Highway 1 Through Marin: Narrow, Blind and Busy

North of the Golden Gate, Highway 1 leaves US-101 and turns into something else entirely. It climbs over the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais, drops toward Muir Beach and Stinson, and runs up the coast past Bolinas toward Point Reyes. It is one of the great drives in the state, and for a large fraction of the people on it, it is also the most difficult road they have ever driven.

What the road actually is

Not a scenic highway in the modern sense. In stretches it is a two-lane road with a painted centerline that is optimistic about the available width, hairpin turns with no guardrail, a drop on the ocean side, and a rock face on the other. Sight lines around headlands are measured in car lengths. There are pullouts, and there is very little else.

Add the traffic mix. Weekend visitors driving unfamiliar rental cars. Cyclists, in numbers, climbing at walking pace. Motorcycles moving considerably faster than the cars. Delivery vehicles and the occasional bus. Locals who know the road and want past all of it.

The encounter that produces the damage

It is not a dramatic crash. It is two vehicles meeting on a blind curve where the road is not wide enough for both, and one of them making contact with the rock face, the other vehicle, or a mirror.

The habits that prevent it:

• Hug your own side through blind curves, even when it feels tight against the bank. The oncoming vehicle will be using more than its half.
• Use the horn on blind hairpins. A short tap is normal courtesy on roads like this and not aggression.
• Use the pullouts. If cars are stacking behind you, pull out and let them by. That is what the turnouts are for and using them is the mark of someone who knows the road.
• Give cyclists three feet. Vehicle Code section 21760, the Three Feet for Safety Act, bars passing a bicycle at less than three feet between any part of your vehicle and any part of the bicycle or its rider. On Highway 1 that frequently means you cannot pass until there is a straight, and waiting is the correct answer.

Parking at the trailheads and the beaches

Roadside parking near Muir Woods, Stinson and the Point Reyes trailheads fills early and spills onto shoulders that are barely shoulders. Parking half on the pavement of a road with this little width creates a hazard for everyone coming around the corner, and it puts your car in the path of a mirror or a side panel.

Damage to a parked car by an unknown driver is its own frustrating category. Which coverage responds depends on your policy and on whether you carry uninsured motorist property damage, and there is genuine variation between carriers on how an unwitnessed hit-and-run is handled. Ask yours before you need the answer.

Fog and the afternoon light

The marine layer comes over the Marin headlands regularly and can reduce visibility to almost nothing on a road where visibility was already the constraint. Vehicle Code section 24400(b) requires lighted headlamps in inclement weather, defined to include conditions preventing a driver from clearly discerning a person or another vehicle at a thousand feet. Low beams, not high. And in the late afternoon, westbound sections put the sun directly in your eyes on a road with no margin for a blind moment.

Deer, and everything else that lives out here

The open country either side of the road holds deer, and dawn and dusk are when they move. That is worth its own habit: scan the verges rather than only the pavement, and if you see one, expect a second.

Driving this coast often? Worth ten minutes to check that your coverage matches the road.