It looks as though the citizens of Los Angeles, the legendary traffic capital of America, the place that gifted us freeway gridlock and smog, the “spaghetti bowl” of freeways and the parking lot that is “the 405 Freeway,” will vote on March 5 to make traffic in that city … worse.
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On the ballot that day is Measure HLA, as it’s called, a proposal that, if passed, will require the city to implement street safety, bus, and bicycle “improvements” laid out in a visionary document passed in 2015 —the Mobility Plan — by the City Council and then-Mayor Eric Garcetti.
What that means is that if Measure HLA passes, every time the city must pave or improve at least one-eighth of a mile of street — 660 feet — it must install on that patch of road all the recommendations built into the 2015 document. Those recommendations constitute a driver’s horror house of gridlock and delay — new bicycle lanes, more bus lanes, increased sidewalk widths, “calmings,” and “road diets” that “hourglass” cars from four to two lanes, mandating slower speeds, long backups at stoplights, and more stop-and-go driving.
That’s not how it’s being sold, of course, by the Los Angeles Times and the urbanists that want to get you out of your car and onto a seat on a city bus or a bicycle.
To them it is an issue of pedestrian safety. Last year, 336 people died in traffic accidents in L.A., over half of them pedestrians. The bike lanes and road diets, proponents of the measure claim, will slow drivers down and reduce the danger to pedestrians and bicyclists.
According to the Times, polling last summer showed massive support for the measure. Proponents plan on pumping about $2 million into an ad campaign pushing the proposal. A political consultant advising Healthy Streets LA, Jeff Millman, said the campaign installed billboards on the “most dangerous” streets. “Every street we chose were selected because of the pedestrian fatalities,” he told the Times. (READ MORE: Why the Bipartisan Hostility Toward Nippon Steel Deal?)
There is, thankfully, some pushback, and it’s coming from firefighters concerned that the measure will further lengthen response time. United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112 plans to spend at least $100,000 to defeat the measure. Fire trucks, according to union President Freddy Escobar, already suffer when traffic lanes are converted to bike or bus lanes. “Every second counts. The road diets slow down our firefighters,” Escobar told the Times. “And it will be so much worse with HLA.”
The city’s top budget official also chimed in with a potential “road diet” price tag: $3.1 billion over the next decade. Matt Szabo, the city administrative officer (CAO), told the City Council that, should Measure HLA pass, the city would also have to forgo other projects to fund the bike lanes and sidewalk improvements called for by the measure. “[Y]ou will be asked to make offsetting decisions, and potentially not fund other projects and priorities to meet the mandates of this measure,” Szabo said.
The pro-road-diet side was furious at Szabo’s figures. “All we ask,” said Michael Schneider, manager of the Yes on HLA campaign, “is that the CAO stop using taxpayer money to play politics before an election, and let the voters decide if they want to implement the plan … to make our streets safer.”
Proponents of Measure HLA say Szabo’s numbers are greatly inflated; Szabo says they’re “conservative estimates.” As all who follow this sort of thing know, governments never run over their original cost estimates.
Other opposition comes from those who actually sit behind a wheel. Writes one on Reddit: “In my experience with arterials that go down to one lane, they create a perennial slog of traffic even on weekends with just a line of cars, and it does indeed result in drivers opting to take side streets.” Another complains:
We have road diets here in Indiana. My god, they suck. We used to have plenty of 4-lane roads. Now we have 2-lanes with a stupid middle one. Can[’]t tell you how many times I get [behind] a slow-poke. That[’]s why I treat the middle one as a passing lane now.
Turning four-lane highways into three-laners, with a middle lane for left turns, might give buses a lane to use when on the roads, or the bicyclists who transit a given street, few though they be — it might even widen the sidewalk so that a café can put out streetside tables. But if the road has through traffic, that traffic will grind to a crawl.
Mass transit in a city sprawl like Los Angeles has faced insurmountable obstacles from the get-go. Keep L.A. Moving, an advocacy group resisting the road diets, explains:
[F]ew Angelenos have the privilege of living within walking or bicycling distance to our jobs, much less all the other essentials of life. And transit simply isn’t a viable option for the vast majority of people in L.A. County.
In fact, the war on cars hurts poor and working Angelenos the hardest.
The group cites a University of California, Los Angeles, traffic study from 2018 that captured the futility of the urbanist raison d’être:
The typical low-income [mass transit] rider wants to graduate to automobiles, while the typical driver might view transit positively but have little interest in using it.… With very few exceptions, acquiring an automobile in Southern California makes life easier along multiple dimensions, dramatically increasing access to jobs, educational institutions and other opportunities.
Buoying the opposition, however, is the successful repeal of road diets in portions of Los Angeles in 2017. Again in the putative interest of pedestrian safety, the city striped out 9.4 miles of traffic lanes, installing 4.3 miles of bike lanes instead, on a popular alternative route to the always-congealed 405 Freeway, creating fierce opposition to the bumper-to-bumper traffic and elevated commute times that the “one-lane madness” caused.
As one Manhattan Beach resident said at the time:
We’re showing people that you don’t have to roll over and let things happen to you. As these road diets roll out, more and more people are going to find that their quality of life is brought to a barely habitable level.
Road diets are just one front in the Left’s war on driving. Urbanists are waging war on numerous fronts — plumping forever mass transit and bicycles, lambasting suburban life, among other insidious efforts. (READ MORE: Yes, They’re Coming for Your Cars)
And that’s not even considering high gasoline prices, rising costs on traditional cars, rebates on electric vehicles to encourage their purchase, and the push by governments to do away with gas-powered cars — the latter including, notoriously, California’s mandate to eliminate sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035.
The automobile is integral to the pursuit and enjoyment of life in America, no less so in the car-dependent Los Angeles basin. Traffic “improvements” instituted by government should actually improve traffic conditions, not make them worse.
