If you mess with traffic you have messed with the DNA of Southern California.
It just created gridlock through our town pretty much all hours of the day.
It all comes from the same agenda.
Get you out of your car.
We’re in Playa del Rey, at the shack
site of a lot of angry people who live in the neighborhood.
Upset over this stupid—I even hate the phrase—road diet.
Here in this quiet beach community just outside Los Angeles,
residents went to war with the city back in July over traffic.
It all started when the Los Angeles City Council imposed what it calls a road diet,
meaning lanes of traffic were removed in favor of building new bike lanes
and adding space for parking.
Some locals applauded the changes.
I was really pleased to hear that they would be slowing down the traffic through here.
But commuters were furious.
We only have three roads that connect us from the South Bay, to the west side.
So when the city came in and halved the capacity of two of these roads,
it really created havoc for us.
John Russo is a local resident who co-founded Keep LA Moving,
a community coalition that’s fighting back against the city’s unilateral decision
to reconfigure the streets in a way that’s choking the flow of traffic.
This was basically done without any community input.
Most of Playa Del Rey didn't know this was happening.
It created just huge backup, huge gridlock in the mornings.
Like what was a ten minute drive turned into a half an hour.
It literally crushed our local business.
There was a group of 62 businesses that were surveyed and across the board business was down.
From the restaurants to the coffee shop,
I mean even like people you wouldn't expect like the dentist.
The dentist lost customers.
It’s part of a strategy known as Vision Zero,
in which the city aims to eliminate all traffic-related fatalities by 2025.
The thinking is that eliminating car lanes will slow traffic, meaning fewer accidents.
The goal is also to incentivize more commuters to bike to work.
In order to achieve zero deaths, public officials have been doing some odd things
Baruch Feigenbaum is the assistant director of transportation policy
at the Reason Foundation.
Road diets are used as what I would call solutionism,
where as anywhere there is a safety issue, we're going to put in a road diet
and it's going to solve the problem.
It's not really based on science and it's not really based on empirical findings.
So after the road diets were put in, we actually saw traffic accidents go through the roof.
We had an average of 11.6 accidents per year on these roads in Playa Del Rey.
We've had 52 accidents in the last four months.
So we're over 400% of the yearly average in just 4 months.
Emergency vehicles couldn't get into town.
We have video of ambulances out there on Culver, sirens blazing, just sitting in traffic
because no one can pull over anymore.
There is no place for people, the cars to go to let the response vehicles through.
According to 2013 census data,
just over one percent of Los Angeles’ commuters bike to work.
Sixty-seven percent of commuters drive.
You're taking something from a whole bunch of people just to benefit a few people.
That's not a good cost benefit analysis.
What better way to force people out of their cars
except make traffic so unbearable you don't want to sit in your car anymore?
City planners also hope to incentivize residents to move closer to their jobs.
Or if they do have to commute, to ride the city’s public transit system.
Los Angeles has the third largest transit network in the country,
yet only ten percent of commuters use it to get to work.
In Los Angeles, a majority of the folks simply cannot get from their home to their job
in a short period of time using transit and it's not an option.
and so trying to force people into one type of behavior doesn't tend to work
and it's why, even in Los Angeles,
the vast majority of people are still commuting by automobile.
In October, the Los Angeles City Council reversed itself in Playa del Rey
after community members filed two lawsuits against the city
and launched a recall election of local Councilman Mike Bonin who had backed the plan.
But the city is still planning to implement over 40 road diet projects
in other areas of Los Angeles.
And Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, and Atlanta are pursuing similar policies.
In the 1960s we were building interstate highways,
freeways through downtown areas, which was definitely the wrong approach.
Nobody is suggesting we go back to that.
But now we seem to be on the total opposite end of the pendulum,
where we don't want to build any roads at all.
We just want to build bike paths.
We want to narrow lanes.
We're saying that transit is going to solve everybody's needs.
Neither extreme is what we need to do.
I just think this is completely wrong.
It’s not about cyclists vs drivers.
These are all of our roads and they should be safe for all users.
And the road diet didn’t make our roads safer
and they’re not making it better for the cyclists.