Ocean Beach Master Plan drafts big changes for Ocean Beach
Planners have revealed a sweeping set of recommendations for guiding San Francisco’s Ocean Beach over the next several decades. The plan is predictably complex, especially with the necessity to protect important city infrastructure, but the changes deliberately aim to preserve the natural habitat, surfing, and the sweeping views that many residents enjoy.
Ocean Beach faces challenges including destructive coastal erosion, rising sea levels and a myriad of competing demands as the biggest beach in a densely developed city. In response to these challenges, the draft recommendations of the Ocean Beach Master Plan call for changes such as rerouting part of the Great Highway, reducing the number of lanes on most of that road, and installing cobblestone berms and other features to blunt the erosive impact of waves on the shore.
When it is completed early next year, the Ocean Beach Master Plan will provide a set of principles and concrete suggestions that city, state and federal agencies can use to guide the management of the beach over the next several decades.
I am hoping that this plan is drafted. For many years, the city has been woefully negligent in it’s attempts to preserve the coastline. The current strategy of dumping huge rocks and chunks of concrete on the dunes at the south end of Ocean Beach has failed miserably. You would think that after part of the Great Highway collapsed into the ocean down there that planners might rethink their strategy and do something positive for a change.