Measure HLA aims to implement street improvements outlined by the Los Angeles 2015 mobility plan. Melrose Avenue saw some progress near Fairfax High School in summer 2022. (photo by Edwin Folven)

Los Angeles voters could determine the future of the city’s street safety on March 5. Measure HLA, or the City Mobility Plan Improvement Measures, would attempt to, among other things, tackle the significant uptick in pedestrian car crash fatalities. Last year, 176 pedestrians were killed in car crashes in Los Angeles, compared to 88 in 2015.

The crux of the ordinance is the implementation of the city’s 2015 mobility plan, which earmarked where bus lanes, bike lanes, wider sidewalks and other enhancements are necessary. With Measure HLA, L.A. would be required to install the elements every time one-eighth of a mile of street is either paved or improved.

“A pedestrian is killed once every two days in L.A., they’re injured once every five hours and the most amazing stat to me is more than 50% of all the injuries and deaths have occurred on streets that [are marked for] mobility plan treatment that hasn’t been implemented,” Streets For All founder Michael Schneider said. “If the city just followed its own plan, fewer people would die and be injured on our streets.”

“Measure HLA is not rocket science,” Streets Are For Everyone executive director Damian Kevitt said. “This is basically saying the city of Los Angeles’ own plan needs to be implemented. [It] currently has no requirements to be implemented. It is literally just the plan that’s been approved by the city council.”

The opposition to the plan includes Councilwoman Traci Park, 11th District, who expressed many concerns regarding the measure.

“Let me preface by saying that one death on the streets of Los Angeles is too many,” Park said. “I also want to put this in the context of the fact that I live in Venice and I ride a bike pretty often and I have for a lot of years. I am well aware that there are many roads that are not safe. There are places that I simply cannot and will not go on my bike because I don’t feel safe doing it … In my view, residents of Los Angeles deserve a well-designed, well-connected safe system of bike and transit lanes.”

Park is concerned Measure HLA would eliminate and narrow lanes of traffic on roads ways. Additionally, she said that the installation of physical barriers would increase traffic and impeded response time for emergency personnel.

Backing Park in opposing the measure is United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112, which has posted signs that read “Don’t slow us down!” The Los Angeles Fire Department signed off on the mobility plan in 2015, but the union now believes that the pedestrian and public transit enhancements would slow down emergency services response times. LAFD Local 112 did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

“It’s not the firefighters themselves. Let’s just be clear about that. The union has a stake in this because they’ve been convinced by people that are opposed to it … that if this were implemented, it would cost so much money,” Kevitt said.

Park said the total cost would be $3.1 billion or $300 million a year until the 2035 deadline date.

“We know that priorities for residents in Los Angeles are encampment interventions, affordability, public safety and repairing and restoring our existing infrastructure,” Park said. “And unfortunately, HLA, while some of what is calls for is good and while much of the city’s mobility plan is good and make sense, we don’t have an unlimited amount of funding, and our city departments have been clear that they do not have the resources to implement this.”

A report by city administrative officer Matt Szabo was provided to the council in regards to the cost of Measure HLA. Schneider said that it would not cost nearly as much money as the report alleges.

“Two billion dollars out of the $3.1 billion is for sidewalk repair, and our measure does not mandate sidewalk repair, because the city’s mobility plan [did] not mandate sidewalk repair,” Schneider said. “So, you can’t stick the cost of sidewalk repair to something it doesn’t require. [Without sidewalk repair], you’re down to $1.1 billion. That is bike lanes at the cost of $2 million per mile, and [Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s] own estimate to put in protected bike lanes is $250,000 per mile, or nearly a tenth of the cost. We should be having an honest conversation, and the CAO should be producing numbers that are relevant to the measure. Unfortunately, it’s been politicized and the numbers are dramatically inflated.”

Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, 5th District, supports Measure HLA.

Park said that the approach to the implementation of the mobility plan was flawed.

“Six hundred sixty-foot-long segments based on a resurfacing schedule is not how I would approach this. These treatments will go in regardless of what they may connect to on the other end, regardless of what the level of usage may be, [and] whether that is a priority destination to complete an existing project,” Park said. “We have the Olympics right on the horizon. Rather than investing in 660-foot stretches of road diets to nowhere, I would like to build an interconnected system of bike transit between our Olympic venues so we can actually have a carbon free Olympic games.”

Some residents also saw the plan as incomplete.

“It seems like the execution of an ill-conceived plan,” Hancock Park resident Cindy Chvatal said. “By just installing bits and pieces of bike structure every one-eighth of a mile whenever some road enhancement is done, you’re creating a jigsaw puzzle. You aren’t building connectivity.”

Kevitt said that the Olympics is actually an important reason why Measure HLA is a pressing issue.

“Especially before the 2028 Olympics, we should be investing in our roads a lot more if we’re going to dump several million more people onto our roads. And if we don’t have that public transportation system, we don’t have the bus lanes and things like that, it’s going to be a nightmare,” Kevitt said.

Schneider also addressed the environmental needs that the plan could allow the city to address.

“There’s no way for us to achieve our green New Deal ambitions and clean our air a lot more without also having a mode shift by some people for some trips,” he said. “Cars are the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in California and Los Angeles. This isn’t about forcing people to ride a bike or take transit, it’s about giving them the option to. Right now I think most people don’t feel they have the option because most people … feel like they might die if they try to ride a bike on the streets of Los Angeles.”

Schneider went on to note that a quarter of all car trips are less than a mile, and many could be replaced “if we had a more multimodal transportation system.”

Ultimately, it will be up to the voters to decide if Measure HLA will be the way the city moves forward in the implantation of transit and pedestrian accessibility. For Park, the choice comes down to money.

“We can’t afford the bill,” Park said. “We can’t afford the traffic and we can’t afford to slow down our first responders.”

Schneider said that the vote comes down to safety.

“It won’t happen right away, but as the city repaves streets over time, Measure HLA will simply make the streets safer and more multimodal,” he said.

Updated on Feb. 22: In a previous version of this article, the paragraph below was attributed to Councilwoman Katy Yarolsavsky. The information was actually from an op-ed by the Los Angeles Angeles Times.

Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, 5th District, pushed back at the criticisms, going as far to pen an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that deemed the opposition arguments as “fear-mongering.” Yaroslavsky wrote that the redesigns were found by an environmental impact report to actually help emergency response with the addition of left turn and bus lanes, “which would allow ambulances and fire trucks to whiz by car traffic.”