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The move to speed up Los Angeles' streets continues unabated.  Less than a week after hundreds of people gathered at the L.A. StreetSummit to discuss how to tame traffic and make Los Angeles' streets more livable, the City Council Transportation Committee is expected to hear, debate, and pass three speed limit increases in the San Fernando Valley at 2:00 p.M. this Wednesday in City Hall.  In a way, its kind of a sobering crash back to reality.  After a week of being reminded of what could be, activists are back to where we are...fighting speed limit increases that represent the exact opposite kind of thinking to what we talked about all weekend.

Megan McArdle at the Atlantic, writing on today's Toyota hearing in the House oversight committee, hears Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood claim that "lowering the speed limit to 30 mph would not save any lives, which is why we have minimum speeds on highways."

When we last checked in with the City Council Transportation Committee, they decided to table a motion to increase the speed limit on Chandler Boulevard, where the limit would increase from 35 MPH to 45 MPH along the Orange Line, and Riverside Drive which would change the limit from 35 MPH to 40 MPH for its entire length between the Burbank border and Van Nuys Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. The Councilman for the area, Paul Krekorian, wanted a chance for the community to give input on the increases before the proposal went through, and now the increases are back on the agenda for tomorrow's meeting.

As mentioned in a post yesterday, the Los Angeles City Council Transportation Committee will vote tomorrow at 2:00 P.M. in City Hall on whether or not to raise speed limits on three local streets Chandler Boulevard, Riverside Drive and Beverly Glen Boulevard. In the past day, three outraged pieces have attacked the limit increases and challenged the Council to defy state rules that require the increases for the LAPD to use radar to enforce the law.

Recently, the City of Santa Monica completed a series of speed surveys on it's streets, as required by state law.  The result might be a surprise to people that have followed the inability of the City of Los Angeles to maintain lower speed limits when these surveys are done.  In Santa Monica, fourteen street locations are seeing their speed limits lowered while speeds will be increased in only two areas: on Colorado Avenue between Ocean Avenue and Lincoln Boulevard and on Second Street between Wilshire and Colorado.

Tomorrow, new rules governing how municipalities evaluate speed limits on local roads will go into effect.  Unfortunately, these rules allow municipalities even less room than before to resist speed limit changes.  The new rules maintain the backbone of the bad law, speed limits are set based on how fast the "eighty-fifth" percentile of drivers are speeding but still manage to make it harder for municipalities to resist faster streets for pesky reasons like pedestrians or cyclists want to use the street.

So what happened? Despite the support of just about everyone in Los Angeles, A.B. 766 didn't muster the support to even come to a vote at the Assembly Transportation Committee Hearing yesterday. How could such a slam dunk piece of legislation, a bill that would protect cyclists and pedestrians from the increased speeding of drivers, be such a non-starter with the State Legislature?