Where we go from here

Today at the Los Angeles City Council, there was an opportunity for Council to adopt Healthy Streets L.A. as an ordinance, or send it to the March 2024 ballot. If Council had adopted it, it would have become law in about a month, and the city would have been required to implement its planned bus lanes, bike lanes, and pedestrian improvements when repaving streets. Instead, it chose to vote 13–0 to send it to the ballot.

Traffic violence going on around council while they were voting on Healthy Streets LA

I want to start with a huge THANK YOU. By my count, over 40 people showed up to make public comment in support of council adopting us as an ordinance. I am sorry many of you didn’t get to speak since Council President Martinez cut off public comment before everyone could talk. I know many of you missed work or other important engagements to be there, and whether or not you got to speak, I want to let you know how profoundly grateful I am that you were there.

I also want to thank our coalition. We had forty neighborhood councils in support (a record for any single item), and a wide coalition of business, labor, equity, and transit organizations. You can see the full list on healthystreetsla.com.

So, where do we go from here?

1. We start preparing for March 2024, and we’ll start our campaign in early January 2024. We are already underway with early planning and concepts for marketing and selling this to the public. If you want to help, reach out to me.
2. If council was serious about reaching a deal with us, we’ll listen. While I remain skeptical that any council-led process is going to get us to where we need to be — something with teeth and enforcement that can’t be easily repealed — we’ll certainly listen to any specific proposals that come our way.
3. We’re going to keep our eyes on the city like a hawk — while there is still no mobility plan implementation ordinance (either our version or theirs), will they choose to continue to ignore the mobility plan when repaving, or will they show good faith by proactively stopping that process? Time will tell. If you want to volunteer to help watch over this, let me know, and we can work together on it.

A screenshot from our polling showing this would easily pass in March 2024

This is just the start of the process. While we would have loved to have been adopted today (and came extremely close to getting 8 votes in our conversations yesterday), we are excited for 2024 as our polling shows this will pass easily with voters.

We may have lost the battle today, but we will win the war. Onwards.