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...In his 35 years living here, longtime Big Sur resident Marcus Foster said he’s hard-pressed to remember a time that it’s been this busy. “It’s to the point where people don’t want to leave their house on the weekends,” he said of the locals’ experience here. “Businesses are actually losing employees because they’re fed up with their commutes. More than half the employees who work here commute, sometimes from long distances: Seaside, Monterey, Salinas. I have one friend who works in Ventana. It takes him over two hours to get to work.”

But it’s more than just commuter and visitor traffic, Foster said. It’s car and van campers. It’s trash everywhere. It’s people stopping in the middle of the highway — especially the viral, must-get-a-selfie spots like Bixby Bridge.

It’s a trio of ongoing smaller-scale roadwork and bridge fortification projects from Caltrans. It’s folks illegally camping, who are sparking up illegal campfires. It’s lines of cars alongside the highway jutting into the lands near popular pullout spots and restaurants. It’s pedestrian traffic. Everything, combined with a lack of resources to help mitigate it all, has turned the summer of 2026 in Big Sur into something Foster, along with many residents here, can’t quite fathom.
“It’s a big story, everyone’s talking about it,” said Foster, who is co-founder and chairman of Keep Big Sur Wild, a conservation nonprofit tasked with helping to adhere to the Big Sur Land Use Plan. The plan is the seminal document from the 1980s that has helped guide the massive and massively popular coastal region’s recreation and development policies for more than 40 years.

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