Safe Streets in Santa Monica and Chelsea
SAMODOT and SMPD Staff: Cody Green, Erika Aklufi, Anuj Gupta, Jason Kligier
Safe Streets can’t wait.
Have you heard? The Santa Monica voters recently voted for safer streets. 74% voted YES on Measure K, a measure that Santa Monica Families For Safe Streets endorsed and that will help make our streets and sidewalks safer for children, seniors, and disabled residents.
Unfortunately, this victory won’t make our streets safe overnight. On Sunday night, an elderly woman lost her life on our streets after a driver hit her and fled the scene. This preventable death occurred at the intersection of Wilshire Blvd & Chelsea Ave, at Douglas Park and, just down the street from McKinley Elementary School. We offer our sincere condolences to the victim's family and friends.
Chelsea Ave could and should be a safe street for the elderly to get around the neighborhood, for children to get to school, and for anyone to get to Douglas Park or anywhere in the area. But with the absence of traffic signals at Santa Monica Blvd and Wilshire Blvd, it’s particularly unsafe for road users who aren’t in a car.
While Santa Monica is moving in the right direction, our progress toward truly safe and multimodal safe streets is slow, and motor vehicles continue to hurt and kill people on our streets.
Will you join us in telling the city that safe streets can’t wait?
Sponsored by
To:
SAMODOT and SMPD Staff: Cody Green, Erika Aklufi, Anuj Gupta, Jason Kligier
From:
[Your Name]
To the Santa Monica Department of Transportation and to the Santa Monica Police Department,
Thank you all for the important work you do to make Santa Monica safe and accessible for all.
Unfortunately, while many exciting projects are in the works, the progress remains slow, and preventable deaths continue to happen, like the recent fatality that occurred at Wilshire Blvd & Chelsea Ave down the street from McKinley Elementary School.
While the upcoming improvements around this school are great news, they still won’t make it safe for children, or really anyone, to travel along Chelsea Ave, as there is no traffic signal either at Santa Monica Blvd or Wilshire Blvd. This is a key mid-city connector, and could be the only safe cycling street north of the freeway between 17th and Yale.
74% of Santa Monica voters just voted for safer streets. Our community wants and deserves safe multimodal streets, and the longer we take to implement these, the more lives are lost or altered by traffic violence.
This is why I urge you to:
Take traffic violence seriously and do not let it go without impunity. Hit and run crashes are on the rise and these preventable homicides must be taken as seriously as any other homicide in Santa Monica by the police and city management.
Make it clear to the community that traffic violence will not be tolerated on our streets. Clear messaging is an important part of this, and SMPD should avoid using the prejudiced term “accident” in case negligence may be identified through investigations. Traffic enforcement should be highly visible and should focus on the most dangerous road users & behaviors, which is aggressive, distracted, and dangerous driving by car drivers.
Prevent crashes from happening in the first place by building safe streets. Our city has great plans for safe streets, but implementation has slowed after COVID-19 due to loss of staff and an increase in antisocial behaviors of all types, including aggressive driving. We can’t accept further loss of life that results from this slow pace.
Our streets are an incredible community asset. They are used by our entire community, by people of all ages and abilities getting around in many different ways. Our streets should be safe, and we know how to make them safe.
Please invest effort and resources into more safe & accessible streets in Santa Monica.