I cut my urbanist teeth 10 years ago on a project in my community called Destination: Pico, which grew out of Mayor Garcetti’s Great Streets program. In 2016, we won a grant from the Mayor’s office that promised $500,000 in city investments on Pico Blvd. in our Mid-City neighborhood. But first we had to do six months of community outreach to figure out what people wanted.

We led eight interactive neighborhood workshops, met twice with every business owner along a seven-block stretch of Pico, tabled at local events, put a survey in every customer’s check at four restaurants on the Boulevard, and sent a survey home in the backpack of every student at the two local elementary schools. All in all, we had over 1,500 points of contact with community members.

The absolute, number-one, consensus ask was a signalized crosswalk at Pico and Masselin Ave.

We delivered the final report on our outreach to the Mayor’s Office in the fall of 2017, and three years later, while we all hunkered down during the pandemic, this was installed¹:

The new crosswalk had a kind of signal that was relatively new to the city in 2020 - a pedestrian hybrid beacon, also called a HAWK signal, which stands for High-intensity Activated crossWalK. (Who let the traffic engineer name this?) The signal worked beautifully. Most of the time it was idle. If you wanted to cross, you pressed the button, and the signal immediately flashed yellow, then turned red. If cars were approaching, loops embedded in the street detected them, and the signal graciously allowed them to pass before lighting up.

We were delighted. The community was delighted. Then came the end of the COVID lockdown.

In the early days of the pandemic, when the city’s normally jammed streets were eerily deserted, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) reported that the drivers who did venture out were speeding an average of 30% faster on some streets. The California Highway Patrol reported an 87% statewide increase in tickets issued to drivers speeding over 100 mph.

In response to all the speeding, LADOT switched the city’s signals to nighttime mode, uncoordinated with the other signals down the street, so that drivers wouldn’t get a green wave of lights on main streets that allowed them to pick up too much speed.

When the Masselin crosswalk was installed later that summer, LA’s signals were still on nighttime mode, and the HAWK signal was allowed to “run free,” responding only to the pedestrians and drivers right at the intersection. Hence, the usually instant response when the button was pressed. But in the summer of 2021, as people were getting vaccinated and driving more, signal coordination was turned back on across the city, and the Masselin HAWK signal was integrated into the larger system. Instead of responding instantly to pedestrians, the signal made them wait up to 120 seconds before granting the walk signal, ensuring the HAWK was coordinated with the other signals on Pico and didn’t disrupt the free flow of car traffic.

To give you a sense of what that change felt like for pedestrians, here’s a snippet from a video I made soon after the signal timing was changed. No cars in sight, but the signal still told me to wait. (Click here for the longer and excruciatingly slower video.)

Notice a few things going on in the full video:

The community was upset about the change. The most common complaints were that the signal was “broken” or had “stopped working.” Here’s a more thoughtful email, this one from one of my favorite neighbors, an elderly woman who takes long walks every day and knows everyone in the neighborhood by name:

Marilyn makes a couple of great points. Making pedestrians wait often leads them to do something less safe - cross before the light turns red. What’s the point of installing a signal if people ignore it? And when pedestrians cross before the light turns red, drivers arrive at a red light with no pedestrians in sight. Everybody, on foot and behind the wheel, thinks the signal is broken!

We did our best to convince LADOT to change the signal back to running free. We got the Mayor’s Office involved. In the end, they shortened the cycle from 120 to 60 seconds, but that’s it.

Now you may be thinking, “They cut the time in half - that’s great!” But consider this: In 60 seconds, a driver on Pico going the 35 MPH speed limit covers 3,080 feet - over half a mile. That means at the moment a pedestrian presses the button at Masselin, cars more than nine blocks away on Pico will get to cross the crosswalk before the pedestrian waiting in the blazing sun gets to walk 70 feet².

Why does a pedestrian signal have to be coordinated with the other signals down the street? For starters, the traffic engineers’ bible, the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), says HAWK signals “should be coordinated” with other signals. But “should” isn’t “shall” - it’s just a recommendation. And separately, the Federal Highway Administration, which publishes the MUTCD, says:

Pedestrians’ impatience with long waits is well-documented. In one experiment, researchers varied the timing of a mid-block crosswalk on a major street in Miami Beach. They found that with a wait time of 30 seconds, only 2% of pedestrians started crossing before the walk signal. But when the wait time was increased to 60 seconds, 15% of pedestrians left early (Table 4.2) - nearly one in six.

Not surprisingly, that pattern holds for HAWKs that make pedestrians wait vs. those that don’t. In 2016, the FHWA published a study of HAWKs in Tucson and Austin. Among many other things, they looked at when pedestrians crossed after they pushed the button. Of the 20 signals they studied, only two were coordinated with the signals around them - the rest ran free. At the 18 signals that ran free (like the pandemic-era Masselin HAWK), only 0.43% of pedestrians couldn’t wait the couple seconds before the light turned red - they started crossing before they got the walk signal. At the two signals timed with other signals (post-pandemic Masselin HAWK), 4.8% crossed before they got the walk signal. In other words, pedestrians lost patience with the crosswalk signal 11 times as often when it was coordinated with other signals.

Why is it so important to design a signal that pedestrians obey? Because human bodies have a terrible time in the fleeting moments when they share space with cars in Los Angeles. More people die in traffic collisions than are murdered in LA. Crashes are the number one killer of children here. Traffic deaths have become a matter of public health.

Yet Vision Zero, launched in 2015 to reduce traffic deaths to zero in 10 years, has been a complete failure. Instead of falling to zero, pedestrian deaths have doubled³.

Vision Zero is a failure not because we don’t have the tools to solve the problem, but because our leaders are unwilling to use them. For decades, driver convenience has dominated everything in this town, from erasing our neighborhoods to hobbling our trains. And it’s not just drivers’ convenience that we privilege - it’s their feelings. Here’s an email from an LADOT engineer defending the timing of the Masselin HAWK:

Translation: drivers will get so mad if they have to stop that they’ll run red lights and hit pedestrians. We have to design our crosswalk to avoid causing road rage.

The rage-inducing amount of time drivers have to wait when the Masselin HAWK turns red? 27 seconds.

There’s a term for neglecting your needs in order to manage someone else’s bad behavior: codependency. 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, and drivers keep expecting to get from point A to point B with as little friction as possible, damn the consequences.

Codependency also has an element of magical thinking. If I lend him another $500, he’ll get his act together. If we give drivers a frictionless experience, they will drive more safely. But we’ve been trying to achieve that for decades, and look where it’s gotten us.

The only way to fix a codependent relationship is to set boundaries and start getting the other party to accept responsibility. In the city’s relationship with drivers, the boundary is “people outside of a car always come first.” Consistently send drivers that message, consistently design streets to privilege the most vulnerable people who use them, and drivers will have no choice but to change their behavior. Then we can start making some headway on Vision Zero and save some lives.

For my neighborhood’s humble crosswalk, setting that boundary means letting the signal run free⁴. Giving pedestrians the walk signal immediately is the best way to protect them - they won’t cross when it’s not safe. You may notice I am concerned about taking care of pedestrians’ feelings and managing their bad behavior. That’s because they are the ones who truly have a need - to not have to play Frogger just to stay alive when crossing the street. When someone you care about has a need, meeting it is the mark of a healthy relationship. The kind of caring relationship the city should be fostering with all of us.

Until they start doing that, we will have to wait up to 60 seconds to cross Pico at Masselin. But the HAWK has always had a secret - it runs free after 7 pm. One evening this summer, my 7-year-old daughter and I walked across Pico to get pizza. She pressed the crosswalk button, and when the signal turned red immediately, her eyes widened like she had just accidentally conjured the crosswalk god. The crosswalk’s dysfunction is so etched into my kid’s brain - she’s never known it any other way - that seeing it work the way most people think it should looks to her like a magic trick.