This is not to say that the job is anywhere near done.

To the contrary, as time passes, the task grows more daunting. As months go by, those who have most profoundly felt the impact of these losses do not forget; however, for many others, the memory fades. New drivers excitedly get their licenses, a newfound sort of freedom. Others notice that the police presence is not as constant as it used to be, and the ominous reminders of past crashes loose some of their power.

This the case, here is my continued call to action. We cannot relent in our pursuit to avoid the senseless loss of life that has become a running theme on our local roadways. In February, the newly constituted Safe Westside pinned three elements as key to our effort: enforcement, education and engineering.

Enforcement has had a visible impact thus far. In the past nine months, police officers have worked in the canyon on more than thirty occasions. In conjunction with hundreds of warning letters issued by the police on behalf of the Speed Watch volunteers, we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in the average speed of motorists on Palisades Drive. This effort must continue. It cannot ease up, or its impact will wane.

Education has rejuvenated an understanding of the dangers on our roads. In Spring 2009, Safe Westside facilitated four assemblies at Palisades Charter High School that reached more than 1200 in attendance, and even more through the reporting efforts of the high school newspaper, the Palisades Post, and the Los Angeles Times. This year, even more assemblies are planned in an attempt to continue the message both at Pali High and in other local schools. In addition, many in the local community have also signed the Pledge to Save Lives. These efforts must not cease.

Sadly, engineering efforts have faltered behind the other two, though they have still made forward progress. Several stop signs have been added in the Highlands, as well as other minor road modifications on Sunset and other local streets, but, in a time of budgetary cuts, it has proven rather difficult to get any such changes passed through, though the effort continues.
In all three areas, we have a long road ahead of us.

January 31, 2009, October 22, 2008, November 7, 2007, July 5, 2007, and April 11, 2001. These are days that will never be forgotten. These are days when our roads tragically claimed members of our small community. They were not the first, but let’s do our part in an attempt to make them the last.

For general information or to get involved with other Safe Westside endeavors, please contact info@safewestside.com. To get involved with Speed Watch, please email speedwatch@safewestside.com. To take the Pledge to Save Lives, please visit http://pledge.safewestside.com.

- I had a good call on Friday from one of our community leaders. His concern was to sound me out regarding; my position on how I personally felt about the conditions on Palisades Drive, and whether my statement at the community meeting that “I was just trying to facilitate communication” was accurate. After a short Q&A his assessment of me was that I was an advocate. Advocate of what became the next line of discovery.

It is safe to say that my assumption is that Palisades Drive, in its current form and culture, are not safe for me or my family. I differentiate form from culture but the two are inextricably connected.

As the moderator of discussion on this site, I read every posted comment before approving it. To date, I have approved every comment. In another case, an email was sent to a group of people who monitor these goings-on, and I referred to the sender as a “troll“, an Internet vernacular term for a person that uses invective in digital forums.

There was concern that I was taking ‘sides’ with my Troll remark, and so I am writing this missive to state clearly my bias and intent. (It’s a fine line when criticizing the parenting of someone that has lost a child, and in order to make a point well, nuance and subtlety are certainly advantageous.)

I am a Design Thinker, a Creative Director, which means that my job is to define problems (unmet needs) for creative disciplines to solve. I also live on Palisades Drive. My experience with the road is up-close and personal as I am on it, one way or another, many times a day.

As stated earlier, the problem is, as I experience it, that Palisades Drive is unsafe for automobiles, pedestrians and cyclists. Any argument to the contrary is necessarily accompanied by a caveat “if only [insert your anomaly here]“. E.g. “It is safe if only people obeyed the speed limit”.

In order to look for a solution to the problem, the cause must also be agreed upon. My straw-man suggestion is, that the cause is, an environment that creates a culture of speeding.

Because the long, wide, winding slopes of the road caters to the speed-daemon in all of us, no single group seems to be immune. While teenage drivers have higher fatality rates, that data could be normalized by looking at the safety and handling characteristics of their cars, versus other drivers in other accidents. E.g. a middle-age driver flying off the road, and hitting a tree 7′ off the ground in a BMW M5 was saved by virtue of the quality of the vehicle. The point being that most drivers, in most vehicles, would not have survived the same crash.

So if, for arguments sake, one assumes that the environment creates a culture of speeding, what might solutions look like? The two areas for improvement are the environment and or culture.

For this case, the word culture is defined as the assimilation of values and processes. Culture can be changed by adjusting the values of a group (processes usually follow values). In the case of Palisades Drive, the values are the speeds at which people drive. Enforcement and education can be used to influence those values, but require vigilant human resources to maintain an effective status. E.g. people will slow down until the police go away, people ‘forget’ what they have learned, or a new uninitiated population enters the area.

Another way to change the values and, in turn, the culture is to change the environment. The benefit of an environmental change is that it is sustainable, in that it does not require the long-term commitment of human capital. It is a short-term capital expense, but over time, will continue to be effective, yielding a lower total-cost-to-maintain than the enforcement and education options.

For example: John Fisher’s second option had a price tag of $5MM. If we assume that the cost-to-taxpayers for each man hour of that project is $200 (person, benefits, apparatus) then the projects cost is one-time 25,000 man-hours. If we assume that Police, at the same rate were available for enforcement and education at 160 man hours a week, the cost would be 8,320 man-hours per year.

Even without cost-of-living and inflation increases, a sustained education and enforcement solution equals the cash outlay of the engineering solution after 3 years. However, to maintain it into year four, the cost increases, and continues ad-infinitum in order to maintain control of the speeding culture. (This calculation does not factor in the Fire Department and other public service savings).

Homeowners associations run into this type of issue, regularly. The pressure between raising association fees and deferred maintenance creates a similar dynamic, whereby short-term band-aid fixes attempt to shore-up, postpone or offset required capital expenditure. Invariably, this strategy fails with time, as it is equally unsustainable.

The Highlands President’s Council might well consider the property taxes that this community pays as our ongoing contribution to to the “reserve”, and that the deferred maintenance has now reached a point where further inaction will cost more lives.

I’m not married to any particular reconfiguration. It just seems, from the back-of-the-envelope calculations, getting rid of some lanes, adding some lights and making room for the safe conveyance of pedestrians and bicycles is the safest, most cost-effective solution and sustainable solution to changing a culture of speeding.

I welcome comments, anything but anonymous invective.

Peter Duke

peter@dukemedia.com

I posit that the problem is not speeding, teenagers, or reckless disregard, the problem is, that for whatever reason, the Design of Palisades Drive is fatally flawed. Without going into it’s history, it’s a Class II Highway, that connects an isolated neighborhood to the rest of the community. To add (bureaucratic) complication it runs through a state park, that touches many different jurisdictions.

Delivering a laundry list of potential solutions to elected officials will not, necessarily, have the desired result. e.g. If we put in solar-powered speed signs, and someone get’s killed again, then the bureaucrats and the elected officials can say “we did what you asked”.

Instead we need to make a simple request, that the Department of Transportation re-engineer Palisades Drive with the main success criteria being that safe passage for autos, pedestrians and cyclists be given the highest priority. The success criteria need to be no more fatalities or injuries (except in some extraordinary case).

Education and Enforcement are supports for for Engineering, not a replacement. Education and Enforcement can be brought online as quick tactical fixes, the the real solution is to get the LADOT to do some substantive work.

A tool that I use for defining a creative project is a Positioning Statement. While its form seems more suited to a product, I believe that the value here is in focusing our message to the councilman’s office.

Here’s the formula:

For [audience], [our product’s name] is a [category in which our product competes] that provides [the major benefit of our product] unlike [our major competitor’s product].

Here’s my first whack:

For [District 11 residents], [Palisades Drive] is a [thoroughfare] that provides [safe access to the Highlands for automobiles, pedestrians and cyclists] unlike [the current class 2 highway].