Materials for Use in Lessons
Traffic Violence, Built Environment, and Equity Facts & Figures in Los Angeles & US
LA has 7,500 miles of city streets. (LA City)
Los Angeles Streets are our largest public asset – covering 18% of our land mass (LA Great Streets)
VISION ZERO LA
Documents and brochures from Vision Zero LA available here. Vision Zero’s mission is about creating an environment that diminishes the chances of human error, and lowers the likelihood of severe injury and death when crashes do occur.
Highlights from Vision Zero:
For every 100,000 people in Los Angeles, 6.27 people die in traffic collisions each year in LA. That’s a higher rate than any other major city in the US, including San Francisco (3.51) and New York City (3.21).
65% of all deaths and severe injuries involving people walking occur on just 6% of our streets.
The High Injury Network (map indicating where traffic injuries are most likely to occur or have occurred).
2013 statistics:
95 collisions occur every day on LA streets
978 people suffered severe injuries in traffic collisions
201 people were killed
18% of trips were taken primarily by foot, yet pedestrians represented 33% of people killed or seriously injured in traffic
People walking were involved in only 8% of collisions, but accounted for 44% of all traffic deaths
Pedestrians are not likely to survive the impact of a vehicle moving at speeds greater than 30 mph
Older adults (65+) and youth (<18) account for 30% of all bicycle and pedestrian-related traffic deaths.
Nationwide, people 65 and older make up 13% of the population, but represent about 22% of pedestrian deaths.
In Los Angeles, the pedestrian fatality rate per 100,000 people is highest among those aged 75 and older, followed by those aged 65 and older.
Traffic collisions are the leading cause of death for those between 2 and 14 years old and the number two cause of premature death among those between 15 and 25 years old.
22% of collisions that result in the death or severe injury of someone walking or biking in LA are hit-and-run.
70% of collisions that result in the death or severe injury of someone walking or biking in LA involves a male driver.
Why Do Collisions Happen?
Speeding is the leading cause of serious injury and death in collisions. [National Safety Council Injury Facts]
In addition, red light running, unsafe turning, not yielding to a pedestrian in a crosswalk and not stopping at a stop sign make up the top five causes of crashes. [City of San Francisco]
In Los Angeles:
Speed is a very common contributing factor for collisions resulting in severe and fatal injury.
Most collisions occur on arterials [through roads, per New Oxford American Dictionary].
Left turns and right turns are extremely common factors across all collisions.
Driving under the influence is a common contributing factor for collisions resulting in severe and fatal injury.
Results:
In New York City, traffic deaths have decreased by 34% in areas where the City made major engineering changes, twice the rate of improvement at locations without changes.
Restriping the street can sometimes lead to more efficient traffic movement. JSK (from LA Times report): “Two good traffic lanes work better than three bad ones.”
Walking in LA (LA TIMES)
http://graphics.latimes.com/la-pedestrians/
“Using data collected from reports that law enforcement agencies send to the California Highway Patrol, The Times analyzed more than 665,000 traffic accidents in L.A. County from 2002 through 2013 and identified 579 intersections in Los Angeles where the reported rate of crashes between cars and pedestrians was significantly higher than the county average.”
“Many of the city's intersections have never seen a pedestrian accident. But among those that have, a tiny fraction of crossings has recorded an outsized number of crashes.”
“Resurgent downtown Los Angeles has the highest concentration of those intersections, The Times found. More than 600 people on foot were hit by cars at 48 intersections over those 12 years, or an average of one person per week. Eleven people were killed.”
Figueroa -- from Avenue 51 to York & Avenue 63
2002-2013
80 pedestrians struck
4 killed
Slauson Ave. & Western Ave. (South LA) - More pedestrians were recorded as being hit at or near the intersection of Slauson Ave. and Western Ave. than any other intersection in the county.
Vision Zero Presentation
View the City’s prioritized intersections here: https://ladotlivablestreets.org/programs/vision-zero/maps
Re: Mobility Plan for 2035
LA Times article Sept 20, 2015
...We've shaped and then perfected, like potters at the wheel, a punishingly efficient downward cycle for the city's public spaces. As lanes for cars grew, space for everybody else shrank. Sidewalks got narrower. The public realm, whose basic armature is the sidewalk, shriveled. We required architects to push back their buildings from the street to make room for parking lots (and for other reasons), which made sidewalks less shaded and more exposed.
Over time it became far less pleasant to walk than it had been, as pedestrians negotiated an increasingly narrow strip of pavement with car traffic on one side and parking lots on the other. Fewer people walked. It became easier to widen the streets even more, because there were fewer walkers to object, and those who did walk had less political clout. And so on. ...
...This is in fact the larger shift that the vote on the mobility plan reflects, even as the plan itself has flaws and remains very much a work in progress. There is a growing constituency for improvements to the civic realm that take a newly nuanced view of the relationship between the car and public amenities. No longer do we have the luxury of thinking of the whole city as reachable by car at all times. Sometimes the public amenity — the park, in this case — needs to come to us.
Sometimes, to be more specific, we need to decide to tax ourselves and pay for it to come to us. …
National Facts
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2016/03/09/racial-inequity-in-traffic-enforcement
Similar disparities exist for pedestrians. Only 49 percent of low-income neighborhoods have sidewalks, while 89 percent of high-income communities have them.
Respectively, black and Latino Americans are 60 and 43 percent more likely than white Americans to be killed while walking. Meanwhile, the same groups of Americans face worse health outcomes, unequal incomes, lower rates of educational attainment, and higher rates of incarceration.
From SAFE ROUTES TO SCHOOL NATIONAL PARTNERSHIP
1. Low-income people and people of color are using active transportation now:
Low-income people have the highest rates of walking and bicycling to work – the very highest rates of walking and bicycling to work are among those who make under $10,000 per year, with high rates also seen for those making under $25,000 per year.
By race, people of mixed race and Asian Americans have the highest rates of walking to work, Latinos show moderately high rates, and whites and African Americans show the lowest rates. Children of color, particularly Latinos and African Americans, are more likely to bike or walk to school than white students. Low-income children are twice as likely to walk to school as children from higher-income families.
More than 60 percent of transit riders walk to get to and from their transit stops. African Americans make up 33 percent of public transit riders, riding at a rate that is two and a half times more than their share of the population. A high percentage of public transportation users are low- to moderate-income, with two-thirds of riders having household incomes of less than $50,000 per year, and 20 percent of riders having a household income of less than $15,000 per year.
Latinos and Native Americans have a slightly higher rate of bicycling than whites. Growth in bicycle ridership is occurring most rapidly among African Americans and Asian Americans, with Latinos and whites following. Between 2001 and 2009, bicycle trips by Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans grew from 16 to 23 percent of all bike trips in the United States.
2. Low-income people and people of color are walking and bicycling in dangerous conditions:
Children and adults from low-income households have a higher risk of being injured or killed while walking than residents of upper-income areas.
Nationally, pedestrian fatality rates in low-income metro areas are approximately twice that of more affluent neighborhoods. A study in one metropolitan region showed that the number of people on foot injured in the poorest census tracts was 6.3 times higher than in the richest census tracts; for people on bicycles, the number of injuries was 3.9 times higher in poor areas; and for vehicle occupants, 4.3 times greater in poor areas than in rich ones.
For walking, Latino and African American fatality rates are about twice that of whites. Fatality rates for people bicycling are 23 percent higher for Latinos than whites, and 30 percent higher for African Americans than whites.
Low-income communities have poorer pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and more high-speed, high-traffic roads. While almost 90 percent of high income areas have sidewalks on one or both sides of the street, in low-income communities that percentage drops to 49 percent. Streets with street lighting are also significantly more common in high-income areas (75%) than in low-income communities (51%). Streets with marked crosswalks are significantly more common in high-income areas (13%) than in low-income communities (7%). Traffic calming features, such as traffic islands, curb bulb outs that shorten crossing distances, and traffic circles, are found almost three times as often in high-income areas compared with low-income communities.