Transportation is a central topic of life in Los Angeles, with urgent repercussions for the world at large. We seek city leaders who prioritize exceptional and affordable public transportation, street safety, and adequate active transportation infrastructure while centering issues related to affordable transit-oriented housing development and dealing with the city’s crisis of hit and runs. Before voting for our next L.A. mayor, we needed to know where the candidates stand on the essential issue of transportation equity. In a collaboration with CicLAvia, Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, Climate Resolve, Streets For All, Los Angeles Walks, Act-LA, POWER, IKAR, Asian Pacific Islander Forward Movement, Pacoima Beautiful, and MoveLA, L.A. TACO presents a candid questionnaire given to all of L.A.’s mayoral candidates, with their answers in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean. All responses were provided by the candidates via email.
GETTING AROUND IN L.A.
How often do you walk, bike, ride transit, or otherwise get to your destinations without driving in LA? How would you judge the condition and importance of each of those transportation modes? How important is it for the next LA Mayor to experience all available transportation modes?
I am fortunate enough to live walking distance to a Redline metro stop. We need a Los Angeles where everyone is! I often take the metro downtown – what a pleasure it is to have a 10-minute walk and 20-minute metro ride to arrive in the center of downtown Los Angeles – no parking necessary and no long wait on the 101 freeway. I also make a concerted effort to walk to my destination for at least one errand a day – be that picking up dry cleaning or splurging on a fancy coffee. My teenage children make excellent use of the metro. East Valley High School is conveniently located just beside the North Hollywood metro station. I would like to see metro stations and bus lines beside all of Los Angeles’ high school campuses. We also ride our bicycles (my husband his skateboard) on the weekends, though recent traffic accidents have us doing that less frequently. I would like to see streets with drastically reduced speed limits to accommodate that being a safer way for families to move around the city. When I lived in mid-city it was very convenient to take the bus to the beach and we often did that as a Family. As Mayor, I will make every effort to push for FREE public transportation for our city.