But wait! Then again, maybe the do care about non-motorized transportation. The other night I was unable to connect to the internet. This forced me to pass time digging through the voluminous "Downloads" folder on my hard drive in search of something interesting (and to delete stuff that wasn't).
I had just gotten done deleting an old bunch of .pdf files when I came across one named "NFIA2694.pdf".
NFIA2694.pdf is an LADOT Traffic Count Summary from March 14, 1994 done at the corner of North Figueroa Street and Avenue 26 in the Cypress Park neighborhood in North East Los Angeles between the hours of 7 to 10 am and 3 to 6 pm. This area has been written about in the New York Time in an April 9, 2009 piece by Jennifer Steinhauer entitled "Giving Lessons in Traffic Safety at Middle Schools". The Times piece ended with a City Attorney quote about handing out safety vests to parents to make the street safer for the hundreds of kids walking to and from school, many of whom get banged into by errant cars.
This is a one-page document, filled with numbers of extrapolated (and observed) automobile traffic volumes through this busy intersection. This intersection is one of the most car-packed intersections on North Figueroa Street, which makes sense given the proximity to the 5 and 110 freeway exits and entrances nearby.
One section at the top of the page, which I must have passed over before, caught my attention. It contains a table of the observed numbers of "Dual-Wheeled", Bikes, and Buses moving through this intersection for the day. What?! The LADOT counts bike trips?!
Further down the page are cryptic little tables that indicate "XING S/L" and "XING N/L" - which are not part of the car count numbers and so lead me to believe that these are, in fact, pedestrian crossing counts for this intersection!
What is going on here?
I honestly have no idea. This survey is from 1994. The LADOT could have just been doing this in the North East area. This could just be an old way of doing things that they've since rejected. Perhaps the type of count taking place is rarely done.
The machine-outputted formatting of the page leads me to believe that this data was at one time was (or perhaps currently still is?) stored in an electronic format.
Let me just get internet crazy with caps to make my little revelation clear:
PEDESTRIAN and BIKE COUNT DATA going back decades are potentially digitally stored in the archives of the LADOT.
Why doesn't the Transportation Committee have this data before them in a digital or printed map? Why doesn't a Google Map exist with this data? Why aren't there community plans with desired traffic counts by mode split?
I've been a long time critic of the LADOT for not properly collecting data about pedestrian and bicyclist (and bus) trips. This data, I have argued, is essential in the political fight to re-orient our streets towards these modes of transportation (and away from private automobile trips).
BikesideLA has grabbed the State of California's crash data for LA county and turned it into a Google Map (LA Bike Map). The LACBC has organized a massive bike count, and has published their results online. Yet the LADOT, with its thousands of employees and reams of data on both crashes and pedestrian and bike traffic counts has not published an annual or quarterly report about these modes!
Why not arm your DOT spokespeople with reports about how small bicycling and pedestrian numbers are compared to cars (not just lame anecdotes and references to "car culture")? Why not shut down politicians with reports on data rather than innuendo about the power of drivers interests at re-election time?
Why not? Because once you let it be known that you are tracking pedestrian and bicycle numbers someone is bound to ask, "Well, if the numbers are low, how do we increase the number of bikes?" or "If there are so many crashes here, how are we going to make this intersection safer for pedestrians to cross?".
That would cede control of the debate about transportation away from the black box of engineering expertise that brought us the push-button crosswalk signal (forever ending the debate about whether our streets are safe to cross and shifting it to whether or not we can afford to install a signal), the ATSAC signal-timing fiasco in Downtown LA (which has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that one man picking his nose causes traffic delays during rush hour, not the timing of the lights), and many more triumphs of the privately owned (publicly subsidized) automobile over the local economic interests and quality of life of Los Angeles's residents.
The LADOT is literally killing us to help people in San Marino drive into town, make some dough, and speed out of it to spend it elsewhere. The data on pedestrian, bus, and bike volumes and crashes is vital to stopping this practice. We need to have this information move front and center in the debates about quality of life, economic vitality, sustainability, and community health issues.
Can I get a a councilman's second on that motion?
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