Activating Columbia Road: Reframing a Missing Link

TEMPLE STREET
Figure 76: Street Safety Advocates Participate in a Demonstration as Part of Temple Street Slow Jams
launched his city’s Vision Zero Initiative in response
to an alarmingly high number of endemic traffic
fatalities; every forty hours, an Angeleno lost their
life in a traffic collision. In announcing the Vision
Zero Initiative, Mayor Garcetti kicked off a process
of redesigning city streets and instilling regulatory
strategies to reduce the death toll to zero by 2025. 15
Since that announcement, LA’s Vision Zero Initiative
has progressed slowly, and nowhere has this
beleaguered pace been more admonished than
along Temple Street, a 2.3 mile stretch of roadway
that serves as the main commercial corridor for the
Filipinotown neighborhood.
Temple Street is a busy road, and like Columbia
Road, has four lanes of traffic with parallel parking
on either side, but unlike Columbia Road, Temple
Street has no central median. The road runs parallel
to part of Route 101, and the neighborhood street is
commonly used by drivers trying to leapfrog traffic
on the 101.
The roadway is notoriously dangerous for all users.
The California Highway Patrol Database shows
that from 2009 to 2017, 34 people were severely
injured and five people died in traffic crashes. 16
The city has responded by including Temple Street
15 Los Angeles DOT and Vision Zero. “Vision Zero Los Angeles
2015 - 2025: Action Plan.”
16 Tinoco, “LA Taps the Brakes on Temple Street Road Diet.”
as one of its 40 Vision Zero priority corridors listed
in the Vision Zero Action Plan. But the process to
make Temple Street safer has ground to a widelypublicized,
and much-critiqued halt.
In July 2017, the city of Los Angeles Vision Zero
team held a public workshop to gain community
input into some proposed safety improvements.
Prior to that meeting, the Los Angeles Department
of Transportation (LADOT) released a tentative plan
for some pilot infrastructure improvements, meant
to be the first step in a community-involved, longterm
solution. Those improvements included a road
diet to trim the four road lanes down to two, with
a continuous central vehicular left turn lane, and
add new bike lanes in both directions. Crosswalk
signals would be retimed to give pedestrians a
head start in front of turning vehicles, and new
speed feedback signs would be installed. A second
round of improvements proposed new high-visibility
flashing crosswalks at three primary intersections,
and left-turn signals for vehicles. 17
These proposed changes ran into staunch
opposition from Los Angeles City Council members
citing concern for local businesses’ economic
wellbeing and increased travel times for driving
pass-through commuters. This site-specific
17 Linton, “Vision Zero Safety Improvements Planned For Temple
Street.”
94 Activating Columbia Road: Reframing a Missing Link