a day ago
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.
