Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said he will propose $91 million to fund Vision Zero, an initiative to eliminate traffic-related deaths in the city by 2025, as part of the budget he is releasing later this week, tripling the amount that was budgeted for the program last year.

Garcetti revealed the funding figure Tuesday during a City Hall news conference on an unrelated matter, after traffic-safety activists criticized him for failing to highlight the politically touchy subject during his state-of-the-city address Monday.

“To every activist, we are with you on this, we have done over a thousand Vision Zero improvements,” he said. “One or two get all the press, because we don’t always do them perfectly. We always have to look at the impact of them. But we will keep moving forward on them.”

It was unclear what type of projects the $91 million would be used for. Last year, the city adopted a budget that included $27 million for the Vision Zero program, well below the $80 million that Department of Transportation at the time had said was needed to meet Vision Zero’s midpoint goal of cutting traffic deaths by 20 percent in 2017.

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Some who watched Garcetti’s speech took to social media to blast the mayor, saying he missed out on an opportunity to lend his political weight to the ambitious initiative, which he unveiled three years ago, but that has since faced hurdles, especially from public opposition to projects that remove traffic lanes.

Madeline Brozen, a researcher at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, said the mayor spoke more to the concerns of drivers, rather than to the rising number of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths that Vision Zero is meant to address.

Let me fix this for you, @MayorOfLA

"It steals the lives that didn't need to be lost"

My blood is boiling so much over the lack of recognition about this issue in the #SOTC2018 that I don't think they'll even need to put a needle in my arm at my blood donation today. https://t.co/V9K2BlYchZ — Madeline Brozen (@Maddz4planning) April 17, 2018

The Vision Zero program has proved contentious over the last year. City officials received blowback from residents and drivers upset after the city instituted so-called “road diets” in their neighborhoods. Such projects take away traffic lanes to make room for bike lanes and other safety features, and is aimed at inducing slower traffic speeds.

But after some city council members backed off from doing such projects in their districts, traffic safety activists have accused city leaders of caving in and ignoring the needs of pedestrians and bicyclists who are killed in greater numbers than victims of gun violence and homicides.

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“Of course, the focus on reduction in crime is important,” Emilia Crotty, executive director of Los Angeles Walks, an advocacy group for pedestrians, said Tuesday. “But the city needs to focus on what’s really injuring and killing people on the streets of Los Angeles.”

Crotty pointed to the spike last year in the number of pedestrians killed. LAPD figures as of Dec. 9 showed that there were 125 pedestrian deaths since the beginning of 2017, a 52 percent rise from 2015 numbers.

The city also failed to meet its goal of cutting traffic-related fatalities by 20 percent in 2017, instead only reducing deaths by six percent over 2016, when deaths had already shot up by 40 percent.

In recent weeks, a spate of bicyclist deaths have riled up traffic safety activists who are calling for the city to take on more drastic safety measures like road diets. They point to an incident in South Los Angeles in which a pedestrian was struck just as a group of people were attending a vigil for another bicyclist who had died in a hit-and-run traffic collision.

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Traffic safety experts and activists consider road diets to be among the most effective ways to reduce driving speeds, which in turn decide the severity of a collision and whether someone is injured or killed.

Brozen said Tuesday she was “pleased” the mayor has subsequently announced he wants to increase the funding for Vision Zero, but she added that it will take political leadership to ensure those funds are actually used on projects that can effectively reduce traffic deaths.

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“Last year it was definitely about getting the budget in place,” Brozen said. “What we’re seeing this year is that it’s not about the money, it’s about the political will.”

“We’ve seen how difficult it is to get citywide buy-in from the elected officials, especially given the structure of our council, but we elected a mayor to be that voice … that citywide voice, and there was nothing about it in the speech,” Brozen said.

The story has been corrected to reflect that a pedestrian was struck during the vigil for a bicyclist killed in another hit-and-run crash.