Ending traffic deaths in the car capital of the country

Community safety

City of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a citywide benefit)

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

In 2015, the City of Los Angeles declared itself to be a Vision Zero city, and committed to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025. Ten years later, traffic deaths are at an all-time high and pedestrian deaths have doubled to over 300 per year. In 2023 and 2024, the City passed a grim milestone, with more people dying by traffic deaths than by homicides each year. In the same time period, traffic deaths became the number one killer of children, surpassing firearms. Los Angeles, as the “car capital” of the United States and also its second largest city, sets a powerful example for the rest of the country. We cannot make empty promises while people continue to die in our streets. This project will be both a retrospective of what went wrong in the last 10 years, and a resource to provide hope and tools to reverse this horrible trend, with the ultimate goal of achieving zero traffic deaths in the City of Los Angeles.

We will solve this problem by activating Angelenos, motivating them through storytelling and data, and giving them easy-to-use tools to apply political pressure so that politicians expedite the changes needed to achieve Vision Zero. The website and campaign will be launched in December 2025, on the 10th anniversary of Vision Zero in the City of Los Angeles.
Our project will:
Analyze the Vision Zero program using data. While broadly LA’s streets have gotten more dangerous - we want to put them in context with local and national trends.
Understand the anecdotal history of Vision Zero in LA. We will conduct interviews with Vision Zero staff and other advocates to build an oral history of street safety over the last decade.
Create a path to Vision Zero. We will analyze the last decade of crash data to generate crash tree diagrams that will put us on a data driven path to achieve zero annual traffic deaths.
Armed with data, we will translate our findings into a public facing website and media campaign. 
To many, the idea of “zero” traffic deaths seems far fetched. We will explain not only how this goal is possible, but realistic, based on proven solutions from cities that have actually achieved Vision Zero. Visitors will be able to, with a few clicks, email the relevant people in power and demand change in their neighborhood.
Lastly, we will launch a media campaign with the website. We will use a mix of stories from victims of traffic violence, statistics and visual storytelling.

If our work is successful, we will no longer pay lip service to Vision Zero, and will actually commit the required focus and resources to achieving it. On the ground, the difference will be palpable. Achieving Vision Zero means Angelenos being able to cross the street without the fear of getting hit by a car. It means kids being able to bike themselves to school because the streets are that safe. It means that Los Angeles will no longer lead the nation in traffic deaths. And if the car capital and second largest city of the country can achieve that, it will set an example for cities across the country.