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Measure HLA is stuck. The ballot measure LA voters passed 2½ years ago said the city must install planned bike lanes when repaving. But the city stopped repaving, and new bike lane projects have slowed to a trickle. Exactly one HLA-compliant project has been installed. What comes next?

How to break the HLA stalemate

We voted to link bike lanes to repaving. We got neither. Now what?

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Oren Hadar @futureis.la · 29/09/2026

I mean, I find Claude Pro's writing is often just as overwrought

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So what now? The ADA and HLA have raised costs, but they’re here to stay. I asked people on the city and advocacy sides how to get repaving and the Mobility Plan moving again. Click to read what they told me.

How to break the HLA stalemate

We voted to link bike lanes to repaving. We got neither. Now what?

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HLA requires ALL Mobility Plan elements to be installed when repaving, including for pedestrians. The complete street. It’s like a restaurant set menu. Nice for a special occasion. But if my family had to order an appetizer and dessert every time we went to Olive Garden, we'd go a lot less often.

Montage of three maps from the Mobility Plan showing Hollywood Boulevard is on the Bicycle Enhanced Network, the Transit Enhanced Network, and a Pedestrian Enhanced District.

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But HLA defeats the workaround. It’s triggered by "any paving project or other modification" at least ⅛ mile long. The bike lane itself is a modification. And if a street is in a pedestrian district (2/3 of potential bike lanes in Central LA), that means fixing curb ramps - the ADA all over again.

Map of Central Los Angeles showing all streets with planned bike lanes in the Mobility Plan. Streets also in a pedestrian district are orange. Streets only planned for a bike lane are blue. 2/3 of the streets in the map are orange.

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The workaround: Large Asphalt Repair (LAR), a long patch the city calls maintenance - no need to fix curb ramps. Put LAR under the bike lanes, leave the rest of the asphalt untouched, and install the bike lanes cheaply. I was outraged by these patches at first. Now I think they’re an important tool.

Google Street View image of Hollywood Boulevard with protected bike lanes and new asphalt under the lanes where the city installed large asphalt repair. An outdated curb ramp is circled in green at right.

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The problem is costs stacked on costs. City Council required bike lanes to only be installed on good pavement. Repaving adds $1M/mile. The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) says when repaving, curb ramps have to be fixed. Another $600k/mile.

Flowchart showing the convoluted series of choices the city has to make when installing a bike lane.

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How to break the HLA stalemate

We voted to link bike lanes to repaving. We got neither. Now what?

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Oren Hadar @futureis.la · 24/09/2026

I agree. I do think ED 1/AHIP is going to be very valuable for building 80% AMI apartments in wealthier neighborhoods that will be genuinely below market. I wish we had a better lay term for this kind of housing. "Affordable" is too broad. I think "workforce housing" is pejorative.

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Oren Hadar @futureis.la · 23/09/2026

Thanks for fact-checking that tree canopy op-ed. I was so inspired by it that I too did some research and came up disappointed. The canopy was already at 28% in 2016, way before the tree ordinance passed in 2023 that spurred all this tree planting by developers, and has held steady since then.

seattle.gov

2016 Canopy Cover Report - Trees | seattle.gov

Canopy Cover

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Oren Hadar @futureis.la · 22/09/2026

You should meet with him! It would be fascinating!

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Oren Hadar @futureis.la · 18/09/2026

Bravo! This is so well done.

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Reposted by Oren Hadar

Could SB 79 help fix LA's parks shortage? I was amazed to learn that almost every one of the city's most park-poor neighborhoods was upzoned by SB 79. Even more surprising: the law itself could hold the key to building more parks there.

SB 79 is here, and lots of new housing is coming. Is anything else?

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Oren Hadar @futureis.la · 14/09/2026

I did a whole deep dive on Japanese land readjustment while researching the SB 79 and parks piece I published the other day, only to realize there is no way in hell it will ever happen here. I ended up settling on things that are more in the realm of possibility.

SB 79 is here, and lots of new housing is coming. Is anything else?

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A generation from now, hundreds of thousands of families will raise their kids in SB 79 neighborhoods. Nobody will remember the old neighbors' complaints. But everybody will benefit from the investments the city boldly decided to make. Let's start planning them now.

SB 79 is here, and lots of new housing is coming. Is anything else?

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LA's first response to SB 79, Low Rise, was all about avoiding neighbor backlash. It only allows incremental change (3-4 story buildings). But incremental and holistic planning are enemies. One asks how little damage change can cause. The other asks how much good it can create.

Sometimes planning means letting go

LA's new SB 79 plan is trying too hard to control how our neighborhoods look.

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Parks beg a bigger question: Where is the holistic planning around SB 79? 145 station areas could each welcome thousands of new people. What will the city build to help them thrive? Libraries? Bike lanes? SB 79 is a housing bill. But people don't just live in housing. They live in neighborhoods.

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That overlap is an opportunity: a quirk in SB 79's design could help the city get land for parks. My explanation, plus some potential scenarios.👇

SB 79 is here, and lots of new housing is coming. Is anything else?

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The city's 2025 park needs assessment prioritized where new parks are needed most. My aha moment: of the 36 highest-need areas (colored squares), 30 overlap with SB 79 station areas (yellow circles). In LA, poor people get transit, and rich people get parks.

A map of Los Angeles overlaying the city's park needs assessment and SB 79 station areas. The map shows 36 colored squares representing the neighborhoods with the highest park needs, and 145 yellow circles representing the areas around the transit stations where SB 79 applies. 30 out of the 36 high-park-need neighborhoods overlap with SB 79 station areas.

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We desperately need more parks. Only 62% of Angelenos live within walking distance of a park. Chicago: 98%. New York: 99%. San Francisco: 100%. LA ranks 93rd out of the 100 biggest US cities for parks. Seven years ago we ranked 55th, but other cities kept adding parks, while LA essentially stopped.

tpl.org

Los Angeles, California

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SB 79 is here, and lots of new housing is coming. Is anything else?

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Oren Hadar @futureis.la · 10/09/2026

What would you do about it?

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Oren Hadar @futureis.la · 28/08/2026

How were they able to exceed the standard SB 79 height?

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Oren Hadar @futureis.la · 18/08/2026

Their budget will get cut next year if they don't spend the money they're given

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cityplanneractual.bsky.social @cityplanneractual.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

27 seconds is the time drivers have to wait when the signal is red

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Reposted by Oren Hadar

HAWKs exist to get around "signal warrants," but in every single case a Red-Yellow-Green traffic light would be better for the crosswalk. HAWKs' resting state is "blank" aka invisible. RYG's would project green so that drivers keep scanning them, looking to see whether they turn yellow and then red

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Reposted by Oren Hadar

gregmartinsd.bsky.social @gregmartinsd.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

It's a city street, not a highway. Cities need to hire traffic engineers that know the difference and design city streets for safety and movement of people, not fast movement of cars.

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You made a big contribution - thank you!

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Tactical Ruralist @jslashk.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

All HAWKs should run free!

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Reposted by Oren Hadar

Excellent essay. Key passage: “Like a person who keeps lending money to their deadbeat lover, the city is sacrificing its own needs (reducing traffic deaths) because it thinks the other party (drivers) can’t handle meeting those needs. The result is dysfunction - pedestrians keep getting killed”

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The way to fix a codependent relationship is to set boundaries and force the other party to accept responsibility. Design streets - and crosswalks - to privilege peds and cyclists, and drivers will get the message that their behavior needs to change. Then we will make progress on Vision Zero. /end

The crosswalk designed to appease angry drivers

Our codependent relationship with people in cars is preventing us from getting to Vision Zero

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The city is in a codependent relationship with drivers, sacrificing its own needs (protecting pedestrians’ lives) to avoid upsetting the other party. The codependency is literally killing us - Vision Zero launched in 2015 with a goal of zero traffic deaths by 2025. They doubled instead.

Chart titled annual number of pedestrians killed by vehicles. The number increases from 88 in 2015 to 170 in 2025.

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Why is a crosswalk signal timed to coordinate with other lights? When we asked, an LADOT engineer said interrupting the free flow of traffic would cause drivers to run the crosswalk light and hit pedestrians. Translation: we have to design our crosswalk to avoid causing road rage.

Screenshot of an email that says "Ensuring progression and clearing entire platoons of vehicles through this corridor of closely-spaced signals during peak hours actually works to enhance safety for all users, including pedestrians. When density of traffic is high, secondary issues such as vehicular collisions and drivers running through red lights can increase if platoons of vehicles are interrupted due to poor signal coordination."

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The predictable result: impatient pedestrians started crossing before the signal turned red, which meant cars would show up later to a red light with no pedestrians to be seen. Everyone - peds and drivers - thought the signal was broken.

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Pico/Masselin crosswalk - August 17, 2021, 5:23 pm

The Masselin crosswalk was glorious. Press the button and it turned red almost instantly. Everyone loved it. But when the lockdown ended and the city turned signal coordination back on, we suddenly had to wait up to 120 seconds (later cut to 60), even when no cars were in sight.

youtube.com

YouTube video by The Future Is LA

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In 2016, my neighbors and I won a grant for street upgrades on Pico Blvd. After talking to 1500+ people, the #1 ask was a signalized crosswalk at Pico/Masselin. It got installed in 2020, during the COVID lockdown, when signal coordination was turned off across LA to deter speeding on empty streets.

destinationpico.org

Destination: Pico

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LA protects drivers' feelings at pedestrians' expense, and it's killing us. A crosswalk in my hood makes people wait up to 60 seconds so cars don't get annoyed. Pedestrians give up and just cross. Why have a signal at all? A 🧵 about the city’s codependent relationship with drivers.