t. Thirty years ago, we were told by Al Gore Earth only had ten years left due to climate change. He lied. Now we have cities and the ocean scared they will float away into the ocean. Will it take thirty years to prove, as Jesse Watters calls them, “panicans”?
“The sandy bluffs underneath roadside parking lots have completely given way in some spots, sending slabs of asphalt tumbling over the cliffs and leaving hollowed-out voids under the remaining pavement. Fences keep visitors from getting too close. But there are other “hot spots” where erosion has exposed abandoned drain pipes and forgotten curbs from an earlier era, when the highway was even closer to the ocean.
“This coastline’s eroding about six inches to a foot a year,” said Frank, Carlsbad’s transportation director and chief engineer. “There used to be roads along the coastline that are no longer there.”
Carlsbad, a suburban community 30 miles north of San Diego, has deployed a wide variety of innovative traffic designs to make its streets safer and more walkable. But perhaps no project on the city’s to-do list is bigger than determining the future of this stretch of Carlsbad Boulevard, a divided highway along beaches and bluffs that was once part of California’s famed Highway 101.”
Just another Halloween, scare tactics from those who want your money and control your life. Al Gore would be proud.
As Coastline Erodes, One California City Considers ‘Retreat Now’
Carlsbad, unlike many other seaside communities, might just have the time, space and resources to get ahead of coastal erosion.
By Daniel C Vock, Bloomberg, 5/13/25 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-13/carlsbad-california-devises-plan-to-move-highway-away-from-eroding-coast
As Tom Frank walks down the shoulder of an oceanside highway in Carlsbad, California, he finds signs everywhere that this stretch of iconic highway will not last as it is much longer.
The sandy bluffs underneath roadside parking lots have completely given way in some spots, sending slabs of asphalt tumbling over the cliffs and leaving hollowed-out voids under the remaining pavement. Fences keep visitors from getting too close. But there are other “hot spots” where erosion has exposed abandoned drain pipes and forgotten curbs from an earlier era, when the highway was even closer to the ocean.
“This coastline’s eroding about six inches to a foot a year,” said Frank, Carlsbad’s transportation director and chief engineer. “There used to be roads along the coastline that are no longer there.”
Carlsbad, a suburban community 30 miles north of San Diego, has deployed a wide variety of innovative traffic designs to make its streets safer and more walkable. But perhaps no project on the city’s to-do list is bigger than determining the future of this stretch of Carlsbad Boulevard, a divided highway along beaches and bluffs that was once part of California’s famed Highway 101.
The most immediate threat is to a one-mile segment of the highway between two hills near Encinas Creek where the road gets within just a few feet of the crashing waves at high tide. Local officials call it “The Dip.” Already, saltwater spills onto the pavement during winter storms or “king tides.” A decade ago, the city placed boulders known as rip rap along the lowest point to secure the highway. But armoring the infrastructure only delays the inevitable — nobody is quite sure for how long — and will likely speed the process of sand on the beach disappearing.
“No matter what your perspective is on climate, the coastline is eroding, and it is coming in,” said Frank.
Carlsbad, unlike many other seaside communities facing gut-wrenching decisions about how to handle coastal erosion, might just have the time, space and resources to get ahead of the problem. Plenty of advocates in the region hope the city can be a model for climate adaptation with its proposal to move the road inland.
But its ambitions depend on its ability to find outside funding and build public support locally for the project.
Right now, the city is on track to choose the path of “retreat now,” before an emergency situation, rather than “retreat later,” the default option for many communities — especially those facing harder decisions to move homes and businesses rather than just infrastructure.
“We overall are much better at spending recovery money — that is, addressing issues after disasters — than we are at spending hazard mitigation,” said Michael Beck, director of the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Beck expects this tendency of cities to put off preparedness to only get worse in the US as the Trump administration cuts funding for hazard mitigation programs.
So far Carlsbadis preparing to move forward as it navigates multiple potential funding sources. Even with the city’srelative advantages, taking action will not be easy. Everything from the project’s nine-figure cost to local scrutiny over the proposed replacement — which might include controversial elements like replacing stoplights with roundabouts and limiting the number of vehicle lanes — could block or delay the project.
“It is a little slow, but we want to do it right,” said Carlsbad City Council Member Teresa Acosta. “I think money is the most worrisome. Especially right now, it’s feeling like we’re not going to get a lot of assistance from the federal government on these grants.”
A ‘Win-Win Situation’
A city task force proposal would move the southbound lanes of Carlsbad Boulevard inland, essentially transforming a divided highway into a single roadway. The plan calls for the construction of a 500-foot-long bridge for the new stretch of highway over the creek. Elevating the road would enable the city to remove the artificial hill that holds up the current roadway, allowing for the restoration of the wetlands that existed before the highway was built.
The city could either leave the existing lanes near the ocean alone, allowing them to be used by pedestrians and cyclists instead, or demolish them, which would provide more beach space and leave open the opportunity to build bike and pedestrian paths along the new inland road.
“It would be great to create this wonderful facility for the residents who live here and the visitors to just bike and walk and enjoy the ocean separated from cars,” said Peder Norby, a former Carlsbad city councilmember who previously helped revitalize the downtown of nearby Encinitas.
This plan to retreat now — or at least as soon as possible — offers many benefits, including creating a bigger beach, restoring a creek bed and making traffic improvements along the highway. Retreating later — when coastal hazards overwhelm the current infrastructure — has fewer benefits but also fewer up-front costs.
“Wherever feasible, if you have the space to move infrastructure back from the coast, you create a win-win situation,” said Mitch Silverstein, San Diego County Policy Manager for Surfrider Foundation, a group of environmentally minded beach users. “You protect this infrastructure, which is a critical coastal corridor, and you also save the beach at the same time. That’s why I think this is a model project.”
On the other hand, keeping the boulders on the beach only accelerates the process of sand disappearing. The waves come crashing ashore with more force against the rocks, Silverstein said, which creates more erosion. And on top of everything else, he added, the armored coasts make the nearby waters no longer surfable at high tide.
A Coastal Retreat
Carlsbad has options that many nearby coastal cities do not, he noted. For most of Carlsbad’s seven miles of shoreline, the land next to the ocean is public — like the highway or state parks — rather than private property. Near The Dip at Encinas Creek, that means the city can retreat from the coast and create more beach without buying homes or hotels perched along the water — a far more fraught process.
Relocating infrastructure pushing up against rising seas looks different depending on the geography. On the East Coast, the predominant strategy for protecting shorelines has been to replenish sand on the beaches, even if much of the sand washes away, says Gary Griggs, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. San Diego County has tried sand replenishment, too, including in Carlsbad, but the geology of the Pacific Coast with its prominent coastal bluffs makes that difficult. Maintaining highways in places in California is like “putting a road across an active landslide,” he said.But the East Coast is dominated by coastal plains and sandy barrier islands that shift over time, a problem for places like Miami Beach or Atlantic City. “It’s a totally different shoreline,” Griggs said. “The only thing they have in common is an ocean that’s rising.”
While Mother Nature can be unpredictable, Carlsbad also appears to have more time than some other coastal cities, where emergencies are already prompting a response. To the south of Carlsbad, for example, an August 2019 bluff collapse killed three women in Encinitas. The city and state reached a $32 million settlement with the family of the women in 2024, because the state had previously determined that the bluffs that collapsed were unsafe.
Covering the Cost
City officials in Carlsbad are still looking for ways to pay for their coastal realignment. Other governments that have traditionally helped municipalities with such large-scale projects are under strain. The state of California has struggled with budget shortfalls in recent years, and the Trump administration has threatened, frozen or canceled billions of dollars in grants, many of them related to climate resilience.
The exact cost of the Carlsbad Boulevard project is still unknown, but Frank said the new bridge that could carry the reconstructed highway and multiuse paths over the creek alone could cost as much as $150 million.
The city council wants to explore a new tool in California that might allow it to collect money for climate-related infrastructure improvements. The “climate resilience districts” allow jurisdictions to use tax increment financing and other funding mechanisms for those projects, but few local governments have set up the districts since state lawmakers first authorized them in 2022.
Carlsbad is on solid financial footing, and it’s used its resources for other major infrastructure improvements in recent years. Its property tax collections have been increasing for a decade, as residential and commercial real estate prices have climbed since the Great Recession. The city’s bottom line is also helped by hotel occupancy taxes it collects from people visiting Legoland California, playing golf, touring the city’s extensive flower fields or, of course, enjoying the beach. And Carlsbad has been able to maintain high-quality infrastructure, in part, by getting developers to pay for improvements as a condition for getting their projects approved.
As part of the study of the Carlsbad Boulevard relocation, city staff prepared an adaptive management plan to help public officials decide when certain actions would need to happen, relying on measurements of cliff erosion, coastal flooding and the integrity of coastal armoring. Katie Hentrich, Carlsbad’s climate action plan administrator, said few cities in California have developed such a detailed plan. Santa Cruz, in northern California, laid out a step-by-step process for moving infrastructure away from the coast, but winter storms proved so severe that Santa Cruz quickly found itself having to do “everything, everywhere, all at once,” Hentrich said.
Lagging Public Support
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to early climate adaptation is public support for changes that may not yet feel urgent. In Carlsbad, feedback from the community gathered in 2022 suggested people prefer to keep the coastline the way it is now.
“Their number one thing was: ‘Change nothing,’” Hentrich said. “They’d say, ‘It’s Highway 101, it’s a historic highway. You’re cruising with the windows down and you can see the water, and that’s really nice.’ It was a big hurdle when we came out with the different roadway options.”
Some of those designs included roundabouts, which Carlsbad has been slowly introducing around the city in recent years. Neighbors in a subdivision and operators of a hotel across the road from the ocean initially objected to the idea of roundabouts, worried that they would back up traffic.
But Frank and other city officials met with them to explain how roundabouts could keep traffic flowing while making the road safer. Then, on an August afternoon in 2022, a motorcyclist traveling80-100 miles per hourdown Carlsbad Boulevard hit and killed a 68-year-old cyclist in the northbound bike lane at one of the intersections where the roundabouts would be installed. It was one of two fatal collisions between bikes and vehicles in the city that month, prompting the city to declare a local state of emergency for traffic safety.
The crash and city outreach eventually convinced many nearby residents that roundabouts should be considered in the boulevard reconstruction, Hentrich said. “By the end of it, they were all saying they were in favor of it, but a year and a half prior to that, they all hated it,” she said.
Tom Frank shows how even elevated parts of the road are affected by erosion. The sandy cliffs are washed away by rain and blown away by winds off the ocean, which create craggy formations. The city installed this black line of asphalt to divert rain runoff from the most vulnerable parts of the cliffs.Photographer: Daniel C. Vock
Another potential political issue would be the size of the new roadway, and, in particular, how many lanes it has. Frank, the city’s transportation director, said one lane in each direction would be enough to accommodate the 18,000 vehicles on the road each day. The city recently reconfigured part of the southbound road nearest the ocean to a single lane, to slow vehicle speeds and to give cyclists and pedestrians more space.
Carlsbad Mayor Keith Blackburn indicated at a city council hearing last year that he preferred a “retreat now” strategy but wanted to keep two lanes in each direction for cars. That change could increase the cost of the project, but Blackburn declined requests to answer questions. Instead, a spokesperson sent a statement on his behalf, saying that the project aligns with Carlsbad’s goals of “environmental protection, preservation of natural resources, and maintaining Carlsbad’s unique character and connectivity.”
“Given the project’s scale, cost and coordination with multiple jurisdictions, I continue to advocate that whenever we do this project, we ensure it is done correctly from the start,” read the statement.
Frank said it could be years before the required studies are completed and the city council gets to make a final decision on what the project would look like. And while the city owns the highway, it would have to coordinate with several different state agencies that own adjacent pieces of land.
The council’s final set of choices will likely rest on how much money is available, he said. “The next steps are to find out what are our options to present to the public and city council on what’s feasible given different funding levels. And if we don’t have any grant and we’re in jeopardy of losing the roadway, what can we do to preserve that connection?” Frank said. “It’s really wide open.”
Funding for this story was provided by The Neal Peirce Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting journalism on ways to make cities and their larger regions work better for all people.
