Negotiating with the Mayor's Office

Hey there. It's Robin from PRX and I want to take a moment to tell you about a big year long series from this day, a history podcast here at Radio Topia. twenty twenty six is America's two hundred fiftieth birthday this is where. And folks over at this day have requested that I try and say semi quincentennial ten times fast . Anyway, it's been two hundred and fifty years since the Declaration of Independence and over at this day they are in the middle of a year long series called Fifty Weeks That Shaped America . This day is doing deep dives each week on the stories from two hundred fifty years of US history that brought us to this very complicated moment. Some of them are new perspectives on huge moments like the Civil War or Prohibition . Others are lesser discussed stories that still had a massive impact, like the Transcontinental Railroad or the so called hard hat riots of the nineteen seventies. 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This week I wanted to try something a little different . You see, we live in a world of problems . Some are possible to solve with a phone and a mic sitting behind a computer , but there are so many way more than I can ever solve on this show that either require boots on the ground in a specific locale or simply more time and know how than the hyperfix team can expend . But the good news is that problem solving isn't a skill that's unique to podcasts. As much as we live in a world of problems , we also live in a world of problem solvers , people whose special skills are an absolute shamelessness in bugging people for answers that they want. Patience and a willingness to try just about anything to fix stuff . And, you know, we here at Hyperfix just kind of think it's a shame that they don't get more attention . So this week's episode is the first in what I hope will become a new series, which I'm calling hyperfixers. In these episodes, we'll find someone out in the world making a difference in their own small weird way . Someone so hyper focused on one specific problem that they throw everything they've got at it . And then I'll share that story with you . This week , crosswalk Johnny . Frankly, I was just super depressed. This is Jonathan Hale, Johnny when you're not using his full name. He's a second year law student at UCLA , and this period of feeling super depressed that he's talking about happened at the beginning of twenty twenty five . Trump was back in the White House. He had a super majority in all three branches of government, and the city of Los Angeles , the city that Johnny had only recently moved to , was literally on fire . I was like, so many big things are happening in the world and I feel like everything's going for the worse and these problems are too big for me to be able to make a change . That feeling of overwhelming helplessness can pacify people into inaction . But for Johnny, it motivated him to find some small part of his world where he could make a difference. And as an avid cyclist, pedestrian, and advocate for public safety, he found his cause in his own backyard , or I guess, at the corner of his block . But let's rewind a bit. So in twenty fifteen, Los Angeles became one of the first American cities to sign on to a program called Vision Zero. If you've never heard of this, Vision Zero is a global initiative that started in Sweden with the lofty goal to create a system of roads so safe that there are zero fatalities . And to do that, it prescribes a number of solutions . Some as mundane as just lowering speed limits, some is radical as limiting certain types of cars and complete street redesigns that afford dedicated separated space to pedestrian traffic. In twenty nineteen, LA released its own vision zero action plan, which included adding separated bike lanes, pedestrian activated flashing crosswalks, better lighting on roadways , and much, much more . But well , what has happened is the streets have gotten a lot more dangerous . A couple of years ago the city council commissioned an audit of the Vision Zero program in which they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a consulting firm who basically told them that the reason that Vision Zero's fail ed and thousands of people have died is because a lack of institutional urgency, the failure to coordinate between city departments , lack of enthusiasm , hesitancy, general unwillingness to do things that might be politically unpopular . There's just all these different factors contributing to Vision Zero doesn't get implemented. Nobody takes it seriously and a lot of people die. Right now cars are the leading cause of death for kids in LA. I think there's something like two hundred and ninety traffic deaths in twenty twenty five , which is a marked reduction from twenty twenty four actually. So kudos to the city for that. I think I don't I forget the exact number, but twenty twenty four was over three hundred twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four were two consecutive years where there were more traffic deaths than homicides in the city of Los Angeles. So when Johnny first heard about this audit, explaining the reason that the city wasn't implementing any of these lifesaving changes to the street , he rolled up his sleeves and decided to get to work . At this point, Johnny didn't think he was going to become the face of guerrilla pedestrian safety in Los Angeles. All he knew was that this seemed like a problem he wanted to help with. So one facet of LA's proposed action plan for Vision Zero was the creation of high visibility crosswalks , literally just painting the pavement to clearly delineate spaces where cars must yield to pedestrians when they're trying to cross the street . Because even though crosswalks don't need to be painted in order to be legal, there's irrefutable evidence showing that when they are painted , safety outcomes improve significantly. It's also just a cheap and fast way to improve safety conditions in a neighborhood, so it's kind of a no brainer. Unfortunately , like so many other parts of the Vision Zero Plan, the city seemed to have issues following through with its crosswalk initiative , which meant that some particularly dangerous intersections in LA , intersections where one or more people had been fatally struck by cars had been left with unmarked crosswalks . And instead of just allowing that to be the way it is, Johnny signed up to volunteer with a group called the Crosswalks Collective. The Crosswalks Collective is a coalition of LA citizens that descend upon a location wearing masks to obscure their identities. They paint a crosswalk as quickly and unobtrusively as possible, and then get the hell out of there . And the reason they do that, of course, is because painting the street without a permit , whether or not it's for the public good is considered an act of vandalism. I reached out to them, asked if I could get involved, and they brought me out to a crosswalk painting, learned how to do the whole thing g.ave They me a stencil . We were doing this. It was great. People were coming out. Oh, your car speed through this area all the time. We needed this. Thank you guys, you know, this it was this wonderful community gathering to do something to make the area a little better, a little safer, just like our small act of resistance . I think the moment that radicalized me was I was so proud of that first crosswalk that I painted in Hollywood, and I circled back to it a few weeks later. It was gone. It was like it had never existed. It was just a race . It was gone . Yeah, yeah. The city had come through with a five person crew and a giant machine and blasted the paint right off the pavement . And I realized that hadn't been happening. So it was like this protracted wack and mole between the cross collective and the city where they would go around, paint these frostslock so we could come by a little while later and remove them. And I was like, there's no way that we're cool with this. Like we should be demanding answers for why this is a priority the city has pretty much stopped really paving its streets . It takes so long to get a pothole filled in LA. Sidewalks are cracked and dangerous and inaccessible for people with disabilities . Like why are we prioritizing this? Can't we just leave it? But those were questions that the Crosswalk Collective was not prepared to ask because again, the work they were doing, the work they had been doing for years was being done anonymously . And it seemed like it had to be, because again, regardless of how good their intentions were , what they were doing was illegal . So they couldn't confront the city without revealing their identities or their act ions . And that's when Johnny got the idea that ultimately led us to this conversation . Because once he realized that the city obviously does have the resources for this kind of work and the ability to mobilize those resources rapidly, he felt like he needed answers about why those resources weren't being used to fulfill the city's commitment to keep pedestrians safe . And it seemed like the best way for him to get those answers was to force the city into a public conversation about its priorities. So after that, I was like, I'm going to start my own organization . And we're going to go public with this because what we want to do is we want to prove this point about like why is the city prioritizing this? Why can the city unilaterally decide to get rid of crosswalks but it takes three years , two studies, community outreach to actually put in those things that are going to save lives. So Johnny formed a new group, a public group that would operate in broad daylight without face masks. He called the group People's Vision Zero as a nod to the city's failed safety initiative , and then he quickly gathered volunteers to help him get paint on the ground. For their first effort, the group chose a cluster of unmarked crosswalks that connect Johnny's West LA neighborhood to its local park. Stoner Park, which is this community hub. It's where I walk my dog often. It's where I run into my neighbors . There's a lot of schools nearby that use Stoner Park as their field because they themselves don't have a field. So there's a ton of kids walking around . It's also a place where there's a lot of summer camps. There's like a community pool, there's a recent. So there's a lot of foot traffic in this area . But the streets surrounding the park are a popular cutth forrough cars. And as my LA Native producers have informed to me, people really do go racing down those streets. So the plan was to talk to everyone in the neighborhood , get their buy in on this project, then they'd paint these unpermitted crosswalks before the beginning of summer camp season . And then after a couple months, they'd leak the story to the press and see how long it took the city to respond . And that's exactly what they did Using the skills he learned from the crosswalk collective, Johnny coached his team of neighborhood volunteers through the process of painting code compliant crosswalks . And the whole thing went off without a hitch. Everyone was super enthusiastic about the project . And when Johnny leaked the story to the press , there was an immediate burst of media attention. And it was like seventy two hours where all these news outlets were coming to the park to talk to me and my neighbors and then bam. The city removed them in one day. Like we weren't like, oh gee , the consequences of our actions , but we were surprised that it happened so quickly after the story got media attention. But of course, this was all part of the plan to draw the city into an open and public dialogue about the safety of its streets. So after they got removed, I talked to my neighbors again and I was like, guys, if you're upset about this, we're going to email DOT, we're going to email our local city council member and we're going to ask for safety improvements or at least like some answers as to why this was a priority. Like why did we need to spend money on this? I wrote like a statement about it. I was like, I'm going to repaint them next week if we don't get an answer and then the city will just have to deal with that. Which is funny. The idea of like extorting the city by threatening to paint a crosswalk, you know? Like I'm the joker or something. Like, oh if you don't so we did that and the city reached out to me, they repainted the cross walks, all four of them within a week. And then that led to our first meeting with the mayor's office. When Johnny walked into his first meeting with the mayor's office, he was ready to ask some serious questions about the city's commitment to the safety of its streets . He wanted to know why they'd spend taxpayer money unmaking these crosswalks only to remake them again in more or less the exact same way , and what tangible steps they were planning to take to uphold their commitment to vision Zero . The general tone was like, Oh, you're a good kid. You got good intentions, but you're young and idealistic and you know, you just don't get that there are these processes that we have to abide by in such and it's a little condescending to be frank and in my head I'm like, well that's the reason we're protesting is because there are these processes that make these lifesaving improvements so difficult. It obviously wasn't a great meeting, but Johnny wasn't deterred . He told the mayor's office that he planned to keep painting crosswalks until they either publicly condemned his actions or took tangible steps to make the stre ets safer . And since they did neither, he rallied his team and kept on painting crosswalks. How are you choosing the places where you paint these crosswalks? There is a really useful data source, UC Bergley's Transportation Herry Mapping System, or Tim's , which provides a data set of crashes and vehicle collisions. And so I was able to isolate a list of where pedestrians had been hit and injured or killed by cars in the last ten years . So the period which L. A. was supposed to reduce traffic deaths to zero. And we were choosing intersections , residential corners where there's a four way stop where pedestrians have been hit and that was pretty much her criteria . Have you talked to any people who have experienced a loss from a traffic accident in the city about the work you're doing ? Yeah, I mean it's tough because the work that we're doing doesn't bring people back . Hopefully we'll prevent it from happening in future One thing that we did do we painted a crosswalks at the corner of Fort New Hampshire in Koreatown , which is corner where a nine year old boy was hit and killed by an RV driver. And it's just sad you think about that boy's life he was born the same year that LA committed to ending traffic deaths by the year he died . And if we had taken our goals seriously , he would still be alive . And I think that's underscored by this particular corner , there were plans going back to twenty eleven and funding going back to twenty fifteen . So think about the year twenty fifteen . LA commits to ending traffic deaths and we have plans and funding for a roundabout at this intersection . And this child comes into the world . And then ten years later none of those things happen. There's no roundabout. Even though there's plans on fighting for it, LA has totally failed to reduce traffic deaths and a kid dies as a result. And that's, you know, it's it's hard. And so we painted that corner, the city is replacing it with with a roundabout and that action like finally shed light on this, I guess. But it's too little, too late . For six months, the People's Vision Zero continued to target dangerous intersections across Los Angeles . And Johnny continued to operate with as much transparency as possible . In addition to notifying the neighborhoods of his plans for p ainting crosswalks , he also always notified the mayor's office . I would email the mayor's office that we were going to be painting certain corners. Here's why p.ed Aestrian was hit and killed here. We're going to be panic at this date, this time. We will be closing off the street. Here's a picture of our previous work. So you know what to expect. We would literally email the mayor's office telling them that we would be doing this including how yeah, including the corner that I painted the day I got arrested . That's after the break Welcome back to the show . So before the break, Jonathan Hale had moved to LA, found that the city's Vision Zero Initiative was in fact not working at all, and thought he might be able to make a small difference simply by organizing people to repaint crosswalks, especially on corners where there had been injuries or deaths. So typically when Johnny identified a crosswalk that needed painting, he would start by flying the neighborhood . He'd talk to people, tell them about this group he was working with, making it very clear that they're not city workers, but regular citizens who paint crosswalks to protest for safer streets and more effective government . And usually, people were very enthusiastic about it . But on december seventh of twenty twenty five , that was not so much the case. On that day, Johnny and his team got to the location early and got to work. So yeah, we were just out there doing our thing and some people, just some neighbors seemed like pretty upset I think I think they see us they're like, oh this what's this liberal to foolery or something? And you know, so somebody did call Yeah, they assume like we have an agenda or something. So anyways, somebody called nine hundred and eleven. They called police officers to the scene . And we had interacted with police before. We had had friendly conversations with police where I said, look , we have the shared goal of wanting to improve public safety. We're not. We don't have a permit for this. Technically it is vandalism, but we're protesting for a clause and I think we have a shared goal to some extent. And they just let us go. They let us keep doing our thing . So when the police came, that's how I approached the situation . I was like, Hey, how's it going officer? No, I don't have a permit for this . Here's what I do and who I am . I understand that this is not permitted , but we're protesters expressing our right to free speech basically . And we happen to be doing this thing. Here's why, basically. And this guy was just not having it . In the middle of the street, surrounded by volunteers and community members , this police officer pulls Johnny's hands behind his back and then slaps a set of hand cuffs around his wrist . It didn't while that was happening. My friends were videotaping . Oh, it happens. I was like, this is crazy. Like this is I can't believe this is happening . I mean, I can't, but like it's really happening. One of the things that's so striking about this video is just how benign Johnny looks while being handcuffed. He's wearing this big floppy hat and a reflective yellow vest , and he looks about as calm as one can look being handcuffed by the police. He looks more like an elementary school crossing guard than any kind of vandal . And that only emphasizes the absurd ity of what's happening. Can we get your name and batch number? Yeah Wilson four eight one four five eight four city property without a permit on nice yacht record all your own but he bagged up or we'll take everybody to jail. So he put me in cuffs and then I kind of told my team to pack it up and you know my team was awesome to put everything away and that was pretty much it. I was in cuffs for about a half an hour, which is ridiculous. I got a citation for vandalism. They did not need to put me in cuffs to give me a citation for vandalism. I not. I was not a flight risk . But Sabita was great optically for me . Later that day, Johnny edited the video together with an explanation of what happened. And when he posted it to Instagram, the video immediately exploded. The video was reposted and reshared over over and over again Millions of people were watching it, people from all over the country, people from all over the world . And also people who produced the show . It just seemed to strike a chord with everyone who felt frustrated with the failures of their various governments, everyone who felt powerless to enact changes needed in their own communities , and everyone who had been a victim of car violence , which many of you know is me too . And so they took to the comments section to share their own stories of frustration and to cheer on the efforts of this guy who wasn't waiting for someone to tell him it was okay to make his neighborhood safer . I had no idea it was going to blow up like that. I mean right now there's something like twelve million views and after I made that I got a call from that was Sunday. The next day I got a call from the mayor's office and they're like, Hey , you want to beat? And I'm like, yeah, that's what I've been trying to do for the past couple of months. After his less than successful first meeting with the mayor's office, Johnny realized that if he were to ever have the opportunity to meet with the office again , he would have to go about it in a different way . For better or worse, People's Vision Zero was twisting arms here, and they didn't want to be doing that just for the sake of doing that , but if they wanted meaningful outcomes, and really that's, all they wanted . Then they were going to have to present a coherent plan for how to make these outcomes achievable. So with the second meeting, I was like, Dude, we have to be so prepared. We have to know everything , find all of the contingencies, the legal precedent , all that stuff. People's Vision Zero had two demands. The first was that they wanted the city to publicly recommit to Vision Zero and state that as a priority . The second demand is that they wanted the city to implement a tactical urbanism program that would allow volunteers to organize in their community to make legal reasonable modifications to the public right of way, the way they'd already been doing with People's Vision Zero and the Crosswalk Collective. Tactical urbanism is the idea of making mindful modifications to public space in a way that benefits pedest rians , road users and people seeking to share public space. It can involve a lot of things like crosswalks , bus stop benches, the creation of pop up parks, pop up bike lanes, things of that nature typically built by teams of volunteers and strategically implemented to make this point about urbanism and use of land. One of the things that's so great about tactical urbanism is that it allows cities to test infrastructural changes before committing capital to them on a more temporary basis, quickly and without a ton of politicking. And maybe that sounds crazy, but it's not without preced ent. Chattanooga, Tennessee has a good program. Nashville, Atlanta, Oakland, Richmond. There's plenty of other cities that have programs that allow the citizens to make modifications to the public right of way. So this is not groundbreaking stuff. And if his verbal pitch wasn't enough, Johnny also wrote a thirty nine page white paper detailing exactly how it could be done. And so I presented that to the mayor's office at our meeting. I was like, here's what we've been doing. Here's why here's the scope of the problem. And here's how you could allow us to continue doing this legally if you so choose. The mayor's office promised to read through Johnny's proposal and then get back to him with a proposal of their own. And that's where things stand now. we're waiting for the city to get back to us . And then I've been holding off on painting crosswalks to allow them to work . But if the city continues to drag its feet on this , we can just go back to the streets and now I have a platform. So I can say, Hey guys, we're painting crosswalks this time this day and it'll be awesome. We can throw a block part , have a whole community thing . And who's going to be against that, right? That's kind of our last resort. We would love to be able to do this legally , but if the city is dragging its feet, we'll do it. And that's part of the reason we're protesting is that the city is dragging its feet and that's causing thousands of needless deaths. A thing that I found in my experience reporting is that when I start harassing the levers of power, usually they completely shut down, and then I'll get like an email from someone who's like, Hey, I work in the mayor's office and I just want to let you know everybody's super annoyed with you and think you're a pain in the ass . Have you experienced any of that? I've actually gotten reverse. I've gotten a little bit of positive feedback. I think people within the machine are supportive of this because my goal is not to tear down institutions. Institutions are essential. I think the goal of this is to em power institutions and the people working in those institutions to do the work that they signed up to do. City government is filled with passionate people who care deeply about making Los Angeles a better, safer, more walkable place . And those people are being hindered by these procedures that we're fighting to change. So we're on the same page in that regard . I think there's some people in city government who are definitely very annoyed Mind , but you know , it's hard to position on self as being the person who's against the guy painting cross locks. I think that's just fine. People may be privately annoyed, but I don't think anybody is that annoyed by what we're doing . Also because it's working, you know, it is actively forcing change. Is there anything that I missed that you were like, I really just want to get this out there? Yeah, I guess like a last word is that I personally have felt very cynical for a long time and I think other young people often look at the world from a depressed perspective where things are too large for us to have an impact on and we can't have any control over outcomes and