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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
How many kids must die before L.A. makes streets safer?
Two weeks ago, fourth-grader Nadir Gavarrete was crossing the intersection at New Hampshire Avenue and 4th Street in Koreatown on an e-scooter alongside his 19-year-old brother, Carlos, when both were struck by an alleged drunk driver turning left through a stop sign. Nadir was pronounced dead at the scene, and Carlos was taken to a hospital in serious condition. Although we often refer to incidents like these as 'accidents,' the truth is they're entirely preventable. We live in a city where a pedestrian is injured every five hours and killed every two days. The status quo places L.A. among cities with the highest per capita pedestrian death rates in the U.S. (2.9 per 100,000), according to Los Angeles Police Department data. Koreatown is one of the densest parts of Los Angeles — at 44,000 people per square mile, it's more crowded than most New York City boroughs. Nearly every major street in Koreatown is on the city's 'high injury network' list — the 6% of streets that cause 70% of the traffic injuries and deaths. In other words, L.A. knows how dangerous Koreatown's streets can be. As a result, 14 years ago, in 2011, L.A. applied for a federal grant to improve safety along several city streets, specifically choosing to focus on the intersection of New Hampshire and 4th for one of its projects. The city won the grant money and kicked off community meetings to discuss installing a roundabout at the intersection, as well as adding enhanced crosswalks and other safety improvements to the immediate area. When I was appointed to the Los Angeles Bicycle Advisory Committee in 2019, eight years after those initial community meetings, we were given a presentation by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation that showed a rendering of a beautiful and significantly safer intersection at New Hampshire and 4th, full of crosswalks and traffic calming, and featuring a roundabout. Six years later, there is still no roundabout. The city has yet to even break ground despite holding years of community meetings. Meanwhile, now a 9-year-old boy is dead and his family is left shattered. There are numerous bureaucratic reasons why a single intersection improvement could take more than 14 years. I'm not interested in them. What city leaders need to understand is that when they fail to act with any sense of urgency — even when they've won funding to do so — the inaction has real-life consequences, this time in the form of a little boy's life. What will it take for Los Angeles to have a sense of urgency in actually making our streets safer? We currently spend more on legal settlements to those hurt and killed on our streets than we do on Vision Zero, the city's half-baked effort to reduce traffic deaths. Since Los Angeles declared itself a Vision Zero City in 2015, with the ultimate aim of having no one killed in car crashes on city streets by 2025, deaths and injuries have only gotten worse. In the last few years we've had at least three children hit and killed while walking to school. And yet the city's leaders — facing a budget crisis, much of it of their own making — perpetually underfund LADOT and street safety in general. If a rash of falling elevators killed someone in L.A. every two days and injured someone every five hours, we'd immediately stop using them as the city stepped in to investigate and solve the problem. Yet we seem to just accept the deadly status quo of traffic fatalities as the cost of doing business while walking L.A.'s streets. We don't have to live this way. There are cities that have actually achieved Vision Zero, such as Hoboken, N.J., which has now tallied eight consecutive years without a traffic-related death thanks to significant updates at curbs, crosswalks and intersections. New York City is also steadily making progress on its Vision Zero goals, leading to a per capita pedestrian death rate nearly one-third that of L.A. Los Angeles remains an outlier and will continue to be one unless we properly and urgently fund our Vision Zero efforts and remove the bureaucratic red tape that slows progress: There's no need for 10 community meetings and buy-in from an entire neighborhood to make smart, lifesaving improvements. Michael Schneider is the founder of Streets for All.
Los Angeles Times
09-08-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
It's no wonder Angelenos are painting crosswalks themselves
On July 22, a feel-good story made headlines in Los Angeles: A cadre of civic-minded volunteers had spent a month of Saturdays coming together to paint crosswalks near Stoner Park in the Sawtelle neighborhood. A concerned resident (and friend of mine), Jonathan Hale, modeled the effort on other DIY crosswalks after he witnessed a series of close calls between pedestrians and cars. Yet, within three days of the reports about the civic effort, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation sent a crew to remove the crosswalks. Why did LADOT act so quickly? It wasn't because the crosswalks were sloppy. Hale had studied the code, and even the local City Council member's representative said it 'looks beautiful.' In California, every stop-sign intersection also legally includes a crosswalk regardless of paint, so the volunteers were only making that visible. One stated concern is lawsuits filed under the Americans With Disabilities Act: L.A. officially requires all crosswalk installations to include curb ramp installations to minimize risk. This legal interpretation is neither universal nor strictly followed in practice. But as former official Diego de la Garza commented, LADOT believes in robust processes, always studying the potential for 'lighting, signals and speed limits' alongside crosswalks. He suggests that merely painting a crosswalk without a holistic approach creates an 'illusion of safety.' In other words, LADOT removed the crosswalks because the city cannot simply make one improvement; its mandate is to study a set of possible improvements whenever considering one. No one who pays attention to Los Angeles will be surprised by this. Scholars talk of measuring a local government by its 'state capacity': how well it manages finances, maintains order and delivers public goods. By these measures, Los Angeles has a legacy marred by ambitious goals gone unexecuted because of a flawed and bloated process. Consider three of former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti's ambitious goals: Build 28 public transit projects by the 2028 Olympics, eliminate all traffic fatalities by 2025 and end street homelessness by 2028. Today, only four of the 28 original transit projects are completed. Traffic deaths have gone up from 186 in 2015 to 337 in 2023. And of the $1.2 billion raised in 2016 to build 10,000 units of homeless housing, the city has completed 5,597 units. Since 2018, the number of unsheltered people in the city has increased by 17.8% to 26,972. These failures clearly demonstrate that our local government simply will not get things done quickly and effectively. Consider Vermont Transit Corridor, a bus rapid transit proposal that Metro's former leadership states could have been implemented by 2028 but is now unlikely to be. The delay came when the Metro board stopped the project as conceived to instead study building a rail line (without any funding source). This second-guessing was inspired by vague concerns about racial equity. Or consider sidewalks. A simple monthlong sidewalk repair is routinely delayed by a design and contracting process that takes almost two years, leading to wait times of up to 10 years. One can begin to understand why a couple of years ago in Brentwood, former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger resorted to filling potholes himself. The city's homeless housing projects funded by Proposition HHH took an average of three to six years to build, with one taking 18 years because of layers of approvals and a California Environmental Quality Act lawsuit. This is precisely why our vigilante crosswalk painters opted for DIY work: They wanted to see a crosswalk painted, not bogged down by red tape. Thankfully, just seven days after LADOT undid Hale's work, the city repainted the crosswalks. Facing public pressure, the city decided that absolute ADA liability avoidance need not be the priority. And it likely never should have been: Since 2020, L.A. has paid nearly $300 million in liability claims from broken infrastructure and only $1.4 million in ADA lawsuits. But without deeper reforms, we are unlikely to see the city painting more anytime soon: Only days after the crosswalks were removed, emails show that LADOT is refusing to consider street improvements. Why? Because of recent city budget cuts, the department 'no longer has adequate staffing' to consider conducting 'studies' for implementing 'traffic control devices' (i.e., a crosswalk). Rather than simplifying the process, L.A. is throwing up its hands and saying to residents, 'No more crosswalks!' In contrast, consider how Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro famously fixed a broken freeway in 12 days. Then-Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels got average Bureau of Motor Vehicles visit times down to nine minutes. Back in 1994, after the Northridge earthquake, local authorities had the Santa Monica Freeway back in service in less than three months. And recently, when public pressure was applied, even LADOT found the time to remove and repaint crosswalks in 10 days. Los Angeles should be working to streamline every process it can, increasing state capacity and making it easier to do good. But seeing this happen will require a fundamental political reorientation. Moderates must stop pretending the status quo works, and progressives should stop promising ambitious moonshots without first making existing services functional. But most importantly, it requires more citizens like my friends at Stoner Park, who are invested enough in their city to seek reform, ideally with their hands and their votes. Thomas Irwin is an economic development professional for a nonprofit in Los Angeles and a housing organizer with the Faith and Housing Coalition and Eastside Housing for All. He writes 'The Pontification' on Substack.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Contributor: Don't let the mayor's budget make our streets even worse
By law, the city of Los Angeles must balance its budget every year. But Mayor Karen Bass' current proposal to do so represents a dystopian nightmare for our streets, sidewalks and public transportation system. The city should correct this mistake as it evaluates the proposed budget in the coming weeks. Angelenos already live with streets deteriorating faster than we can fix them, sidewalks breaking faster than we can repair them and streetlights going dark faster than we can replace them. A recent audit exposed the city's utter failure to achieve Vision Zero, after promising 10 years ago to bring down traffic deaths. These things are happening under the existing fiscal year's budget, which already made draconian cuts across the city. With further cuts, expect even worse service for everyday essentials. The mayor's proposed budget would result in a one-third reduction in staff of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation in just two fiscal years, and about the same at the Bureau of Street Services. If the budget is adopted, the Bureau of Street Lighting estimates a broken streetlight would be fixed two years after being reported. Bass' proposal would add money to the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Fire Department, maintain the mayor's homelessness initiative Inside Safe (though it failed a recent audit ), and drastically cut investments in transportation, street services, parks, animal shelters, street lighting and even the zoo. A budget is a reflection of values. Does the mayor's reflect the values of Angelenos? Do we want to live in a city where we can't safely walk to the park because the sidewalks are too broken and the streetlights are out, and the park's hours have been reduced because of staffing cuts? The proposed cuts are also short-sighted, targeting programs that generate more revenue than they cost or initiatives that save the city money. For example, in its first full month, cameras mounted on the front of Metro buses wrote nearly 10,000 citations to drivers illegally parked in bus lanes. This didn't just speed up service for transit riders and make our streets safer — it also generated millions of dollars for the city. Two years ago, state law authorized the city to put into place speed cameras — and mandated that the revenue generated by the cameras go toward fixing the streets along the corridors. In typical Los Angeles fashion, a year and a half later, we still have not implemented the cameras (though we are inching toward doing so by year's end). That means we have not yet received any of the anticipated income or reaped the safety benefits of the program. Now, the mayor's budget proposes to save a few million dollars by eliminating 58% of the city's Department of Transportation parking citation adjudication staff — the staff that looks at evidence from the cameras and actually issues the tickets. That would put us in a situation in which we might not be able to introduce the speed cameras at all and we may have to discontinue the bus lane camera enforcement program. The result — in addition to making our roads less safe — would be a net reduction of millions of dollars per year to the city. This is penny-wise, pound-foolish. This proposed budget also increases the city's liability payout risk. For the current fiscal year, the city budgeted $87 million for settling lawsuits. But L.A. is on track to spend $320 million on settlements by the end of this fiscal year. Although claims against the Police Department make up the largest share, the second-most-expensive department is Public Works. Nearly $54 million of those settlements stem from lawsuits claiming people were hurt because of our dangerous streets and sidewalks. If we try to save money by cutting back street and sidewalk maintenance even more, it will lead to these liability claims going up even more, in addition to the human lives hurt. Keep in mind that Los Angeles is also about to be under a spotlight on the world stage. We are hosting eight matches of the World Cup next year and the Olympics in 2028. We shouldn't be hosting world-class events on streets full of potholes, broken sidewalks and dark streetlights. It's a terrible image for Los Angeles, and the coming fiscal year's budget is our last chance to make progress before the events begin. At a recent budget hearing, Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky — who chairs the Budget Committee — asked Deputy Mayor Matt Hale if there was a plan in the budget to get the resources needed to prepare for the Olympics. He responded: 'The investments we're making this year are headed in the direction of developing a plan.' These events are coming up fast. We don't have time to just be 'headed in the direction of developing a plan.' Instead of cutting services key to making Los Angeles livable and presentable, Bass should approach the unions, clearly show the city can't afford the raises she previously agreed to and renegotiate to save as many positions as possible. LAPD should put new rules in place so we don't spend $100 million in a year settling claims from officers' misconduct. And we should avoid cutting any programs that generate revenue for the city, such as parking enforcement and automated speed enforcement, or that save the city money, such as fixing infrastructure to reduce future liability payouts to people hurt by our broken streets and sidewalks. Los Angeles is one of the world's wealthiest cities, but our infrastructure is quickly looking more like that of a developing country. It's never a good idea — and always more expensive in the long run — to let your infrastructure deteriorate. It's an especially bad look when we're about to host two major global sporting events. We can, and must, do better. The City Council has a chance now to fix the mayor's budget proposal and reflect our values. Michael Schneider is the founder of Streets for All . If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Contributor: Don't let the mayor's budget make our streets even worse
By law, the city of Los Angeles must balance its budget every year. But Mayor Karen Bass' current proposal to do so represents a dystopian nightmare for our streets, sidewalks and public transportation system. The city should correct this mistake as it evaluates the proposed budget in the coming weeks. Angelenos already live with streets deteriorating faster than we can fix them, sidewalks breaking faster than we can repair them and streetlights going dark faster than we can replace them. A recent audit exposed the city's utter failure to achieve Vision Zero, after promising 10 years ago to bring down traffic deaths. These things are happening under the existing fiscal year's budget, which already made draconian cuts across the city. With further cuts, expect even worse service for everyday essentials. The mayor's proposed budget would result in a one-third reduction in staff of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation in just two fiscal years, and about the same at the Bureau of Street Services. If the budget is adopted, the Bureau of Street Lighting estimates a broken streetlight would be fixed two years after being reported. Bass' proposal would add money to the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Fire Department, maintain the mayor's homelessness initiative Inside Safe (though it failed a recent audit ), and drastically cut investments in transportation, street services, parks, animal shelters, street lighting and even the zoo. A budget is a reflection of values. Does the mayor's reflect the values of Angelenos? Do we want to live in a city where we can't safely walk to the park because the sidewalks are too broken and the streetlights are out, and the park's hours have been reduced because of staffing cuts? The proposed cuts are also short-sighted, targeting programs that generate more revenue than they cost or initiatives that save the city money. For example, in its first full month, cameras mounted on the front of Metro buses wrote nearly 10,000 citations to drivers illegally parked in bus lanes. This didn't just speed up service for transit riders and make our streets safer — it also generated millions of dollars for the city. Two years ago, state law authorized the city to put into place speed cameras — and mandated that the revenue generated by the cameras go toward fixing the streets along the corridors. In typical Los Angeles fashion, a year and a half later, we still have not implemented the cameras (though we are inching toward doing so by year's end). That means we have not yet received any of the anticipated income or reaped the safety benefits of the program. Now, the mayor's budget proposes to save a few million dollars by eliminating 58% of the city's Department of Transportation parking citation adjudication staff — the staff that looks at evidence from the cameras and actually issues the tickets. That would put us in a situation in which we might not be able to introduce the speed cameras at all and we may have to discontinue the bus lane camera enforcement program. The result — in addition to making our roads less safe — would be a net reduction of millions of dollars per year to the city. This is penny-wise, pound-foolish. This proposed budget also increases the city's liability payout risk. For the current fiscal year, the city budgeted $87 million for settling lawsuits. But L.A. is on track to spend $320 million on settlements by the end of this fiscal year. Although claims against the Police Department make up the largest share, the second-most-expensive department is Public Works. Nearly $54 million of those settlements stem from lawsuits claiming people were hurt because of our dangerous streets and sidewalks. If we try to save money by cutting back street and sidewalk maintenance even more, it will lead to these liability claims going up even more, in addition to the human lives hurt. Keep in mind that Los Angeles is also about to be under a spotlight on the world stage. We are hosting eight matches of the World Cup next year and the Olympics in 2028. We shouldn't be hosting world-class events on streets full of potholes, broken sidewalks and dark streetlights. It's a terrible image for Los Angeles, and the coming fiscal year's budget is our last chance to make progress before the events begin. At a recent budget hearing, Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky — who chairs the Budget Committee — asked Deputy Mayor Matt Hale if there was a plan in the budget to get the resources needed to prepare for the Olympics. He responded: 'The investments we're making this year are headed in the direction of developing a plan.' These events are coming up fast. We don't have time to just be 'headed in the direction of developing a plan.' Instead of cutting services key to making Los Angeles livable and presentable, Bass should approach the unions, clearly show the city can't afford the raises she previously agreed to and renegotiate to save as many positions as possible. LAPD should put new rules in place so we don't spend $100 million in a year settling claims from officers' misconduct. And we should avoid cutting any programs that generate revenue for the city, such as parking enforcement and automated speed enforcement, or that save the city money, such as fixing infrastructure to reduce future liability payouts to people hurt by our broken streets and sidewalks. Los Angeles is one of the world's wealthiest cities, but our infrastructure is quickly looking more like that of a developing country. It's never a good idea — and always more expensive in the long run — to let your infrastructure deteriorate. It's an especially bad look when we're about to host two major global sporting events. We can, and must, do better. The City Council has a chance now to fix the mayor's budget proposal and reflect our values. Michael Schneider is the founder of Streets for All .
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Newsom-backed San Francisco speed camera program fines certain drivers more than others
San Francisco is launching a new program backed by Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom that will issue speeding tickets based on income. The Speed Safety System Pilot Program was signed by Newsom in October 2023 and allows cities across California to use speeding cameras to fine drivers. Those considered lower-income are eligible for a steep discount if they receive a speeding ticket. Violations for speeding range from $50 to $500, but individuals with a household income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level are eligible for a 50% discount, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Indigent persons, or individuals who are homeless, are eligible for an 80% discount on the speeding ticket. San Francisco officials launched the program on March 20 with a total of 33 speeding cameras around the city, but only around half of them are operational. Veteran California Police Officer Killed In Shootout During Transnational Drug Ring Takedown For the first 60 days of the pilot program, the cameras will only be used to send warnings to speeding drivers, and will issue fines after. Violations start when an individual drives their car more than 11 mph over the speed limit. Read On The Fox News App Speed cameras were placed in areas that are "high injury," where 12% of streets within San Francisco account for 68% of severe injuries or fatalities that are traffic-related. A fact sheet for the pilot program states that speeding cameras were placed across the city "in an equitable fashion." California Under Investigation By Trump Admin For Allegedly Hiding 'Gender Identity' Of Kids "The program is intended to benefit all communities and not single out any particular neighborhood," the fact sheet states. San Francisco isn't the only city planning to roll out the pilot program. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation will roll out a similar program in 2026 that targets speeding drivers, but has an option for low-income individuals to perform community service instead of paying fines. Fox News Digital reached out to Newsom's office and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency for article source: Newsom-backed San Francisco speed camera program fines certain drivers more than others
