There’s one measure on the ballot for Los Angeles voters that could completely revamp city streets and create thousands of miles of street improvements.
The Healthy Streets LA measure (Measure HLA) is not proposing anything new. It’s not meant to create any new initiatives or use any additional taxpayer money to increase street safety.
Instead, it’s meant to hold city officials accountable for promises they’ve already made.
The L.A. City Council approved a 20-year mobility plan in 2015 which laid out specific guidelines for street and transit improvements to be completed by 2035. The plan includes improvements like protected bike lanes, bus-only lanes, safer crosswalks, new street lighting and wider sidewalks.
But in the nine years since, the city has completed only 5% of the mobility plan.
In response, Angelenos have spent several years working to get this initiative on the ballot to force the city to actually complete the mobility plan.
Michael Schneider, the founder and CEO of Streets For All, created the measure with his organization and gathered over 100,000 signatures to get it on the ballot this year.
“There’s a vehicle-enhanced network, there’s a bike-enhanced network, there’s a transit-enhanced network for bus lanes, there are pedestrian-enhanced districts and there’s a neighborhood-enhanced network,” Schneider, a 2003 USC alumnus, said in a phone interview in late January.
“When you take all of that together — if it was actually implemented — our city would be so much safer [and] so much more multimodal. It would just be a different place to live.”
The measure calls for the construction of various enhancements each time the city repaves at least one-eighth of a mile of a street. It would also require the city to create a tracking webpage that allows residents to view the progress of the Mobility Plan and see where and when improvements are being made.
It also comes at a time when L.A. is seeing an increasing number of motor-vehicle deaths.
On January 24, the Los Angeles Police Department released the end-of-the-year report on crime statistics, which shows a significant increase in traffic fatalities, fatal hit-and-runs and fatal pedestrian and bicyclist collisions in 2023.
For the first time in nine years, L.A. saw more deaths from traffic crashes than homicides. There were 336 fatal traffic crashes and 327 homicides in 2023, LAPD officials announced.
From 2022 to 2023, felony hit-and-runs in L.A. increased 23% while DUI crashes increased 32%. Additionally, fatal crashes involving pedestrians increased by nearly 13% from 2022 to 2023.
“When I was collecting signatures, one of the biggest questions we would get from voters is: ‘I don’t understand. The city already adopted this plan. Why is this needed?’” Schneider said. “But they’re just not getting it done. That’s why this is needed.”
Lauretta Hill, USC’s new Chief of Public Safety, advised students to get off scooters or skateboards when crossing the street and remove headphones to stay alert and safe when walking near campus.
“Take at least one earbud out,” Hill said in an interview last Wednesday. “If you don’t want to take out both of them, I understand. But take at least one out so you can hear because safety is hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling — it’s all of those things. And if you’re taking one of those away, then you’re less safe.”
The measure has been endorsed by the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. Unified School District Board of Education and the L.A. County Democratic Party.
Additionally, Measure HLA has been endorsed by dozens and neighborhood organizations and nonprofits across the state, including the California Bicycle Coalition (CalBike).
Kendra Ramsey, CalBike’s executive director, said the most efficient way to address L.A.’s street safety crisis is to improve roads.
“One of the biggest reasons that there has been an increase in people biking and walking being seriously injured and killed by cars is that our transportation infrastructure is not set up in a way that facilitates safe and convenient movement for people outside of cars,” Ramsey said in a phone interview earlier this month. “One of the best ways to solve that is by improving the infrastructure.”
She said it’s a “no-brainer” to require the city to complete the mobility plan since it’s already been approved and the funding already exists, meaning the changes would be essentially free.
“When those repaving projects are happening, it’s really simple,” Ramsey said. “The money is already being spent, and so it should be spent to update the roads in order to better meet the needs of people walking, biking, taking transit as well as driving.”
Beyond this measure, Ramsey said it’s time for California to invest in new and improved methods of transportation to meet the state’s climate change goals.
“In the U.S., we invested heavily in the interstate highway system to facilitate the easy movement of cars throughout our communities and across the country,” Ramsey said. “We need a similar type of investment to make sure that in the next 100 years, we’re set up for people to get places by means other than a private car.”