Hundreds of people are killed on the streets of Los Angeles every year. But you barely heard about it during the mayoral primary.
I’m not referring to criminal homicides, which last year dipped to their lowest tally in 60 years, but an even deadlier menace.
Drivers and their cars kill a lot of people in this city. You’d think someone running to unseat an incumbent would mention this: L.A.’s streets have never been more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians than under Mayor Karen Bass.
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The numbers are horrifying. Last year, according to LAPD data, 290 people died in traffic, more than half of whom were pedestrians. It was the third straight year traffic fatalities outnumbered homicides, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Still, the news isn’t all bad: Deaths have seen modest declines two years in row, ebbing from an all-time high of 345 in 2023.
But they remain far higher than a decade ago, when the city adopted “Vision Zero” and vowed to eliminate traffic deaths. It didn’t work out that way: Fatalities spiked, infamously and dramatically. Anyone running for reelection should worry about this — if not for L.A.’s 3.9 million residents, then at least for her own political future.
This public safety discordance played out conspicuously at the most high-profile candidate forums. The May 6 NBC debate opened with a jarring montage set to scary music that showed (no joke!) hooded marauders, shotgun-wielding cops and people saying things like “I don’t sleep well at night at all.” The ensuing exchange between Bass and her main challengers, Spencer Pratt and City Councilmember Nithya Raman, featured memorable utterances on trash, “super meth” (which may or may not exist) and the “thousands” of moms who’ve talked to Pratt about not feeling safe.
But not one of the candidates mentioned the hazard that Angelenos have good reason to worry about: Getting killed by a speeding vehicle while driving to work, walking to the park or out for a relaxing bike ride.
At another forum, the gap between crime perception and crime data was acknowledged, then quickly waved away. During a May 20 Los Angeles Valley College event, journalist Alex Cohen noted statistics on falling homicides before asking candidate Adam Miller: “What specifically do you think needs to happen so that people feel safe.”
Mariel Garza
Miller’s response: “It doesn’t matter what the statistics say. You talk to people north, south, east, west in this city, and nobody feels safe in their neighborhoods.”
He’s right in one sense: If statistics mattered, he and his fellow candidates would be screaming from the rooftops about L.A.’s dangerous streets.
To their credit, Miller, Raman and Rae Huang did participate in a March 23 mayoral forum hosted by Streets for All, the advocacy group behind Measure HLA, the successful 2024 initiative requiring hundreds of miles of new bike lanes and other safety upgrades in the city. And Miller and Huang both sat down for interviews with Golden State in which they were pressed for solutions to L.A.’s traffic fatality crisis.
But this doesn’t come close to cutting it. Bass and other public officials deserve to be consistently and publicly confronted about this issue because they’ve shown their proclivity for ignoring the problem. Measure HLA passed with nearly two-thirds’ voter support in 2024, but since then the city has slow-walked the kind of mandated upgrades shown in other places to reduce deaths.
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And to say those upgrades work is no understatement. Hoboken, N.J. — a New York City suburb about the same square mileage as West Hollywood but with much more density — has gone nine years without a single traffic death after adding protected bike lanes, improving crosswalks and altering streets in ways that reduced vehicle speeds.
Long Beach, Santa Monica, Glendale and other cities rooted in the same car culture as L.A. are at least trying to address the problem by adding infrastructure to protect cyclists and pedestrians from bigger, faster and deadlier vehicles. South Pasadena is re-working Huntington Drive, one of its most dangerous roads, and South El Monte has made numerous upgrades in the last few years to protect non-drivers.
Yet Angelenos wait for the progress they overwhelmingly demanded in 2024.
With a November mayoral runoff very likely, voters should press the two candidates to explain how many more people have to die in preventable crashes before City Hall takes action.
Paul Thornton
Jon Regardie
