The Highway That Never Was: What Got Cleared Behind Montara's Homes This Summer

If you live near Cedar Street or Linda Vista this past June, you heard it before you understood it. Wood chippers running through the weekday mornings. Unmarked trucks parked along the shoulder. Crews working a strip of brush that has sat untouched behind those houses for longer than most residents have lived there. No signs went up explaining any of it, so the questions went where Montara questions usually go: Nextdoor threads asking what was happening, and why now, after years of that same stretch growing wilder every summer.

The short answer is that Caltrans spent May through mid-July clearing vegetation along a corridor it has owned since the 1970s, a parcel most neighbors know only as an overgrown gap between their yards and the highway. The longer answer, and the more interesting one, is that this land was never supposed to sit empty for fifty years. It was bought to build a highway that Montara effectively talked the state out of finishing, and the brush that just got cleared is the last visible trace of that unfinished plan.

A Parcel With a Fifty-Year Paper Trail

The corridor running through Montara and Moss Beach has a name most residents never hear used in full: the Devil's Slide Bypass, sometimes called the Martini Creek Bypass. Caltrans acquired the land in the 1970s as a fallback plan for the notoriously unstable stretch of Highway 1 at Devil's Slide, which had a long history of closures from rockslides and slippage. The idea was to route traffic inland, over Montara Mountain, connecting to a bypass that would end near Sunshine Valley Road, according to reporting from Coastside News.

That inland route was never built. After decades of debate, a 1996 countywide vote and years of engineering back and forth, Caltrans built twin tunnels straight through the base of the mountain instead. The Tom Lantos Tunnels opened to traffic in March 2013, running roughly 4,149 feet northbound and 4,008 feet southbound, making them the second and third longest road tunnels in California, according to historical documentation on Wikipedia. The tunnels solved the rockslide problem. They also left the old bypass parcel with no purpose at all. Caltrans kept the land, but nobody had a reason to manage it, and the corridor behind Montara's homes grew thicker every year while the state's attention stayed elsewhere.

Why an Overgrown Strip Became Everyone's Business

Unmanaged brush is not a neutral fact once a state agency owns the ground it grows on. In 2025, California updated its Fire Hazard Severity Zone maps to reflect current wildfire risk more accurately, and the Devil's Slide Bypass corridor did not come out looking safe. CalFire's updated map placed roughly 90 percent of the Caltrans right of way in the High Risk category, a designation that turned a decades-old maintenance gap into an active neighborhood concern.

That is the backdrop against which a resident group called Red Alert Montara Moss Beach, known locally as RAMMB, formed in February 2025 under the leadership of Larry De Young. RAMMB's argument was straightforward: land that sits unmanaged for half a century does not stay harmless forever, and the brush along this corridor put close to 2,400 homes in Montara and Moss Beach within range of a fire that could start on state property nobody was tending. The group pushed the Montara Water and Sanitary District and the Coastside Fire Protection District to press Caltrans directly, and by March 2025 they had secured a meeting between Caltrans District 4 and CAL FIRE to discuss the parcel's condition.

The Timeline, Street by Street

What followed was not a single announcement but a slow escalation, documented in detail by Coastside Buzz, the local outlet that tracked nearly every step:

Seen end to end, it took about seventeen months from RAMMB's founding to the full crews residents watched this summer. That is not the pace of a routine mowing contract. It is the pace of a resident campaign that kept pressure on a state agency long enough to move a project most people assumed would never happen.

What the Crews Actually Did

For anyone who spent June wondering exactly what was being cut and why, the scope was specific. Crews worked weekdays between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m., using wood chippers and excavators to remove trees, bark, limbs and debris. The goal, per CAL FIRE's recommendations, was defensible space between private property lines and the state right of way, carried out in coordination with a certified arborist and paired with ongoing weed abatement rather than a one-time cut.

A few practical notes for residents who noticed the work but missed the explanation at the time:

• All work happened on weekdays, with no weekend crews or overnight noise.
• The project moved street by street rather than clearing the whole corridor at once, which is why some blocks saw crews in June and others not until early July.
• Property owners are still expected to maintain their own defensible space on the private side of the line. The state's work addressed its own land, not anyone's fence line or backyard.

The Question Caltrans Still Hasn't Answered

Clearing brush solves this year's fire risk. It does not solve what happens to the land next, and that question is already moving through a separate track. The Montara Water and Sanitary District has been asking San Mateo County to create a Specific Plan for the corridor, a formal planning step that would need certification from the California Coastal Commission before Caltrans could transfer or dispose of the parcel at all. District 3 Supervisor Ray Mueller has been involved in pushing that process forward, according to coverage from Coastside Buzz, with MWSD's stated goal being to take ownership and protect the corridor as open space tied to the district's watershed.

That process has no fixed timeline yet. What it means for residents is that the wood chippers this summer were not the end of this story. They were the most visible part of a longer negotiation over whether fifty-year-old highway land finally becomes something the community controls, or stays a Caltrans holding that gets cleared again in another decade if nobody keeps asking.

Where to Follow What Happens Next

RAMMB continues to post updates at rammb.org, and the Midcoast Community Council, the advisory body for unincorporated Montara, meets on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month, with agendas covering the corridor's status alongside other neighborhood business.

If this is the kind of place where residents will spend a year and a half getting a state agency to clear brush behind their own houses, and then keep pushing for a say in what the land becomes afterward, that tells you something about how Montara actually works day to day. Whether you're weighing a move to the Coastside or you've called it home for decades, The Serdy Team spends enough time in these neighborhoods to talk through what stories like this one actually mean for the people living here. If you'd like to talk local market conditions or just want a straight answer about a corner of the Coastside you're curious about, request a complimentary home valuation and we'll pick up the conversation from there.