Local officials, he said, need to find an approach to traffic safety that doesn’t repeat the harm of past efforts. But we have a public health traffic violence crisis.” “I understand that we’ve got a housing crisis, I don’t disagree that we’re prioritizing that. “As a city, we get an F grade for our traffic, for the amount of traffic violations and our ability to curb serious fatalities and injuries,” said Damian Kevitt, executive director of Streets Are For Everyone. The traffic carnage outpaced national trends.Įven among the most ardent transportation advocates, reducing those numbers in a city as car-dependent as Los Angeles seems like an impossibly tall task. An additional 20 people died in collisions involving bicyclists and motorists, an 11% rise. This is a 19% rise compared with 2021, LAPD data show. The city’s streets remain particularly deadly for pedestrians and bicyclists, with 159 people killed in collisions involving pedestrians and motorists last year. The mother was killed and the girl was critically injured.Īccording to Los Angeles Police Department data, 312 people were killed in traffic collisions in 2022, a 5% increase over the previous year and a 29% increase over 2020. Headlines describing road violence involving pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists have piled up in recent months, including one case last month in which police say a possibly impaired driver barreled into a mother and her 6-year-old daughter as they walked to school in Mid-Wilshire. The city could, for example, use unarmed civilians to enforce “safety-related traffic violations” such as speeding, in the same vein as cities such as Berkeley, Oakland and Philadelphia, the report recommends.Īt the same time, the city should consider “means-based” fee models - such as vouchers to repair broken taillights - for traffic violators, measures that “advance traffic safety objectives and do not perpetuate enforcement disparities.”įrom the chronic problem of people running stop signs to a rise in sideshows that occasionally lead to injuries - such as street takeovers or drag racing - the work group found that the “aggressiveness of drivers towards nondrivers, including the unhoused, is a growing problem in Los Angeles.” While the city could build on the existing Vision Zero model, the report said, it should be less reliant on law enforcement. Much like the Vision Zero initiative - unveiled in 2015 by then-Mayor Eric Garcetti to end traffic deaths within a decade - they would increase safety and reduce the need for active enforcement in “high-injury network corridors, low-income communities, and communities of color,” the report said. Such measures naturally slow the flow of traffic and discourage drivers from speeding or breaking other road laws. Among the recommendations put forth by the city report is investing in so-called “self-enforcing infrastructure,” such as narrower streets, dedicated bike lanes and more clearly marked pedestrian crosswalks.
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