Opinion: Griffith Park is a bit safer for cyclists and pedestrians. That’s worth celebrating
From LATimes.com
Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, July 9, 2022. Let’s look back at the week in Opinion.
I hope you’re wearing sunscreen, because there are a few rays of sunshine poking through all the doom and gloom of late. (And dark it most certainly still is — we’ll get to that later.) After weeks of bad and worse news from the U.S. Supreme Court, and indications that more trouble is on the way, there is an uplifting development right here at home, a tale of a public servants responsive to the people’s needs: The city of Los Angeles is making Griffith Park safer for cyclists, runners, walkers and anyone else not encased in thousands of pounds of moving metal and glass by closing a road segment to cars.
Vehicle road closures in a local park might strike some as the kind of hyper-local “area man bites dog” story that shouldn’t lead off one of the gloomiest weekly reads around (sorry, but the real-time decline of democracy will do that to an opinion journalism newsletter). But as a cyclist, hiker and lapsed runner whose preferred method of exploration is bipedalism, I cannot be happier about a local news item than this. For all of its adulation as one of this country’s largest urban parks, Griffith Park remains largely inaccessible to anyone who’d rather not golf, drive or bike on dangerous roads or hike over mountains. Its primary entry points include traffic-choked roads and, yes, an interstate freeway offramp.
Make no mistake: Griffith Park is still that. Of course, this being L.A., the closure of a segment of Griffith Park Drive to cars isn’t some forward-looking transportation overhaul, and it may not even be permanent. Rather, it’s a temporary change that comes on the heels of something that should never have happened: the death of a well-known cyclist on Crystal Springs Drive, which remains open to cars and dominated by speeding commuter traffic. And we’ve seen what happens when windshield-biased residents complain about a much more meaningful, permanent slowing of traffic, such as when the city reversed course on the Vista del Mar “road diet” near LAX.
Photo by Dhoomil Sheta on Unsplash
