LETTER FROM LOS ANGELES
“The mayor of Paris is one of my heroines! » Michael Schneider is full of praise for Anne Hidalgo. This tech entrepreneur is not Parisian. He lives in Los Angeles and has just won a victory which represents a small revolution in a megacity better known for its highway interchanges than for its cycle paths.
At the head of the Streets for All association, he succeeded in having the HLA measure adopted by referendum in March – for “Healthy Streets Los Angeles”, literally “healthy streets”. No populist undertones behind this name. By healthy streets, the promoters of the measure mean streets where life is good for those who do not travel by car: pedestrians, cyclists and users of public transport. The HLA measurement, which obtained 65.5% yes, calls in particular for the creation of 480 bus lanes and several hundred kilometers of cycle paths, including 380 km of protected paths.
This is where the mayor of Paris intervenes (without knowing it). “What Anne Hidalgo did for Paris on transport corresponds entirely to my vision of the world. She transformed her city,” enthuses Michael Schneider, who would like to see such a metamorphosis at work on the shores of the Pacific.
On paper, Los Angeles committed in 2015 to reducing the importance of the car by adopting the ambitious “2035 mobility plan”. But almost ten years later, only 6% of the planned developments have been carried out. Forgotten, it seems, is the creation of cycle paths, bus lanes, but also sidewalks worthy of the name in a city where walking without a dog on a leash makes you a suspect in many neighborhoods. A city, above all, where, as the “Yes on HLA” campaign highlighted, a pedestrian dies almost every two days under the wheels of a car.
In the city of James Ellroy and Michael Connelly, the number of people killed in road accidents (336, including 179 pedestrians) even exceeded that of homicides (327) in 2023. And set a sad record since Los Angeles began keeping road safety statistics around twenty years ago.
A long fight
Yet, “ensure safe and efficient transportation for pedestrians” was one of the major axes of the plan adopted in 2015 by the then Democratic mayor, Eric Garcetti. Why did the project get derailed? Michael Schneider emphasizes “a mixture of lack of coordination between municipal services and lack of political will at city hall.” Because Los Angeles is an administrative millefeuille where the mayor has only limited powers. Such developments require the approval of members of the City Council, who are all-powerful in their respective districts. “Some members really wanted the mobility plan to be implemented and others fought against it”enlightens the president of Streets for All.
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