In 2023, EPA data showed that the Los Angeles region was once again the most ozone-polluted region in the country.

Greenhouse gas emissions from cars, buildings, and industrial pollution all contribute to our poor air quality, as well as global warming. Increased temperatures from climate change make our air quality even worse and cause health issues – while also leaving us more vulnerable to devastating fires and floods.

Our city’s reliance on cars has also led to another deadly consequence: deaths from traffic violence on LA’s streets have risen in recent years to an all-time high.

I have eight-year-old twins, and I want more than anything for them to be able to live safe, healthy lives in this city – so improving our air quality, reducing the emissions that cause climate change, and building out safer streets are of enormous importance to me.

Building a more sustainable Los Angeles will take effort from every possible angle – changing how we get around, improving our resilience against natural disasters, imposing tighter regulations to reduce emissions, and making our outdoor spaces more enjoyable and useful for families.

I’ve tried to do some of everything in my first term, and I’m very grateful to have been able to work on these issues both through my role on the Council and – as of 2022 – the Mayor’s appointee to represent the City of LA on the South Coast Air Quality Management District Board, the regulatory agency for air quality for a region with about 17 million residents.

Here’s some of what we’ve done:

• I passed legislation to make all new residential and commercial construction in the city carbon-free – significantly reducing the future impact of LA’s second largest source of emissions after the transportation sector. LA became the largest city in the country to do so.

• We built the very first protected bike lanes in Council District 4 along Riverside Drive in Los Feliz and White Oak in Reseda, and added miles of new bike lanes across the district, including on Burbank Boulevard and Hazeltine Avenue in Sherman Oaks, and Balboa Boulevard in Encino. We also resurfaced existing bike lanes on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood and on Griffith Park Boulevard in Los Feliz, making those facilities safer for people biking.

• We made almost a mile of Griffith Park Drive car-free – the first closure of a road to private automobile traffic in LA in a decade, and are working to bring even more safety and active transportation interventions there. We worked with Assemblymember Laura Friedman to secure $4 million in funding for planning and implementing major street safety improvements in and around Griffith Park. We already have the findings from our analysis and community engagement process and are now working on implementation!

• We added over six miles of new bus lanes in the Valley, including 4.5 miles of 24/7 bus lanes on Sepulveda Boulevard through our district and Council District 6 – the longest new 24/7 segment in Los Angeles County – making travel for the 12,000 current daily riders faster and more reliable.

• We expanded the ability of the South Coast Air Quality Management District to regulate polluters across Southern California through crucial changes to the cost-effectiveness threshold of emissions reductions interventions in the new Air Quality Management Plan passed in 2022.

• We designed and passed a new program called RAISE LA which will put funding raised from advertising on LA’s new bus shelters directly back into new street infrastructure, starting with investments in more bus shelters. This program marks the *first* time that the City of Los Angeles will have a dedicated source of funds for bus shelters and other street improvements.

• We successfully advocated in the city budget process for new positions in active transportation design, 10 of which have now been hired! The lack of active transportation staff in DOT has led to extreme delays in designing safety interventions on our city’s streets.

• We invested in park and outdoor space improvements all over the district, including building two brand new playgrounds and restriping for pickleball at Van Nuys Sherman Oaks Park, securing full funding for improvements to the Studio City Rec Center in Beeman Park through Congressional appropriations from Rep. Brad Sherman’s office, helping to purchase one of the last privately owned pieces of land to add to Griffith Park, and more!

• We built new traffic safety infrastructure all over the district, including:

  • Four new and improved crosswalks along Ventura Blvd (including three new full signals) at Columbus, Lemona, Calhoun and Rhodes – all in high-traffic areas of Sherman Oaks and Studio City. This included crosswalks with sabbatical timing outside of the Chabad of Sherman Oaks at Lemona.

  • A new traffic signal at Ventura Blvd / Berry Drive.

  • Traffic signal improvements at the Encino Commons midblock crosswalk, as well as a signal design at Andasol Ave / Ventura Blvd to protect the neighborhood from cut-through traffic in Encino.

  • Safety treatments around Franklin Ave Elementary to ensure families walking to school would be safe.

  • Responded to fatal crashes at Franklin Ave / Beachwood Ave with emergency tree trimming and intersection improvements, including traffic calming features and timing changes, some of which are still underway.

  • Added speed humps to Mulholland Drive to curtail unsafe racing and speeding, as well as to White Oak Ave and Valley Vista Blvd in Encino, Nichols Canyon Rd and Jupiter Dr in the Hollywood Hills, and Russell Ave and soon in Ambrose Ave in Los Feliz.

  • Added Leading Pedestrian Intervals (LPIs) to Winona Blvd / Los Feliz Blvd and Commonwealth Ave / Los Feliz Blvd to make sure people had the time to cross safely.

  • Implementing CD4’s two “Slow Streets” areas in partnership with LADOT and local community sponsors.

  • Along with CD3 and CD12, we are overseeing the completion of the Reseda Boulevard Complete Streets Project (March 17th, 2024), which includes in CD4:

  - Upgrading 6 intersections with protected left turn signal phasing

  - Adding protected bike lanes along the length of Reseda Blvd

  - Leading Pedestrian Intervals (LPIs) at all signals

  - Building 5 bus boarding islands

As proud as I am of our team’s work to improve environmental conditions and make our streets safer, Los Angeles still has miles to go to address both of these issues. I’m committed to working with purpose and urgency to accomplish even more in the years to come on these fronts than we did in our first term.

If I’m elected to a second term, here’s what I believe we can accomplish together:

• Reduce emissions at the railyards and at the Ports of LA and Long Beach. I am the City of LA’s representative on the South Coast Air Quality Management District Board. We are currently engaged in the process of setting new regulations on emissions for railyards and for the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach – the busiest ports in the country, and the source of significant emissions in the region. This is a deeply complex policymaking process, and I’ve taken it as my mission to help develop the most effective strategy for reducing emissions without negatively impacting jobs or economic activity. The example of the recently adopted warehouse rule is a good model for our work: early results from this rule suggest that there has been steady adoption of lower-emissions technology, lower emissions, and no impact on the scale of warehouse activity. This model can help guide our interventions at these other sites as well.

• Make our streets safer for *all* through urgently needed, citywide policy changes. Our city streets remain unconscionably unsafe, with hundreds of Angelenos killed by drivers every year — but there are straightforward changes we can make that I believe are essential to creating a safer future.

  • Most fatalities are happening at intersections. We must regulate signal timing to give people more time to cross the street, especially at major arterials. We must calm dangerous speeding by introducing more red lights to our late night and free-for-all traffic hours, and we must add more signal priority for pedestrians.

  • We must put in place an arterial speed mitigation program that will use all the tools at our disposal, including speed tables and automated speed cameras made possible by the passage of Assembly Bill 645, to help reduce speeds and increase safety on our major streets.

  • We must implement a robust Healthy Streets LA policy to help align our capital improvement projects with safer streets. Whether a version passed by voters as a ballot measure, the version being debated by the City, or a combination of the two, it’s my firm commitment to ensure that this policy drives meaningful change in how we handle street improvements in LA.

• Complete our work on individual neighborhood traffic calming projects. Working with neighborhood advocates and our government partners, I’ll work to see through the planning and implementation of a number of community-driven projects to calm our vehicle traffic and make our neighborhoods safer. These include work around the Hyperion Avenue corridor, building upon some initial speed table safety improvements we hope to install this year, and implementing the outcomes of ongoing community surveying and visioning exercises in Encino to reduce cut-through traffic in the Encino Hills and to create safer and more inviting conditions in the Encino Park, Encino Village, and Amestoy Estates communities along Louise Avenue and in the area of the 101. We will also finish our proactive and aggressive process to reinstate a school crosswalk removed by LADOT at Magnolia Boulevard and Lemona Avenue as soon as possible by piggy-backing onto an existing sewer repair project, utilizing the sewer project to deliver the crosswalk faster than otherwise possible and to ultimately save taxpayer money. Lastly, despite the difficulties in getting a new signal “from scratch,” we will seek to implement long-desired new signalized pedestrian crossings at Magnolia Boulevard and Tyrone Avenue and at Franklin Avenue and Harvard Boulevard at the very least — although I plan to continue building on our success of securing outside and special funding for traffic signal improvements.

• Deliver on the promise of a 21st century transit infrastructure for LA. One of the most important ways to win our fight against global warming is to deliver, expand, maintain and operate a world-class transit system that Angelenos will actually use. I will continue to build on first term successes by ensuring that the City of Los Angeles is driving the discussion with Metro by investing heavily into our transit infrastructure. With the funding secured through our RAISE LA ordinance, I will work to ensure that we build the bus shelters we committed to for the first five years of our new street furniture contract. On paper this should be 2,400 to 3,000 shelters, and I will push our City staff and contractors to deliver on this promise. I’ll also continue my strong support for peak hour and 24/7 bus lanes to help people get to where they need to go. This includes supporting LADOT, Metro, and Council District 13 on planning and delivering peak hour bus lanes on Sunset Boulevard, one of our busiest transit corridors, and other corridors proposed in and adjacent to Council District 4. I will also advocate for the best version of the Sepulveda Transit Corridor – one that will move as many of the daily 400,000 car trips on the the 405 as possible onto the train. This will be one of the most significant transit projects in the country, and we must fight for the best possible outcome.

• Connect the Valley to the city center through protected bike lanes. Our office has worked tirelessly and systematically to complete the LA RiverWay off-street biking and walking path in the Valley. We’ve worked with our agencies to apply for grant funding, winning a $34M Active Transportation Program grant from the State of California for completing the Whitsett to Lankershim segment, and worked with the City Council to formally accept the $60M in Measure M funding for the LA RiverWay in the Valley from Metro. We’ve also collaborated with LADOT and our equestrian community to ensure an extension near Griffith Park takes as much land as possible from Caltrans to build the best trails possible for people walking, biking, and riding. Finally, we introduced a motion to direct our agencies to formulate a plan to complete our remaining ~$100M funding gap to complete the LA RiverWay in the Valley.

  My goal is to have an unbroken protected connection between the Valley and the central part of the city, allowing a safe commuting pathway for cyclists and pedestrians that will transform how people get between these two major regions of Los Angeles.

• Make Griffith Park even better for Cyclists and Pedestrians. With the money from Assemblymember Laura Friedman, our office is now able to implement even more bike, pedestrian, and street safety improvements for Griffith Park – including making Crystal Springs Drive, where Andrew Jelmert was tragically killed by a driver in 2022 while riding his bike, safer for all. These changes, which are the result of a robust community engagement process, include:

  • A safer Crystal Springs Drive from the park entrance at Los Feliz Blvd up to Griffith Park Drive, including new bike lanes and walking pathways

  • A new pedestrian crosswalk at Franklin / Harvard

  • Closing the bike lane gap on Zoo Drive in Griffith Park

  • New speed humps by the Ferraro Soccer Fields

  • A raised crosswalk across Fern Dell connecting Trails Cafe to the playground

  • Funding for Left Turn phasing for the Los Feliz / Riverside traffic signal

  • Planning for a sidewalk-level cycletrack on Los Feliz Boulevard

  • Design costs for a protected bikeway on the Riverside Drive Bridge

With pressing issues like homelessness so visible on our streets, it can be easy to neglect the important long-term project of reducing emissions to combat climate change. It’s been my goal since taking office to never let up on environmental action as a priority – in service of every person who lives in Los Angeles now, and for the city that our children will inherit.