On April 12, the outside lane of Mesa Verde Drive East disappeared for three hours. Cars still had a lane to use. But between Baker Street, right where Early College High School sits, and Harbor Boulevard, the city handed that outer strip of asphalt to anyone on a bike, a scooter, a pair of feet, or a golf cart. The event had a name, Cruise the Loop, and a schedule: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., with activity hubs bookending a stretch of road that runs nearly a mile to Mesa Verde Plaza.
If you drove past that morning and wondered why traffic looked strange, or if you were one of the families who biked the loop with your kids, you already know the surface story. What's less obvious is why the city bothered, and what happens next.
This wasn't really about one Sunday
City staff didn't describe Cruise the Loop as a party with a civic sponsor. They described it as a live study. The event was run in partnership with the Orange County Transportation Authority, which is in the middle of a planning-level look at what it calls overbuilt roadways, streets with more car lanes than the traffic on them actually needs. Mesa Verde Drive East was chosen as a place to test a quasi-separated bikeway, a buffer between the existing bike lane and moving cars, and then watch what residents did with it and what they said about it afterward.
That framing matters because Costa Mesa has run this play before. City staff pointed to a similar demonstration on Merrimack Way near Orange Coast College more than five years ago. That one also started as a temporary lane closure meant to gather public input. It didn't stay temporary. The feedback from that event became part of the case the city used to pursue grant funding, and the changes eventually got built.
Nobody at the city has promised Mesa Verde Drive East will follow the same path. But the Merrimack Way precedent is the reason a three-hour street festival is worth more than a passing mention on a community calendar. If the pattern holds, the golf carts and bike rodeos in April were less about a fun Sunday and more about the city collecting the exact kind of reaction it needed before it goes looking for construction money.
The money is already moving nearby
Separately from Cruise the Loop, Costa Mesa was awarded more than $7.9 million in OCTA Complete Streets grants for three connected bike and pedestrian projects. One of them runs along Adams Avenue between Fairview and Harbor, construction is slated to begin next fiscal year, and city documentation names Mesa Verde Center directly as one of the destinations the project is meant to connect residents to, alongside Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa High and Middle Schools, the Santa Ana River Trail, and the Orange County Fairgrounds.
That's a useful detail for anyone trying to gauge whether Cruise the Loop was a one-off or part of something larger. The Adams Avenue funding is already secured. Construction has a timeline. None of that money depends on what happens to Mesa Verde Drive East specifically, but it tells you the appetite and the budget for this kind of infrastructure already exist in the immediate area. A future proposal for Drive East wouldn't be starting from zero.
What was waiting at the other end of the loop
For residents who walked or biked the route instead of driving it, the southern hub landed at Mesa Verde Plaza, the shopping center at Harbor and Adams that most people know for the Vons and the CVS on the corner. Fewer people think of it as a destination worth a mile-long ride, but the restaurant lineup there has quietly built into something more specific than a strip mall food court. Kenwood's Kitchen and Tap serves American comfort food out of a space with a community table and a small stage for local acoustic performers. Descanso brings a full-service sit-down version of a Mexican taco stand, built around the same taquero tradition you'd find at a street cart. Broken Yolk Cafe covers the breakfast and brunch end, and Mokkoji Shabu Shabu rounds it out with Japanese hot pot.
None of that is new. What's new is the idea that these businesses sit at the end of a route the city is actively trying to make easier to reach without a car. A mile that feels long behind a windshield starts to feel different once there's a protected lane the whole way and a reason to arrive hungry.
The momentum didn't stop in April
Costa Mesa Alliance for Better Streets, the local advocacy group known as CMABS, published its own recap of the event and made a point that's easy to miss if you only saw the festival part: distances start to feel smaller once a street feels safe enough to use outside a car. The group credited the city, OCTA, and the local businesses and volunteers who made the Sunday work, and said it hoped Cruise the Loop was the start of more small-scale experiments rather than a single event.
The weeks after backed that up. Elementary schools across the city kept up their annual Bike to School Day tradition, with Costa Mesa police escorting kids on their rides. A local group called Lillördag has been organizing casual group rides and posting them on Instagram. City Council Member Arlis Reynolds and Planning Commissioner David Martinez both kept posting bike-related content through the following month. None of this is proof that Mesa Verde Drive East gets a permanent redesign. It is proof that the conversation didn't end when the activity hubs got packed up.
What this means if you live here
If you already call Mesa Verde home, the practical takeaway isn't that your street is about to change tomorrow. It's that the city has a specific, tested process for how these changes happen here, and Mesa Verde Drive East is now inside that process. The Merrimack Way precedent shows what a demonstration event can turn into. The Adams Avenue grant shows that funding for exactly this kind of project already exists a few blocks away. And CMABS's own account, along with the events that followed in April and May, suggests the city and its advocates both want another round.
If you want a say in what your street looks like next, the two channels are the same two the city used to build the case last time: showing up when there's a public feedback opportunity, and following the organizations already tracking it, including CMABS's own updates. Whatever comes next for the loop between Early College High School and Mesa Verde Plaza will get decided in the space between now and whenever the next demonstration or funding proposal surfaces. Not something you'll read about after the fact if you weren't already paying attention.
Mesa Verde has always been a neighborhood defined as much by its layout as by its houses, the curving streets, the golf course, the trails that connect to Fairview Park. A street that works better for people outside a car is the kind of change that shapes daily life here long before it shows up in any listing description. If you're the type of neighbor who notices when a street gets a little easier to live on, bouHAUS is worth following for the same reason. We cover this market the way we'd want a neighbor to explain it to us, and when the conversation eventually turns to your own front door, we'd like to be the ones you call.
