GUEST COMMENTARY--As promised — or maybe threatened — the ironically named Fix the City has filed suit against the City of Los Angeles to keep it from doing exactly that.
The NIMBY non-profit is fighting the newly adopted Mobility Plan 2035, which was created to improve safety and traffic flow by providing Angelenos with alternatives to using their cars.
Yet the group’s actions promise to keep the city’s streets just as dangerous and congested as they are now. Apparently, making the city more bikeable, walkable and livable isn’t their idea of fixing it – and certainly not if drivers can continue to careen carelessly through LA’s already congested streets.
According to the LA Times, the suit alleges the plan will increase tailpipe emissions as drivers spend more time idling in traffic due to reduced road capacity, a supposition based on the outdated worst-case projections contained in the plan.
The plan clearly identifies these worst-case scenarios as just that -- despite the repeated failure of the media to press the group on their repeated misrepresentation of those projections.
The assumptions contained within the Mobility Plan make it clear that the predicted doubling of congested intersections will only occur if no one switches to alternative forms of transportation. Yet it also predicts that once the plan is built out in 2035, we’ll see a 170% increase in bicycling, a 38% increase in walking and a 56% boost in transit use -- and a corresponding decrease in motor vehicles on the road.
Again, those are very conservative estimates; more likely, those numbers will be significantly higher as safer streets, more trains serving more areas, and faster bus routes induce more people to leave their cars at home.
The group also claims that safety will be sacrificed as emergency responders find themselves stuck in traffic -- even though the city’s commitment to Vision Zero, which is contained within the plan, means they should have significantly fewer emergencies to respond to.
It’s ironic that a spokeswoman for the group says that if this plan were put to a vote, the people of LA would toss it out in a New York second. It’s interesting to note that New York itself has already begun a similar transformation of their streets, and the sky has yet to fall.
In fact, an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers approve of the changes to the city’s streets, even though some groups had fought them tooth-and-nail, just as Fix the City is trying to do.
The best way to look at this suit is that it’s a last desperate gasp of LA’s auto-centric past, pursued by people unable to envision a future in which cars no longer hold hegemony over the earth.
Hopefully, the courts will see it for what it is, and toss it in the dustbin of history along with the car culture that has damaged so much of our city.
That will help give LA back to the people who live here -- and not to the cars they drive.
(This commentary was first posted at Biking in LA.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 74
Pub: Sep 11, 2015
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