On May 14 last year, a Mutual 11 resident tried to make a U-turn in a vehicle he believed was a golf cart. According to Seal Beach Traffic Investigator James Dowdell, he mixed up the gas and brake pedals and hit a parked Toyota RAV4 hard enough to total his own vehicle. He was taken to Los Alamitos Medical Center. His family had taken away his driver's license and his car. What he bought instead, thinking it would keep him mobile without a license, was a low-speed vehicle: heavier, faster, and legally a motor vehicle that requires registration, insurance, and a license he no longer had.
That case is why Golden Rain Foundation Security and the Seal Beach Police Department have held two town halls in the past year walking residents through the difference between a golf cart and an LSV. It's also the quiet backdrop to a much smaller-sounding announcement in this month's Leisure World Weekly: three new speed cushions are going in on Northwood Road and St. Andrews Drive, starting Thursday, August 27, with work expected to wrap by September 11.
The cushions themselves are simple. The reason the community keeps installing more of them is not.
What Changes This Week
Crews begin work August 27 at two locations:
- Northwood Road gets one two-lane speed cushion covering both the northbound and southbound lanes, positioned near Clubhouse 3 and First Christian Church.
- St. Andrews Drive gets two separate cushions, one for each direction, near Mutual 1.
Leisure World Weekly is asking drivers and pedestrians to follow posted detour signage near both sites while the work is underway. If your regular route to Clubhouse 3 or your daily walk crosses St. Andrews near Mutual 1, expect some temporary rerouting through mid-September.
Unlike a standard speed bump, a speed cushion is built with gaps, or wheel cutouts, wide enough for a fire engine's axle to pass through without a bump but narrow enough to still slow a passenger car or golf cart. That distinction matters here because Leisure World's streets carry an unusual mix of vehicles for their width: sedans, low-speed vehicles, actual golf carts, mobility scooters, and pedestrians, often all sharing the same lane at the same time.
The Radar Signs Already Told GRF Who Was Speeding
This isn't the community's first attempt to slow drivers down, and the data from the last attempt is worth sitting with.
In November 2023, GRF installed radar speed signs on North Del Monte Drive, North St. Andrews Drive, and South St. Andrews Drive. These are the bright yellow boards that display an approaching car's speed and flash when it crosses 25 mph, Leisure World's community-wide limit. They also log every reading for later review.
Since going live, those three signs alone have recorded 52,737 vehicles traveling above the 25 mph limit. Of those, 18 percent, or 9,975 drivers, were clocked at 31 mph or faster on residential streets shared with pedestrians, scooters, and golf carts. That's not a rounding error. That's roughly one in five recorded speeders going six or more miles over the limit on streets where the posted maximum already assumes people are walking, biking, or driving carts alongside cars.
There's a dollar figure attached to this too. In a January 2024 editorial, GRF Director Maureen Habel wrote that the Foundation's insurance premiums had climbed from $3.29 million to $5.49 million in a single year, driven in part by rising liability and property damage claims tied to motor vehicle accidents. That $2.2 million increase feeds into the shared GRF budget that the community's 16 Mutual Corporations collectively fund. Speed cushions are cheaper than another premium increase, and GRF's board has been treating them that way for a while.
Golf Cart or Motor Vehicle? The Rules Aren't Optional
The harder problem, the one no speed cushion fixes, is that a lot of residents are driving vehicles they don't fully understand the legal status of.
California law draws a sharp line between the two:
| Golf Cart (CVC 345) | Low-Speed Vehicle |
|---|
Max occupants | 2, including driver | Varies by model |
Max weight | 1,300 lbs | Often heavier |
Max speed | 15 mph | Higher, not capped at 15 mph |
License required | No, GRF decal only | Yes, California driver's license |
Registration/insurance | Not required in LW | Required by DMV |
Allowed on public roads (Seal Beach Blvd, Westminster Blvd) | No | Yes, if registered and insured |
At an October 2025 town hall, Security Director Victor Rocha and SBPD Captain Mike Ezroj walked residents through the rules for actual golf carts: they can park on Trust streets with a valid GRF decal under the standard 72-hour parking rule, they're never allowed on sidewalks except to cross into a resident's own parking pad, and they must always yield to pedestrians. For anyone whose cart doesn't meet code, Ezroj's advice that day was blunt: "Sell it and buy an actual golf cart."
A second town hall followed on February 11, 2026, this one aimed squarely at LSV registration. Rocha told the room that a significant number of residents may own an LSV without realizing it, since dealers often sell them as golf carts, and that LSVs need seat belts, headlights, turn signals, and a VIN the DMV can verify before they can be registered. Ezroj's message that day was less about punishment and more about compliance: "We're not going to come in here and write 1,000 tickets."
Seal Beach police have said their goal is to reduce unlicensed driving in the community, not flood it with citations. But the confusion has real stakes when a vehicle that looks like a golf cart is legally a motor vehicle requiring the same license discipline as a sedan.
The Pattern Has Been Building for Three Years
Northwood and St. Andrews aren't the first streets to get this treatment, and they won't be the last. Back in February 2023, at a security town hall that drew more than 400 residents to Clubhouse 4, GRF laid out plans for speed cushions on Del Monte Drive, El Dorado Drive, Golden Rain Road, St. Andrews Drive, and Thunderbird Drive. Security was investigating 10 to 12 traffic accidents a month at the time, with 40 percent classified as hit and runs. A resident had been fatally injured in a hit and run that January.
The rollout has continued since. Cushions went in on northbound Del Monte Drive near Sunningdale Road in late 2023. Rocha has since compiled five years of collision data, from 2021 through 2025, discussing the trends on the Leisure World Direct podcast. And in early 2025, the City of Seal Beach separately flagged the intersection of Golden Rain Road and St. Andrews Drive as one of the city's highest-accident locations and began a safety overhaul there, funded through the federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program.
None of this is unique to speeding. In September 2025, SBPD noted a rise in golf cart traffic on Westminster Boulevard after the nearby 76 gas station closed, with carts crossing onto a busy public thoroughfare, mostly not street legal, to reach a Chevron station and Sunny Side Cafe. The pattern keeps repeating in different forms: infrastructure built for one kind of resident is being used by a community whose transportation needs have quietly outgrown it.
What the Cushions Can't Fix
Rocha said something at that October 2025 town hall that's easy to skip past: "There are people here who no longer have the ability to drive, whether it's a car, motorcycle or golf cart." That's the part rubber and paint can't touch. A speed cushion slows every vehicle that crosses it by roughly the same amount, whether the driver behind the wheel is fully capable or, as in the May 2025 case, driving something they don't understand without a license to be driving anything at all.
The two new cushions on Northwood and St. Andrews will do what cushions do: shave a few miles per hour off traffic near Clubhouse 3 and Mutual 1 through mid-September. The radar signs will keep logging who ignores them. The harder conversation, the one about who should still be driving in a community built for people who are aging in place, will keep happening in clubhouse town halls long after the construction crews pack up.
If you're weighing a move within Leisure World, or helping a parent think through what comes next here, the traffic patterns and Mutual-by-Mutual differences are worth understanding well before escrow. Gasper Monteer Realty Group has spent years inside these gates and can walk you through what daily life actually looks like on any given street, cushions and all. Request your complimentary Leisure World home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
