Above photo: A billboard advocating for the Healthy Streets LA ballot measure. Streets For All.
Three lessons from a successful campaign for safer streets in car-dominated Los Angeles.
Think people won’t vote for safer streets? Think again.
In March, Los Angeles voters passed the Healthy Streets LA ballot measure with over 65% of the vote. What’s the story?
L.A. already had a plan — Mobility Plan 2035 passed in 2015 — to create a network of safe routes for biking, driving and walking. There was only one problem: The city had implemented only about 5% of it.
In 2020, StreetsLA (a.k.a. the Bureau of Street Services) was taking advantage of the pandemic shutdown to rapidly repave city streets. The transportation advocacy organization Streets For All saw an opportunity to implement complete street improvements during repaving. Since the L.A. Department of Transportation would have to restripe the street anyway, why not add bus and bike lanes?
It might seem intuitive, but the reality was much more complicated. Communication between StreetsLA and LADOT was fraught and they weren’t always on the same page. To try to coordinate between the two departments, the advocates at Streets For All created and managed a spreadsheet of future repavings and planned mobility improvements.
“We were the go-between between these two orgs, which is a crazy place to be because at that time we were all volunteer advocates,” says Josh Vredevoogd, creative director for Streets For All.
But what if the city had to implement Mobility Plan 2035 every time it repaved a street? Thus was born the Healthy Streets LA ballot measure, or Measure HLA for short. The measure mandates the city implement the mobility improvements in the plan every time it repaves at least one-eighth of a mile of a street – or risk being sued by any resident of the city.
Next City spoke to Vredevoogd about how the campaign stuck the landing on messaging and won the vote for safer streets in car-dominated L.A.
Build a coalition
“We f——ed up,” admits Vredevoogd, noting that Streets For All failed to build broad support for the ballot measure during the signature-gathering phase. There were concerns from other advocacy groups that the ballot measure didn’t address equity by prioritizing underserved neighborhoods for Mobility Plan improvements.
“We just didn’t do a good enough job of addressing those concerns at that point,” he says.
In response, then city councilmember Nury Martinez directed the city to come up with its own version of Healthy Streets LA that focused on equity, an effort that appears to have died in committee.
In the lead-up to the election in March, Streets For All successfully secured endorsements from unions, climate organizations and business groups that saw the vision for safer streets.
Regardless of where the Mobility Plan is implemented first, Streets For All believes that Measure HLA will improve transportation equity.
“The people most impacted by [Measure HLA] are going to be people that don’t own a car, people that need to take the bus, people that need to bike, people that walk, the communities that have the highest propensity for traffic violence in the city,” says Vredevoogd.
“We maybe didn’t do the best job framing that for allies, and we didn’t, honestly, do a good enough job of reaching out to people and building a coalition.”
Safety wins
In car-dominated LA, removing a lane of traffic to add a bus or bike lane — often called a “road diet” — is “political poison,” according to Vredevoogd. So how do you market the idea of taking space away from cars?
Streets For All polled L.A. residents and found that safety was the most compelling argument for voters.
“This is backed by statistics, but anecdotally, people feel very, very unsafe in Los Angeles crossing the street or driving or, obviously, biking,” says Vredevoogd.
Last year, 336 people died on LA streets due to traffic violence, with people walking and biking making up the majority of deaths at 60%.
“We could make climate arguments, we could make equity arguments, but the thing that felt the most bulletproof to us and the most empathetic to the general Angeleno was just road safety,” explains Vredevoogd. “People are dying on our streets — more people every single year. The numbers [are] only going up, the city’s not doing enough to stop it.”
This led to a two-pronged approach to the campaign: Telling the stories of the people devastated by traffic violence and using data to illustrate the scale of the problem. Streets For All ran ads on TV and social media with stories of people who had lost loved ones.
In addition, the organization analyzed traffic fatality data to determine the most dangerous streets in L.A.
“We bought billboard placements on those streets and then put up billboards that just said, ‘40 people have been killed on this street in the last 10 years’ or ‘23 people have been killed on this street in the last 10 years,’” says Vredevoogd.
Keep it simple
Turns out, these simple messages were the most effective.
Vredevoogd fought for one billboard on Vermont Avenue that read “In 2022, more pedestrians died on Vermont Avenue than in the state of Vermont.”
“That one got a lot of traction,” he says. “We had people from City Hall reaching out to us about that one — that one ruffled feathers there.”
But Vredevoogd found that simplicity was more effective — for example, a billboard reading “46 pedestrians killed on Vermont Ave since 2013.”
Vredevoogd recalls taking a Lyft on the way home from the election party and talking to the driver about what they were doing that night.
“He was like, ‘Oh, I saw that billboard. And then he quoted back to me the statistic from the billboard…He had driven past it enough times that it had frozen in his memory.”
The campaign also used social media ads to target people living or working near dangerous streets.
“People would get these hyper-targeted advertisements about their community or about the street maybe they commute on,” says Vredevoogd.
Ongoing challenges
It’s still too early to tell how Measure HLA will play out on the street. Despite the measure’s victory in March, progress has been slow. Months later, there is still no concrete plan for implementation. And some things haven’t changed — such as LADOT’s dysfunctional relationship with StreetsLA.
“It’s one of the failures of leadership from City Hall to not make them integrate and work together more,” says Vredevoogd.
Asked for an update, LADOT listed three repaving projects where the mobility plan has been implemented, including new bike lanes on Hollywood Boulevard, Manchester Boulevard and Reseda Boulevard. However, the Hollywood bike lanes were in progress before Measure HLA passed.
StreetsLA, LADOT and other city departments are meeting regularly to work out the details of implementing the mobility plan during repaving, but there will be no plan presented to city council until next year.
Meanwhile, as Streets For All points out, people continue to die on L.A.’s dangerous roads.
This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Fellowship for Social Impact Design, which is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.