A recently released guide, Safe Streets, Healthy Families Advocacy Guide, offers Los Angeles neighborhood residents a suite of tools and resources to improve street conditions through advocacy and education. The safety advocacy guide, created by Los Angeles Walks, Best Start Metro LA, and Best Start Panorama City, empowers residents with community-led solutions to reduce roadway injuries and fatalities.
Walkability is an important part of a thriving community. As noted in the safe streets guide, historical infrastructure disinvestment in marginalized communities has resulted in poorly maintained roads where unmediated speeding is the norm. This is especially true in Los Angeles, where speeding is a leading cause of roadway fatalities. For every increase in vehicle speed by ten miles per hour, the likelihood a person will survive a crash reduces dramatically. When a car traveling twenty miles per hour hits a person walking, the pedestrian has a ninety percent survival rate. However, if the same car hit that pedestrian forty miles per hour, the probability of survival drops to ten percent.
