The Brief

Los Angeles has failed to meet its Vision Zero goals.

That's the conclusion of a newly released audit, which found the city's long-running effort to eliminate traffic deaths by this year has been impeded by a lack of cohesion across departments, insufficient political support and an imbalanced approach.

In 2015, the city adopted Vision Zero, a policy framework from Sweden with the principle that no one should be killed in traffic. Then-Mayor Eric Garcetti set benchmarks for reducing traffic fatalities over a decade, culminating in the final goal of getting to zero traffic deaths by 2025.

The opposite has happened. Since the program’s adoption, traffic fatalities in L.A. have increased. In 2024, 303 people died in traffic fatalities in L.A., according to preliminary LAPD data reviewed by LAist.

“Eliminating traffic deaths is an ambitious goal but remains the correct one,” a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation said in a statement to LAist. “LADOT will continue to pursue and promote policy changes along with the most effective engineering design principles and continue to invest in proven treatments that make our streets safer.”

What’s the audit?

Following direction from the L.A. City Council in 2022, the office of the City Administrative Officer spent $500,000 on an independent contractor to evaluate the first seven years of Vision Zero.

The office of the City Administrative Officer and Department of Transportation wrote a report accompanying the audit, which was released Friday, with recommendations for the L.A. City Council “to relaunch the Vision Zero Program with a more deliberate and collaborative approach.”

What did the audit find?

While the Department of Transportation leads the city’s Vision Zero work, nearly every related project requires the participation of other agencies, including Engineering, Street Services, the LAPD and more.

In his directive establishing the program, Garcetti envisioned a Vision Zero Steering Committee made up of representatives from departments citywide to coordinate the implementation of traffic safety projects.

By mid-2018, that committee had stopped meeting, the audit found. The reduction in participation resulted in the loss of a “useful forum to collaborate on Vision Zero goals and nothing quite replaced this level of interaction,” the audit said.

The last time the Department of Transportation revised its action plan, the document that coordinates projects across city agencies, was in 2018.

The audit identified 56 “actions and strategies” from that plan that were meant to be completed by the end of 2020, including projects focused on street design and lighting and Vision Zero education campaigns.

Half of those projects remain incomplete as of the end of 2023, the audit found.

According to interviews the audit is based on, “the level of enthusiasm at City Hall” for Vision Zero has decreased since the program was launched.

“Some of the reasons cited include the pandemic, conflicts of personality, lack of total buy-in for implementation, disagreements over how the program should be administered and scaling issues,” the audit said.

Without political support and lack of communication from council members about the program, Vision Zero becomes less effective, the audit said.

“As a governing body, this city does not treat traffic violence as the public health crisis that it has become,” Damian Kevitt, the executive director of Streets Are For Everyone, told LAist.

The audit also noted that traffic enforcement in L.A. has fallen because of LAPD staffing shortages and concerns of over-policing.

“There has been a pattern observed over the years in terms of declining [driving under the influence] arrests and total citations related to safety,” the audit stated.

The audit also pointed out that the city overly focused on infrastructure and engineering, to the detriment of public education and regular monitoring of the program’s progress.

Mayor Karen Bass' office and the LAPD did not immediately respond to LAist's requests for comment.

Cyclists ride across the Sixth Street Bridge in Los Angeles in 2022.

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Trevor Stamp

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For LAist

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What’s the status of traffic fatalities in L.A.?

In 2015, the year L.A. launched Vision Zero, around 240 people people died in traffic collisions, according to state data. The number has not fallen below 280 in any year since.

And by 2024, it had increased to 303, according to an LAist review of LAPD data.

Progress on reducing traffic fatalities nationally has slowed over the last decade. The problem became worse during the pandemic, likely due to an increase in riskier behaviors, according to UC Berkeley transportation safety researcher Matthew Raifman.

Over the last decade, traffic fatalities in L.A. grew faster than the national average. His findings are based on data from 2023, which is the most recent year national data is available.

The city has more pedestrian and cyclist fatalities than the other four most populated U.S. cities, Raifman told LAist.

“That’s deeply problematic because [walking and biking] are an important mode of transportation and something that we're trying to incentivize in many American cities,” Raifman said.

A safer future?

Since the audit was completed at the end of 2023, the city's Department of Transportation identified a new network of streets that see an outsized number of collisions resulting in death or serious injury based on updated data. The department also evaluated the effectiveness of interventions to make streets safer, which the department’s spokesperson said will be used to guide future projects.

The city is expected to have automated speed cameras installed on dangerous streets by the middle of next year as a result of state legislation signed in 2023. The audit points to the success similar cameras have had in helping to reduce traffic fatalities in other cities.

The spokesperson from the Department of Transportation said city officials will “pursue additional changes in legislation" to ensure consistent enforcement and accountability for risky driving behavior such as running red lights, driving under the influence, distracted driving and excessive speed.

At the end of 2024, Bass directed the city to establish L.A.’s first Capital Improvement Plan, a long term planning document that nearly every other major U.S. city uses to prioritize and allocate funding for infrastructure projects. The city is still very early on in developing this plan, but it could help alleviate some of the coordination and planning woes the audit found.

When you sit down to fill out your mail-in ballot for the June 2 primary election (we have a guide for that, have you heard?), you may notice something curious on your ballot envelope.

There are holes in it. Two small holes next to the signature line, and one on the other side.

What’s the deal?

This is a question an LAist reader asked our Voter Game Plan team:

It turns out the envelope holes have two functions. For one, the holes next to the signature line are supposed to help visually impaired people find the signature line so that they can sign their ballot in private before submitting it.

And two: When election workers start processing the ballots to be counted, the holes help them confirm that the envelopes don’t still have ballots left inside.

These holes have been part of the envelope design for many election cycles now — according to the L.A. County registrar’s office, they were included based on a recommendation from the nonprofit Center for Civic Design.

Rest assured, they are not meant for anybody to be able to see your votes inside. Even if you try to make your vote visible, the holes just don’t line up.

Don’t forget to check out our Voter Game Plan guides while you’re filling out your ballot.

General Motors agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties for selling driving data of hundreds of thousands of California motorists to data brokers, allegedly without their consent.

The settlement, announced Friday, is the largest ever for violations of the California Consumer Privacy Act, a 2018 law that requires companies to tell consumers about how their data is shared and to respect requests to stop the sharing.

It stemmed from an investigation by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, several county district attorneys, and the California Privacy Protection Agency, which enforces the privacy act. They said General Motors misled drivers who paid for the emergency roadside and navigation service OnStar and made approximately $20 million from the unlawful sale of their data between 2020 and 2024. The information included names, location information, driving behavior, and contact information, Bonta said, which went to the data brokers LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk Analytics.

“This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians,” Bonta said in a press release.

The settlement also requires GM to stop selling data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years and submit privacy assessments to the state, among other provisions. It followed a similar agreement between the Federal Trade Commission and GM earlier this year and California settlements with Honda and Ford over the past 14 months for their own violations of the privacy act.

California’s investigation of GM began after a 2024 New York Times investigation found GM collected data about millions of drivers nationwide and sold it to insurance companies in order to charge the drivers higher premiums. Californians were not impacted by those premium hikes because a state law prohibits insurers from using driving data to set insurance rates, Bonta said.

Bonta told CalMatters at a press conference Friday that it’s unclear if location data collected by General Motors was used by other companies to make predictions about the prices people are willing to pay for goods. That practice is better known as surveillance pricing and can leverage location data. Target paid $5 million to settle a suit from San Diego County’s district attorney over its alleged use of location for the technique. Bonta’s office began an investigation into the surveillance pricing practices of businesses in January.

“I understand that there could be some overlap and maybe we'll discover something in our investigation in surveillance pricing, but that wasn't the focus of this case,” he said.

Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman said the case started with one person finding location data in a report they requested about the data collected on them. That discovery, he added, led to investigations by journalists, prosecutors, and regulators.

“This case shows more than anything that one consumer can make a huge difference,” he said.

Though the settlement isn’t much compared to the $2.7 billion in net income that General Motors made last year, Hochman called it an indication that companies should expect higher penalties in the future. California reached a privacy law violation settlement with Disney in February for $2.75 million, previously the largest of its kind.

In a statement shared with CalMatters, General Motors spokesperson Charlotte McCoy said, “This agreement addresses Smart Driver, a product we discontinued in 2024, and reinforces steps we’ve taken to strengthen our privacy practices. Vehicle connectivity is central to a modern and safe driving experience, which is why we’re committed to being clear and transparent with our customers about our practices and the choices and control they have over their information.”

Californians will soon have a new protection against companies that use their data without their consent. Starting August 1, the more than 500 data brokers registered with the state must comply with requests California residents can make using an online tool known as the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, or DROP. The privacy protection agency introduced the tool earlier this year.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

For nearly a year, people walking down Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown have passed a small patch of what used to be one of the few public park spaces in the neighborhood. It’s now locked behind a tall chain link fence.

Inside, the grass is overgrown and trash is piled up along the edges. The memorial to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — built at the site where he was assassinated in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel — has fallen into disrepair.

The Los Angeles Unified School District fenced off RFK Inspiration Park, located on Wilshire Boulevard. Nearly a year later, the district is considering reopening the space, but only to students at the adjacent RFK Community Schools.

That’s frustrating for some neighbors, who say the park used to belong to everyone.

“I remember the park being open and suddenly a few months after, it was gated,” said Vanessa Aikens, who lives a few blocks away. “I was just wondering why they gated the area because there seemed to be a lot of people interacting with it.”

There has been little information relayed to the community about why.

“We have a number of our members who live right around there and so there’s an angle of access to green space, the access to a safe space for our homeless neighbors,” said Yuval Yossefy, treasurer of Ktown for All, an all-volunteer grassroots organization serving Koreatown’s unhoused community. “This went basically unnoticed.”

Enrique Legaspi, assistant principal at RFK Community Schools, said the school and the district are discussing using the park again, including for classes and student activities. LAUSD confirmed that school leaders have expressed strong interest in using the space for outdoor learning, art programs and student wellness activities.

Officials plan to involve the school community and nearby residents as plans take shape, but they have not given a timeline or said whether the park will reopen to the public.

Koreatown lacks parks

For years, the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks operated and maintained the park under an agreement with the school district dating back to 2010. At the time, the public was allowed to use the space.

Last March, the department stepped away. By then, it had already been taking on costs outside what the 2010 agreement required.

“RAP communicated uncertainty about its ability to sustain long-term maintenance due to staffing and funding constraints,” said Deirdra Boykin, a department spokesperson.

For people who live nearby, the loss of the park has been simple and immediate: there’s nowhere else like it.

“There are no parks around where I live,” Aikens said. “Now I just walk straight down the street.”

In a neighborhood with such limited park space, the memorial park went relatively unnoticed.

“There definitely isn’t enough green space here,” said Emere Alademir, 23, who lives nearby. “I’m originally from Toronto and everywhere they have green space.”

People who never used the park say they would visit if it reopened.

“I’ve never actually gone in but I would be open to coming here if it reopens,” said Wendy Kim, 70, who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years. “Why not? It’s good for everyone.”

Kim, who splits her time between LA and Seoul, said the parks in Seoul are much better maintained than the ones in LA, and that when she craves nature, she travels out of the city for a hike.

“But every place is different and here, the homeless issue is out of hand. That’s just the reality,” she said.

The fence goes up

Public records obtained by Yossefy and reviewed by The LA Local show that city and LAUSD officials coordinated the park’s handoff around a May 22 encampment removal and cleanup, after which LAUSD took control of the site and moved forward with fencing it off. The emails do not explicitly state that the park was fenced because unhoused people were there, but they show encampment removal was a central part of the transition plan.

Volunteers with Ktown For All, who do weekly outreach to the unhoused community in the area, said they were used to seeing people at the park every Saturday.

“It’s just like all of a sudden the fence was there,” said Nicolas Emmons, who has been doing outreach near RFK since around 2021.

Emmons and others said that while some unhoused residents stayed in the park, the majority of the park was open and available.

“At its peak, it was only a small percentage of the park that was being used by people to live in,” he said. “Some of the people that lived there even took it upon themselves to clean the area around their setup.”

Eunice Jeon, another volunteer with the organization, said they had built relationships with people there over several years.

“We regularly saw people there and had built relationships with people there,” she said. “They respected and treated the park well.”

Jeon added that despite restricting access, the closure has not visibly improved the space.

“If anything I would say the park is in worse state ever since the fence has gone up despite nobody being in there,” she said.

Jeon said many individuals she encountered were navigating complex barriers to housing and services, often caught in bureaucratic loops that made it difficult to access help.

“A lot of the time they’re limited by transportation. Some services don’t allow certain things. They need an address, but in order to get something mailed, they need their driver’s license, which they don’t have because they don’t have an address,” she said.

In email chains included in the public records, officials also discussed installing permanent wrought iron fencing at the site. When asked if that remains the plan, LAUSD said the project is still in the “planning phase” and that details, including potential site features, have not been finalized.

“If the park is fenced off, nobody can access it. It doesn’t provide you any use,” Yoseffy said. “There are a number of people that can’t access this park, whether they were sleeping in this park, or they used the park to exercise, if they liked to sit and read — none of those things can happen there anymore because it’s completely closed off.”

Public records show little evidence of public notice. One email mentions posting notices at the park ahead of the cleanup, but there was no formal announcement made to residents that the park — which had been open to the public for years — would be closed and no longer accessible.

“I think that a public space is meant to be used by the public, including the unhoused,” Jeon said. “That’s something they need to address instead of locking up the parks. That’s a failure of the city. Kicking them out won’t keep anyone safer if they have fewer and fewer places to go.”

LA Local reporter Marina Peña contributed to this report.