L.A. Continues Delaying Infrastructure That Could Save Lives

People walking in Los Angeles. (Source: Flickr.)

Not so long ago, biking and buses were major forms of transportation before we tumbled into car-centric living. Main streets were shared between walkers, cyclists, and motor vehicles. After World War II, as it became more common for households to own cars, engineers were asked to change our modern infrastructure to accommodate this new way of living. As the roads and streets adapted to cars, other forms of transportation were left behind as old-fashioned models that didn’t need as much attending to.

In most American cities, those that continued to walk or bike were left to fend for themselves amongst the fast-driving cars. The results of this have been deadly. Every year, thousands of people die in car-related crashes. In 2021, 7,485 people walking were struck and killed. In Los Angeles, CA, more than two people were killed while walking or biking, every single week. 

In 2015, Los Angeles adopted a mobility plan that would change their modern infrastructure with 1,500 miles of safety improvements for people walking, bus lanes, and bike lanes. It came with the Vision Zero initiative to end city traffic deaths within 10 years, by 2025 (many have speculated that this plan has failed). The mobility plan was not only predicted to save lives, it could also change lifestyles by giving people other transportation options in carrying out their daily errands, work, or social activities. Despite having passed this plan for safer streets, the city of Los Angeles has implemented less than 3% within the past seven years. In the meantime, traffic deaths have only been increasing (by about 20%) as departments failed to communicate and implement a strategy. 

As reported in this LAist article, earlier this year, a coalition known as Health Streets LA raised over $1 million and gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions to try and convince the city to follow its own adopted Mobility Plan 2035. Los Angeles’ elected leaders declined to adopt the community-drafted ordinance and implement the plan immediately. They instead decided to let L.A. voters make the decision by placing it on the ballot in 2024. 

The L.A. Times writes that “Streets for All founder and Chief Executive Michael Schneider expressed disappointment in Wednesday’s vote. He and his allies had been pushing the council to adopt the ballot initiative as an ordinance outright, arguing that the danger faced by Angelenos on city streets is too great to allow additional delays.” 

Despite the delay, several council members voiced they were committed to refining the ordinance and adopting a new version of the mobility plan before the official vote. The city also promised to work with community members on an alternative plan that would achieve many of the same goals without a ballot measure. According to the L.A. Times, “The alternative plan would go beyond the ballot measure language and ensure that low-income communities, which typically experience a greater share of traffic deaths and injuries, are a priority when streets are redesigned, council members said.”

Ultimately, this will be the fourth amendment to the original plan. Healthy Streets LA notes on their website that throughout the years the city has been ignoring its own plan “and even worse, sometimes working against it.” 

This seems incredibly disrespectful to the city’s residents. Streets that are designed with protected bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and street trees encourage drivers to drive slower; it increases safety for everyone on the road whether you’re in a car or not. If we take that number from the beginning of the article and add driver deaths to it, in L.A. someone was killed in a crash every 30 hours on average. Everyone who uses streets would benefit from L.A.’s mobility plan, if only the city would actually implement it. 

People are hurt and killed in car-related crashes every day in L.A., such as in this 2017 crash in which nine people were injured by a single vehicle. (Source: Flickr.)

If this initiative is approved by voters in 2024, the city will be required to implement the walkability and alternative transportation upgrades any time at least one-eighth of a mile of the city's busiest boulevards receive any major road work. Additionally, residents will have the right to sue the city if it fails to follow through with its plan once again. The measure would no longer be able to be repealed by the council and the process of making safer streets for all could move along at a faster speed. 

Through all the muddle of council meetings, debates, and delays to implement a safe streets plan, many advocates have expressed frustration. Why is it so hard to take already planned action and make it physical, especially when there is data and evidence that the initiative can literally save lives? The L.A. Times wrote that “Schneider said he’s skeptical of any council-led effort. The alternative plan on its own “does not give us enough protection against a future City Council watering it down or reversing it, and that would not be acceptable to us.” 

This situation of seemingly continuous delays to implement a plan for safer streets reminds me of an article Chuck Marohn wrote a while back, “Here’s Why We Respond in Force to One Amtrak Crash While Ignoring Thousands of Daily Car Crashes.” In that article he states, “Part of why this problem has been so difficult to address is that it requires a messy, complex, bottom-up, and deeply personal response. Those are hard to do, especially if your underlying operating system—your fundamental DNA—is top down.”

With the continuous revisions and delays riddled within the mobility plan politics, perhaps it’s worth considering that the city thinks they must create this model as perfectly and seamlessly as possible—so it can all be built at once, just like modern suburbs are built. So far this hasn’t been productive; LAist writes that, with 3% of the plan completed in seven years, if we stay at this rate “less than 10% of the plan would be done by its 2035 target (follow that rate to 100% and you’d be very much dead by the time L.A. completed the plan).”

There is no excuse for a city to risk hundreds of lives every year as its residents wait even longer for an “improved” plan. On the surface level, it is noteworthy and something to celebrate that a large city such as L.A. is expressing its willingness to make safety changes by at least entertaining the idea. But the praise means nothing if the city never follows through with its own plan.

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