Five months ago, the Los Angeles City Council voted to spend $27 million on Vision Zero—an ambitious plan to eliminate all deaths caused by car crashes in Los Angeles. Councilmember Mike Bonin proclaimed that the vote showed “Los Angeles is going to step up to make our streets safer and our communities better places to live, work and enjoy.”
One of the cornerstones of Vision Zero, launched in 2015 by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, was to put some of the city’s most dangerous streets on so-called road diets, removing some lanes for cars in order to slow down the flow of traffic. The city got to work right away. In May, it shaved the number of lanes on a section of Vista Del Mar in Playa del Rey—where five people have died and 210 people have been injured from 2003 to 2016—from two to one in each direction.
That roiled drivers who had to contend with a snarl of traffic along the well-trodden commute path between West LA and the South Bay. They filed lawsuits. They threatened to recall Bonin.
In the wake of the backlash, the councilmember and mayor announced last week that the city’s transportation department would “immediately begin restoring lanes” to various streets in Playa del Rey.
Now safe streets activists across Los Angeles are questioning whether city leaders are waffling on their commitment to Vision Zero—and to ending traffic deaths on LA’s streets.
“I worry that this will be the start of a campaign to pressure elected officials to back-track on mobility plans,” says Peter Flax, a Manhattan Beach-based writer who used to commute by bike to Fairfax. “That’s the part that haunts me the most—it emboldens people to go after projects they don’t like instead of accepting the change.”
It’s not just the Westside where elected officials are wavering.
In July, Councilmember Gil Cedillo, whose district sprawls over central and northeast LA neighborhoods, such as Westlake and Highland Park, introduced a motion that, if passed, would halt any road diets or other road modifications in his district until he personally approves them.
In Mid-City, residents who support road diets are waiting on Councilmember David Ryu to sign off on a road diet for Sixth Street between La Brea and Fairfax.
Asked whether the transportation department was rethinking its strategy given the pushback, spokesperson Patricia Restrepo said “at this time, we have no comment.”
Some shouting & arguing at #MarVista comm council meeting, where a vote on #RoadDiet was put off. @CBSLA @KNX1070 pic.twitter.com/xa7RcsjRLO
— Jon Baird (@KNXBaird) September 13, 2017
Transportation officials want to use roads diets to force drivers to slow down. A person struck by a car traveling 40 mph faces an 80 percent of chance of death, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The likelihood of death drops to about 40 percent if the car is traveling 30 mph and to 5 percent for a car traveling 20 mph. Last year, 260 people were killed in traffic accidents in Los Angeles. About half were pedestrians, according to the Los Angeles Times.
But slowing down the speed of cars means that travel times can increase. It’s a lightning rod for resident outrage.
This is what happened in Playa del Rey, where, around the beginning of summer, LADOT re-striped several roads throughout the neighborhood in an attempt to make them safer. The changes came just a month after Los Angeles paid a $9.5-million settlement to the parents of a 16-year-old girl who was struck and killed by a taxi driver while crossing an “‘unmarked crosswalk’ amid ‘zero lighting’ at Vista Del Mar and Ipswich St. in virtual darkness.”
But with fewer lanes, traffic grew clogged on the road diet on Vista Del Mar in Playa del Rey, launching a tidal wave of anger that makes the one-time outcry over Silver Lake’s Rowena Avenue road diet look like a ripple.
Angry Playa residents filed multiple lawsuits against the road diets, waged a nasty Twitter campaign, and launched an effort to recall Bonin over the road changes. (The recall effort was also prompted by a road diet on Venice Boulevard in Mar Vista, which according to Bonin’s office, reduced traffic collisions by 22 percent, injuries by 10 percent, and speeding is down 15 percent.)
The councilmember’s announcement last week signaled to the road diet’s supporters that motorists had won.
Karla Mendelson, one of those who sued Los Angeles over the Playa del Rey road diets, told KCRW her husband’s daily commute time from Manhattan Beach to Santa Monica increased by about an hour. “You can’t just unilaterally start stripping away car lanes from roads without providing people a viable alternative transit solution,” Mendelson said.
But, from the city’s perspective, road diets aren’t necessarily about encouraging people to take alternative forms of transportation.
“The obstacle is that we think of ourselves as drivers and of travel times as the only things that really matter,” says Alison Kendall, a Santa Monica-based architect and a board member for Sustainable Streets, a LA based non-profit committed to promoting complete streets and active transportation. “It’s very important for people to not develop these sweeping condemnations of very useful tools that are very successful.”
This is the fundamental catch-22 for local policymakers; hundreds of people die in traffic collisions citywide each year, but attempting to address the crisis has unleashed a torrent of opposition.
“The saddest casualty here is that one of the early efforts of the Vision Zero campaign to address serious safety hazards for beach users, pedestrians, and cyclists has been thrown out without enough study of viable alternatives which might have better reconciled all the competing interests,” Kendall says.
Speaking to KPCC on Thursday, Bonin said policymakers needs to do a better job of emphasizing to residents the reasons behind infrastructure changes like road diets.
“I don't think we as city officials have done a good enough job explaining to people the scope of the public health crisis that we have with traffic collisions,” said Bonin. “Most folks don’t know that they are the leading cause of death for kids under [the age of] 14. Most folks don’t know that we had, earlier this year, more deaths from traffic collisions than gang homicides.“
How the city will respond in the future remains to be seen.
Garcetti and Bonin’s announcement last Wednesday was steeped with language about safe streets, and noted that there would still be several other infrastructure improvements, but the fact that the high speed travel lanes will be restored throughout the neighborhood is discouraging for those have worked for years in the interest of safe streets.
Scott Epstein, chair of the Mid City West Community Council, says the council spent the greater part of the last five years building a coalition of stakeholders along Sixth Street to support the road diet. The community council voted unanimously in favor of it in September 2016.
He says he’s disappointed that city leaders have failed to act, despite several deaths along the corridor.
“There’s really no doubt about the science,” says Epstein. “It’s about the politics.”
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