As someone who is an ardent and staunch supporter of making our car-obsessed city more pedestrian oriented, I am truly uplifted to see that our city government — specifically Councilmen Mike Bonin and Jose Huizar — is finally stepping in to address the absolutely asinine “jaywalking” tickets the LAPD has been shamelessly handing out to unsuspecting pedestrians throughout Downtown LA (and other parts of LA like Koreatown) despite huge public outcry over the years. Even more egregious, these suburban-minded LAPD cops will actually set up sting operations, frequently I might add, at our busiest intersections like 7th/Figueroa during the crowded lunch rush waiting like wolves to slap anyone who steps into the crosswalk after the countdown timer begins with an unforgiving $200 ticket.

Ka-ching.

As a pedestrian advocate, this is an issue that’s frustrated me for a very long time. Not only are the high ticket fines (up to $250) way too disproportionate to the “crime” ostensibly committed, but it also clearly illustrates the city’s perverse reluctance to shed its suburban car-oriented bias. For a city that’s been shamefully mocked globally for its love affair with the car and its soulless traffic-choked freeways and strip malls, you would think the city would be overly ecstatic that real-life people are actually walking again — voluntarily! — in LA. And instead of doing everything we can to encourage that amazing mode of transit that every other respectable global city on earth desires to nurture, we are slapping our pedestrians with $200 tickets because “they stepped off the curb after the countdown timer begins.” Are you fucking kidding me?

Several years ago, I raised the issue on DTLA Rising that the LAPD was being overly harsh toward pedestrians after watching an officer on a motorcycle rush after a jaywalker on 9th Street in front of Ralphs Fresh Fare as if he was a hard-core criminal. It seemed very odd to me at the time that the officer was so eager to “get him” after I had just returned from a trip to the east coast where I experienced first-hand the incredible difference of being a pedestrian in New York or DC as someone who felt empowered while walking in those cities versus feeling burdened or self-conscious in my own city dominated by drivers and their rules. Subsequently, The New York Times, KCRW, and The Week all caught wind of the LAPD penalizing LA’s true minority: the pedestrian.

Now, thank goodness Bonin and Huizar are finally taking the LAPD to task after a story published in late April on the LA Times by Catherine Saillant exposed undeniably that Downtown LA’s pedestrians were being targeted unfairly. According to Streetsblog LA, just last Friday on May 1, Bonin introduced a motion seconded by urban-minded Huizar to examine the effectiveness of the LAPD’s ongoing “crosswalk stings” (that target mostly Downtown LA) when the CA law invoked by the LAPD references a horribly outdated traffic control signal that includes the words “WALK,” “WAIT,” and “DON’T WALK.” Apparently, nowhere has the law been updated to reflect the new modern countdown timer that’s now ubiquitous on our city streets.

If the motion passes, the onus will fall on the LAPD and the LADOT to not only prove empirically that “pedestrian enforcement” makes walking safer, but also explain why some areas of the city seem to be targeted more than others. In a nutshell, we’re now finally turning the tables, which is an exciting sign that Los Angeles is actually becoming less suburban and more urban minded. Raising a ruckus locally is exactly what’s needed to make real changes happen, because eventually, this jaywalking issue will have to make it up to the state level to update the CA traffic code.

I would love to conclude with Bonin’s marvelous statement at the meeting:

“Excessive and expensive tickets disincentivize walking in Los Angeles. We want people to be safe, but we do not want ‘Do Not Walk’ to be the message we send Angelenos.”