"Once upon a time, the entire boardwalk used to be car-free."
David Cuthell, co-president of the grassroots group beautifulPB, said that to the Pacific Beach Planning Group this summer. It sounds like nostalgia. It's actually a description of an unfinished job that most people walk past without registering: one block of the boardwalk still isn't the boardwalk.
If you've walked or biked between Grand Avenue and Thomas Avenue on a Saturday afternoon, you already know the mismatch, even if you never named it. The concrete promenade that runs 3.5 miles from north Pacific Beach down through Mission Beach simply stops being itself for one block. Painted parking stalls appear. Cars idle for a spot. Pedestrians and cyclists spill into the traffic lane because the sidewalk they were just on has run out. Then, a block later at Thomas, the boardwalk resumes and the cars disappear again.
That's not an accident of geography. It's a leftover from the postwar decades when the city, like most American coastal towns, tore out trolleys and built for cars first. Every other stretch of Ocean Front Walk eventually got converted back to a people-first corridor. This one block never did.
The data that made the planning group listen
beautifulPB didn't just show up with an opinion. Using VivaCity sensor counts collected through the group's PB Counts traffic tally, the organization reported that pedestrians and cyclists account for 73.7 percent of all traffic moving through the Grand-to-Thomas block, with motor vehicles making up the remaining 26.3 percent. On July 4th weekend specifically, foot and bike traffic spiked while vehicle counts stayed essentially flat, according to reporting from Streetsblog California. The sensors also flagged near misses, defined as a vehicle passing within roughly one meter of a pedestrian or cyclist, clustering on weekend afternoons and evenings when the adjacent boardwalk is packed.
Put plainly: a majority of the people using that block aren't in cars, and haven't been for a while. The street just hasn't been told that yet.
Here's how the block compares to what's already settled a few hundred feet away:
| Boardwalk north of Thomas (toward Law St.) | Ocean Blvd., Grand to Thomas, today | Proposed weekend pilot | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cars allowed | No, 24/7 | Yes, full-time | No, weekends and holidays, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. |
| Surface | Continuous concrete boardwalk | Asphalt street with painted parking stalls | Same asphalt, with portable barriers added during closure hours |
| Foot and bike share of use | Functions as close to 100 percent | 73.7 percent, per 2025 sensor data | Expected to rise once cars are removed during peak hours |
| Governing status | Already resolved decades ago | Full vehicle access, unchanged | Awaiting City Council review, possible Coastal Commission input |
The pilot beautifulPB is pushing isn't a redesign. It's an attempt to close the gap between that middle column and the first one.
A 10-4 vote, not a landslide
In June, the Pacific Beach Planning Group took up the proposal formally, after Robert "RJ" Kunysz of beautifulPB had presented it as an information item in May. The vote to recommend the pilot to the City of San Diego passed 10 to 4, according to reporting from Times of San Diego. That's a real margin, but it isn't a mandate. Four members of a body that knows this neighborhood block by block looked at the same sensor data and voted no.
The opposition isn't dismissing the numbers so much as questioning what they justify. Community activist Scott Chipman told the planning group the proposal had been done "with no study, no justification and no baseline data," framing beautifulPB as a group with, in his words, "a reputation for being anti-car." Other residents and nearby business owners raised a more concrete concern: the pilot would remove roughly 30 parking spaces, including three marked accessible stalls, on a stretch where finding any spot during a summer weekend already takes patience. There's also a public safety question tied to Fire Station No. 21 nearby, with critics worried that pushing displaced vehicle traffic into side alleys could slow emergency response during the exact hours the block would be busiest.
City staff, for their part, have flagged their own logistical concerns, noting that portable barriers would need to go up and come down on a tight schedule every weekend, and that operational details still need to be worked out before anything moves forward.
The wildcard nobody controls yet
Even with a planning group recommendation in hand, the outcome isn't settled, because the California Coastal Commission may still have a say. That agency's mission is to maximize public access to the coast for all Californians, and it has backed pedestrian-priority projects elsewhere, including the weekend vehicle closures on San Francisco's Great Highway. But the Commission has also, in specific past cases, required parking as a condition of coastal development permits, which is exactly why residents on both sides of this fight aren't treating a city sign-off as the final word. A project this small could still trigger a much larger review.
What's actually true on the ground right now
For anyone planning a walk, a ride, or a parking spot near the pier this week, here's where things stand as of late August:
- No barriers are up. Ocean Boulevard between Grand and Thomas still allows full-time vehicle access and parking, exactly as it has for years.
- The roughly 30 spaces at stake, including the three accessible stalls, remain in active use for now.
- The planning group's recommendation has moved to city officials for review, and residents on either side of the issue have been directed to Council President Joe LaCava's office as the next point of contact.
- A separate Coastal Commission review could still apply, depending on how the final pilot design is structured.
- If the pilot does move forward, the plan calls for portable barriers and temporary bike racks during closure hours only, with emergency vehicles and a permitted delivery window still able to cross the block.
That means this coming Labor Day weekend, one of the last big crowd tests of the summer, will look like every other one before it. The boardwalk will fill up the way it usually does, the overflow will spill onto Ocean Boulevard the way it usually does, and the block will keep functioning like a plaza that's regulated like a parking lot.
The real question isn't cars versus pedestrians
Strip away the parking math and the emergency access debate, and the actual dispute is narrower than it looks: does the city formally recognize what the pavement already shows, or does the current arrangement hold until something forces the issue. The sensor data says the block has already changed. The 10-4 vote says a majority of the people closest to it agree. The paperwork, and possibly a state agency, hasn't caught up.
For residents, that's the useful takeaway heading into fall. Nothing closes this weekend. But the next time you're stepping around a parked car on that one strange block of the boardwalk, you're standing in the middle of a debate about whether the street should finally admit what it's already become.
Stories like this are part of why WM Luxury Real Estate pays close attention to the small civic decisions shaping daily life in Pacific Beach and up and down the coast, not just the transactions. If you'd like a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground here, from block-level changes like this one to the broader coastal market, WM Luxury Real Estate welcomes you to request a private consultation.
