Council Adopts Recommendations To Reform Street Widening Policies In The City of Los Angeles

For Immediate Release: November 19, 2024

Today, the Los Angeles City Council adopted recommendations to amend the City’s existing policies around automatic street widening to improve our pedestrian spaces and protect shade trees. The recommendations stem from a motion introduced by Councilmembers Nithya Raman, Bob Blumenfield, and former Councilmember Mike Bonin, to reform the City’s current regulations around spot widenings that effectively turn neighborhood streets into jigsaw pieces, creating maintenance issues for the City and making streets more dangerous overall. The newly adopted regulations amend the City’s plan review processes to promote accessibility, follow best-practice street design, and protect and provide sustainable infrastructure.

Since 1961, the Los Angeles Municipal Code (LAMC) 12.37 and the highway dedication process has mandated street nhwidening via dedications and required roadway widening improvements for any new multifamily and commercial developments. These widenings often create incoherent streets that degrade neighborhood character, undermine active transportation, reduce tree canopy, and expand impermeable surface area—all contrary to the City’s mobility and sustainability goals. Today’s vote adopts a set of recommendations to reform the highway dedication processes to achieve a number of goals related to improving the cohesiveness of the public realm and ensuring that public improvements implemented by development projects align with the City’s mobility and sustainability goals.

“For years, we have prioritized making our roadways wider, even if it didn’t make any sense, even if it shrank our sidewalks, even if it led to trees being cut down,” said Councilmember Raman. “This process undermines the accessibility of our City, harms our environment, and places a burden on new construction that has been required to incorporate street widening into their plans. We need to be focused on smart planning that creates safe streets and sustainable public infrastructure – and that is exactly what we have voted for today.”

“Automatic street widenings can make new development, especially of much-needed housing, more expensive without providing any real benefit,” said Councilmember Bob Blumenfield. “They can have negative consequences, such as creating dangerous lane inconsistency and loss of sidewalk or bike lane space. Sometimes wider streets just mean more speeding. This simple policy change is a common-sense step toward a better public realm. It lets us do smarter planning rather than being forced to take a one-size-fits-all approach.”

“Automatic street widenings are a relic of a car centric past that destroy trees and make pedestrians and cyclists less safe,” said Michael Schneider, Founder and CEO of Streets For All. “I’m grateful to Councilmembers Raman and Blumenfield for finally ending this practice in Los Angeles.”

“The Hyperion Street Safety Coalition is thrilled to hear the motion to reverse spot widening was passed,” said the Hyperion Street Safety Steering Committee. “Council District 4 was instrumental in supporting the call to action by 9 community organizations all looking to build streetscapes that PROMOTE active modes of transportation and the maintenance and growth of cool paths to work, school, and places of leisure. This is a game changer for visionary developers who would rather see collective funding put toward street trees, pedestrian level lighting, and sidewalk amenities that service the immediate community.”

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