Los Angeles

What will it take for Los Angeles to have a sense of urgency in actually making our streets safer? We currently spend more on legal settlements to those hurt and killed on our streets than we do on Vision Zero, the city’s half-baked effort to reduce traffic deaths. Since Los Angeles declared itself a Vision Zero City in 2015, with the ultimate aim of having no one killed in car crashes on city streets by 2025, deaths and injuries have only gotten worse. In the last few years we’ve had at least three children hit and killed while walking to school. And yet the city’s leaders — facing a budget crisis, much of it of their own making — perpetually underfund LADOT and street safety in general.

If a rash of falling elevators killed someone in L.A. every two days and injured someone every five hours, we’d immediately stop using them as the city stepped in to investigate and solve the problem. Yet we seem to just accept the deadly status quo of traffic fatalities as the cost of doing business while walking L.A.’s streets.

We don’t have to live this way. There are cities that have actually achieved Vision Zero, such as Hoboken, N.J., which has now tallied eight consecutive years without a traffic-related death thanks to significant updates at curbs, crosswalks and intersections.