Thank you for including plans for bike, pedestrian, and transit access as part of the draft Mobility Plan. What concerns me, and my reason for writing, is the emphasis given to the Vehicle Enhanced Network.
What seems missing from the plan is an acknowledgment or awareness that Los Angeles has already poured billions of dollars over decades to enhance its vehicle network, tearing up thousands of miles of railway, slicing through and decimating whole neighborhoods with freeways, shrinking sidewalks and cutting back corners more and more to give drivers wider lanes and faster speeds, removing crosswalks from thousands of intersections along major thoroughfares, and creating a signal sync program that is ostensibly the envy of the nation.
And yet, here we are in 2014, and we are proposing a "Vehicle Enhanced Network"?? Please forgive my incredulity, but we've done nearly everything we can to serve our cars already, and we pay dearly for that, with thousands of pedestrians injured or killed every year (we were just declared the most unsafe or second-most-unsafe city for pedestrians in the nation, and the number of people killed in car crashes in LA equals the number killed by guns), a bike network that is pathetic compared to any of our peer cities, and a transit network that largely suffers from near-total lack of priority over single-occupant vehicles that take up 20+ times the roadspace to carry the same number of passengers that our buses do.
I live within 100 feet of a major intersection that has been enhanced to serve cars over the past few decades, with stripes to direct cars around turns, sidewalks cut back to give cars ease of tuning and wide lanes, and even an entirely unnecessary right-turn cut-out that serves perhaps 5-10 cars/day and removes a giant section of sidewalk for the thousands of people who walk it every day. The end result of all these "enhancements" is that they just encourage drivers to zip around corners more quickly, endangering pedestrians and other drivers. In the past year, I've witnessed several accidents and myself been nearly hit by cars on several occasions. This intersection is traveled daily by thousands of people on foot and many on bike, including students at a nearby middle school and visitors to local businesses all within the immediate vicinity.
Have we not learned our lesson? There's ample evidence now available that widening streets only does two things: (a) encourages drivers to go even faster (if we can) and (b) increases accidents. The latter might seem counter-intuitive since widening roadways and improving sightlines should giving drivers better vision and more space, but in fact it simply encourages us to take more risks and move more quickly, which significantly hampers our ability to see all things happening in front of us and reduces our ability to react quickly to issues on the road ahead. Additionally, for pedestrians, the likelihood of being killed by a car traveling 35 MPH is 3-4 times greater than if that car were traveling 20 MPH.
Rather than talking about trying to squeeze even more highway-like streets out of limited urban space, we should move in precisely the OPPOSITE direction, trying to figure out how to make our streets more pleasant for EVERYONE. And that means all streets. Remarkably, as shown in example after example around the world, if we slow down our streets and make them more accessible for everyone, it calms down drivers, makes streets more livable (and successful for local businesses), and doesn't negatively impact traffic. Traffic only gets created when we think that our goal is to move as many cars as quickly as possible through a given space to some unknown destination. What this neglects to understand is that the destination is far more important than the journey. We must think instead about seeing the journey as the destination, rather than the journey merely a means to an end.
This may sound radical in concept, but it's been shown to work. Even on a massive scale, where South Korea's capital city of Seoul has recently begun completely removing major highway thoroughfares and daylighting creeks and creating pedestrian districts, traffic has actually decreased while air quality has dramatically improved and hundreds of thousands of people now walk and bike areas that they used to avoid altogether or try to cram themselves through by car. Yes, there's a big difference between Seoul and LA when it comes to transportation alternatives, but I'm not suggesting anything here as radical as their program; and my point is that the results have stunned even the most enthusiastic proponents of the original plan prior to their implementation, let alone the skeptics.
We can do this, LA. But it requires more forward thinking than this draft Mobility Plan represents. It's imperative for us that we stop perpetuating the same bad policies that got us into this mess in the first place.
Thanks again for the opportunity to provide comment on this document. I appreciate the work that you are doing and look forward to seeing what comes next.
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