In June of 2023, the Transportation Committee adopted a Budget Recommendation asking the City Administrative Officer to report on the cost of implementing the City’s Mobility Plan 2035, with a focus on bicycle and pedestrian facilities. This included implementing the Bicycle Enhanced Network (protected bike lanes), the Bicycle Lane Network (unprotected bike lanes), and Pedestrian Enhanced Districts.

Last week, the City Administrative Officer Matthew Szabo produced a report outlining the cost. It’s important to have an honest conversation about cost, given Healthy Streets LA is on the ballot in March, which would force the City of Los Angeles to implement the Mobility Plan 2035 anytime it repaves a street.

There are several issues with the CAO’s report, and we break them down here:

The City passed the Mobility Plan 2035 in 2015. Given we are 8 years in and the city has done just 3% of the planned facilities and is only now getting around to talking about what it would cost to implement shows how deeply unserious the City actually is in implementing the plan.
The CAO is giving the City too much credit. In the table below, he credits miles of bike lanes that were implemented before the Mobility Plan 2035 was even adopted that were included in the plan. It’s a sleight of hand trick that makes the City look far better on progress. The truth is that it has only implemented 3.4% of the Bicycle Lane Network since 2015.

3. LADOT is estimating “community engagement” per project to be between $96,000 and $462,000. Our City loves doing outreach, primarily over bike lanes. Projects that add parking (and, sometimes, even remove bike lanes to add diagonal parking), road space, and other car infrastructure rarely have much outreach. But when it comes to bike lanes, LADOT has an arbitrary outreach requirement; sometimes this just means mailing businesses and residents along a specific corridor telling them a project is happening. Sometimes it includes months or even years of community meetings before a council office will sign off. The City is also obligated to do a traffic study anytime a car lane is being reallocated for another use under the Fix The City settlement.

Our city could save a lot of money on outreach, and speed up implementation of bike lanes, if it set a reasonable, and short outreach period for projects. It’s insane to spend up to $500,000 on just having a conversation on if we should implement a project on the mobility plan already passed by City Council.

4. In the cost estimate, the initial range of $2.9 - $3.28B includes street resurfacing; but the City resurfaces about 500 miles per year anyway — putting that cost on the Mobility Plan 2035 is silly. The whole point of Healthy Streets LA is to force the City to implement the plan during repaving that it’s doing anyway; this would save money.

The second estimate excludes street resurfacing, but includes LADOT’s inflated Community Engagement estimates, which includes up to $80,000,000 in engagement (just to see if we should save lives and implement a plan we already adopted!)

Having said all of that, even if we take the City’s high end estimate of $3.28B to fully implement the plan, and divide that by the 12 years left until 2035, that comes out to $273M/year. The City’s total budget for FY23-24 is 13.15B. In other words, to make walking, biking, and transit more attractive, and save lives on our streets, the cost is only 2% of our budget per year, even at the high end.

5. There are multiple issues with the CAO’s analysis of the Pavement Preservation Program:

The CAO says that while there is existing funding for repaving (the “Pavement Preservation Program”) and upgrading curb ramps, that if the city has to implement the Mobility Plan, that funding will be less available for repaving or curb ramps. He’s specifically pitting pedestrians against cyclists and transit users; this is a false choice.
He says that if LADOT has to implement the Mobility Plan 2035 during repaving, LADOT’s community outreach will delay the resurfacing work. It is true that StreetsLA can resurface a street with little fanfare, while LADOT does have to do community outreach (according to the CAO, which can take up to “over a year”). However, this can be mitigated by standardizing outreach, and not overdoing it. We should not be asking permission to save lives and make our city more multimodal on a plan that Council has already passed.
This is where the CAO shows his bias against safer streets. He claims that the “unintended consequence of realigning these funds is that [repaving] could slow down to a point where the overall City street system deteriorates, resulting in less safe streets and higher costs to maintain those streets.” Did you get that? If we implement the mobility plan, the streets might be less safe (!?).

6. The CAO says that “should the Sidewalk Repair Program funds be reallocated to implement the Mobility Plan 2035, that it will need to be “coordinated” with the Bureau of Engineering to ensure that the City continues to meet its obligations under the Willits Settlement”

Again, the CAO is pitting the interests of pedestrians against cyclists and transit riders. This is a false choice —and the Mobility Plan 2035 would implement safety improvements for all road users—including pedestrians.

Overall, it’s good that the City—eight years after passing the Mobility Plan 2035—is finally looking at what it would cost to actually implement.

With respect to Healthy Streets LA, the measure is cost neutral. HSLA doesn’t tell the City when or where to repave. It simply says that when you repave, you have to implement the Mobility Plan’s 2035 elements, which could include traffic calming on residential streets, bus lanes, or bike lanes, for example.

We hope that the City recognizes the importance of keeping vulnerable road users safe, and building out safe networks of corridors for pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and drivers. Our status quo is untenable, and we need to take urgent action to save lives and keep our city livable.