Community Voices on LA Mobility Plan – CHC’s Carson and Lewis Ctr’s Huff

Huff: These are some initial impressions pulled from a first reading of the mobility element. I still have to look through the Complete Streets Manual, and I haven’t revisited the maps in depth, though I did review the draft networks in detail at an LACBC Planning Committee meeting during the plan development process. At this point I have more questions than answers, probably.

It’s a huge deal to put the nail in the coffin on our old mobility element. The people who worked on this new document deserve credit for articulating, basically ex nihilo as far as official city positions go, a progressive vision for multimodal transportation and a shift from our car-centered, road-widening, 1950s ways. So many of the battles advocates have fought over the past 5-10 years -- from bike lanes to bus-only lanes to safe crossings -- have been about the conflict between vehicle throughput and, well, every other value or function a street can have. Finally, we have a document that officially recognizes streets as public assets that need to be safe, enable biking, walking, and transit, and function as public spaces.

Further, the Draft Mobility Plan seems to have incorporated (to varying degrees from lip service to action plan) almost every good idea that is stressed in urban planning education today. From un-bundling parking to low-impact development to safe design speeds to bike corrals, the Mobility Element gives so many necessary, innovative, productive ideas official endorsement in the city of L.A.

I was talking with my colleague, Madeline Brozen, about how the process and deliberations about MyFigueroa would be different if we had this Mobility Plan instead of the current Mobility Element. We had to laugh, because very little would change. There would be a visionary document supporting the project, but that wouldn’t necessarily change the decision-making process. This is not a problem unique to the Draft Mobility Plan, but rather one that is endemic to many plans, and it has two parts: the first has to do with specificity, and the second has to do with decision-making processes.

Plans that talk around trade-offs (read: most plans), use broad, vague language, and are short on specifics about priorities and phasing -- these plans can easily evade objection, but they are also less powerful in a practical argument. I think bike advocates knew this, or at least intuited it, when we pushed for very specific implementation targets in the bike plan. Those targets are verifiably being met or not met at any given moment in time. The mobility plan, upon my first reading, could use more implementation metrics. The organization of the plan also does a poor job of distinguishing between what the city controls (example: infrastructure) and what it influences but does not completely control (examples: transit service, development, mode split). We can set targets for the latter category and we can and should push toward them, but from an accountability standpoint, the important targets concern the things we as a city control. We need as much specificity around those things as we can bear.

I and several other Bicycle Advisory Committee members are concerned about what is or is not lost in “folding” the 2010 Bike Plan into this new document. So much effort went into naming very ambitious and specific bicycle facility implementation goals, and these are lost in the new document. The specificity around bikeway types and feasibility is lost, too. And the ghosts of “designated but infeasible” haunt Mobility Plan 2035, now wearing a new term, “Deferred Backbone.”

Where I applaud the mobility plan and have written “YES” and “AWESOME” in my notes are the moments when it gets really specific. Doubling the Measure R local return dedicated to bike/ped. Setting targets for the bicycle-enhanced network (though I want these targets to be higher). LACBC has catalogued some of the most awesome things in the plan really well in their blog post. The lack of similar concrete goals around other important issues like parking reform, sidewalk repair is an indication that these things could get short shrift in implementation. Advocates should push for very specific targets on some of these other items.

Again, this critique is more one of the way we do planning today than of this document in particular. It’s ironic that a plan with such a concerted outreach efforts would do such a poor job of making sense to a lay reader. Too many statements in the plan don’t address, in an honest way, the governance structure (with respect to Metro, for example) or the real challenges and fiscal constraints the city faces. The plan does a poor job of explaining its own role in decision making, too. I wish there was a very clear delineation of the various parts and players:

1) government policies that constrain the City’s ability to deliver on its new vision for mobility (e.g. theCalifornia MUTCD, Metro service cuts)2) broader changes in the economy and demographics, and3) the City Council itself.

Advocates have learned, through the Bike Plan process, that City Council can approve a bold document, and then individual council members can support or not support its implementation at their whim. Mobility Plan 2035 doesn’t make key facts like this clear to the lay reader.

In 2014, the way we do planning should be really transparent, democratic, and accountable. Let’s publish the internal documents about why some bikeways are “deferred.” Let’s say who the decider is and when they decide. Of course, a plan can’t do everything to educate citizens, but this plan could use more of a view of the processes of implementation and the key changes that are needed to achieve its laudable objectives.

Perhaps add a section on the “anatomy of a project” that describes the process (staff writes a winning grant, Council approval, budgeting) and the key players (Bureau of Street Services, L.A. Department of Transportation, City Council)? Maybe I am just identifying a role for Streetsblog…