Transforming Los Angeles: Safer Streets and Advocacy with Michael Schneider
Jul 30, 2024
Justin Wallin
Imagine navigating one of the busiest cities in the world without a car. That's exactly what Michael Schneider did, and it led him on an eye-opening journey to transform Los Angeles into a safer, more accessible city for everyone. Join us for an inspiring conversation with Michael, a tech entrepreneur turned full-time advocate, as he shares his transition from the startup world to founding Streets for All. Learn how his dedication led to the groundbreaking Measure HLA, which mandates safer street designs every time LA repaves its roads, prioritizing pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users.
Discover the critical need for improved infrastructure to prevent pedestrian and cyclist fatalities and why Measure HLA has garnered significant support. Despite the often sluggish pace of governmental action, hear about promising projects like the revamped Hollywood Boulevard, which showcases what a more equitable city could look like. Michael sheds light on the challenges and triumphs of advocacy work and emphasizes the importance of holding city officials accountable to ensure these safety plans become a reality. Whether you're passionate about urban planning or simply interested in making your city safer, this episode is a must-listen.
Imagine navigating one of the busiest cities in the world without a car. That's exactly what Michael Schneider did, and it led him on an eye-opening journey to transform Los Angeles into a safer, more accessible city for everyone. Join us for an inspiring conversation with Michael, a tech entrepreneur turned full-time advocate, as he shares his transition from the startup world to founding Streets for All. Learn how his dedication led to the groundbreaking Measure HLA, which mandates safer street designs every time LA repaves its roads, prioritizing pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users.
Discover the critical need for improved infrastructure to prevent pedestrian and cyclist fatalities and why Measure HLA has garnered significant support. Despite the often sluggish pace of governmental action, hear about promising projects like the revamped Hollywood Boulevard, which showcases what a more equitable city could look like. Michael sheds light on the challenges and triumphs of advocacy work and emphasizes the importance of holding city officials accountable to ensure these safety plans become a reality. Whether you're passionate about urban planning or simply interested in making your city safer, this episode is a must-listen.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to Interesting People, the podcast where we delve into the lives and stories of fascinating individuals from all walks of life. I'm your host, justin Wallen. In each episode, we bring you inspiring, thought-provoking and sometimes surprising interviews with people who are making an impact in their fields and communities. There's only one common thread that the world is more interesting because of them. Get ready to be inspired, entertained and enlightened as we spotlight the extraordinary. Let's dive in Well, thanks for joining me. I appreciate I'm here with Michael Schneider and I'm going to let you introduce yourself a bit, because you do a lot, but our interaction was with a couple of iterations of a very important piece of legislation in the city of LA that came to fruition this year. But you do a lot in addition to that. And tell me a bit about that.
Speaker 2:
So I'm born and raised in Los Angeles. I have historically been a tech entrepreneur, startup guy, and about five years ago I got into advocacy work. Being born and raised in LA, you're basically born and raised to drive a car and I did that for a long time, did my job, and about 10 years ago I gave up my car and just started to use a bicycle to get around town, which is not that normal, I guess, and I love living that way. I was never in traffic, never had to look for parking, etc. But especially when my wife and I started having kids, I became radicalized as to how uncensorably unsafe LA is for anything other than a car, and it's not even that safe for that. So that's the short version of my transition from the for-profit startup world to a non-profit advocacy space, which led to us working together on this ballot measure, which passed this year in March.
Speaker 1:
So do you do that full-time, your advocacy work?
Speaker 2:
I do it full-time now.
Speaker 1:
Yes, and tell me a little bit about the path to this success, because there were a couple of starts, for when you first started to seek legislation, I think you started at City Hall and if you can give some background to what this is actually, I mean, it's essentially forcing the city to do what it said initially it was going to do. The city already signed up to do this, they just weren't doing it.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so let's give some context.
Speaker 2:
So LA in 2015, passed what's called the Mobility Plan 2035. It was about 7,500 miles of roads in LA and this touched about half of them. It made it safer to walk on the street, to ride a bicycle, made it easier to use transit and made it easier to drive. It's a great plan actually, it's one of the most ambitious plans on paper in the country, I think, for any large city but they were ignoring it. They had done 5% of the plan in eight years, which means they turned a 20-year plan into about a 160-year plan, and that wasn't working out too well, especially in the context of Vision Zero, where by next year, by 2025, we're supposed to have zero preventable traffic deaths in the city of Vision Zero. Where by next year, by 2025, we're supposed to have zero preventable traffic deaths in the city of Los Angeles. They've actually gone up every single year.
Speaker 2:
So we looked at this and when I started Streets for All in 2019, we looked at this plan and said you know, this is a pretty good plan. The city repaves about 7% of its streets every year. This is simple. Let's just go to the council office. For those that aren't familiar with LA's structure, there's 15 council members and a mayor. There's been 15 council members for about 90 years. The city has grown just a little bit in that time and they're each kind of the mini mayor of their own district. So we said we'll go to each council office and say hey, you're about to repave Adams Boulevard and when you repave Adams Boulevard please put the bike lane that the mobility plan has in it.
Speaker 2:
And after doing this for a couple of years, we sometimes had doors stamped in our face, sometimes no response at all. Sometimes they said, look into it. Never got back to us Very few times, but a few they actually did it. And what we realized is, when there's this much discretion in the city implementing its own plan, meanwhile people are dying. Every five hours a pedestrian is injured and every two days a pedestrian is killed.
Speaker 2:
In Los Angeles right now it's one of the highest rates in the country. We can't just sit still. We need to do something about this. So Healthy Streets LA, which became Measure HLA, was a measure to do something very simple Anytime the city repaves the street remember I said they repave about 7% a year by law they have to put in their own plan when repaving the street. So if there's a bus lane on that street, they got to put in the bus lane. If there's a crosswalk, they got to put in the crosswalk bike lane, and so forth. That was the reason why we went down this path and some context on why this works.
Speaker 1:
Right, you mentioned earlier we're both from. Well, I bounced around a lot, but I'm from LA, a suburb, and when a lot of us say LA, I think you're from LA. La, I'm from Long Beach. I'm actually from the city. Where are you from? Yeah, I'm from Long Beach by way of Arkansas. I'm from Long Beach by way of Arkansas, Texas. It went haywire until the 90s and then I came home.
Speaker 1:
But LA is very car-centric. Whether you like cars or you hate them, it is a space that's challenging to get around absent a car. And I actually do a decent amount of opinion research in this space for other entities, whether it's Metro, which is a client, or actually car share organizations, things like ride share, things like that. It is just an ongoing conversation.
Speaker 1:
And when you talk about the difficulty of getting around without it, first of all, it's hard to get around with a car. It just is right. I mean, it is the bane of anybody in Southern California. If you want to complain about something, you complain about driving, You'll find nine out of 10 people are happy to join that conversation and complain with you. But the alternatives are challenging too, right? And when you say that you started riding a bike to get aroundA. That's difficult in and of itself, but it is extraordinarily difficult when you introduce family and you introduce the day-to-day things that you need to do to maintain a family Errands, all these kinds of things. But it's been done in other cities, right, it's been done elsewhere, and tell me a little bit about that, because that was important to HLA's success, I think.
Speaker 2:
So, zooming out, when you look at the transformation of cities, it's easy to point to cities in Europe. You know Amsterdam in the 70s versus today. But even closer to home, new York City under Mike Bloomberg, dramatically transformed from a pretty car-centric place which is ironic because most people in Manhattan, for example, don't even own a car to a very multimodal place. And if you go to New York City today and especially Manhattan, but actually most of all the boroughs you will see a network of protected bike lanes, you will see bus-only lanes, you will see a multimodal transportation network. That was very inspiring. If New York City can shut down Times Square and pedestrianize it, other stages don't have an excuse. We were inspired by similar ideas in Providence, rhode Island, in Cambridge, massachusetts, in Seattle, washington. These are all places that are very car-centric and that chose to create a bike network as well as a bus network. It wasn't just about bikes, to give people alternatives to the car. And that's the thing about LA. When I go out and community meetings and sometimes get yelled at saying you know, you're, you're a weirdo that likes to bike. But let's get real, not adults don't live that way. Um, and my response is really well, do you like the way it's going.
Speaker 2:
Is it easy to get around town? Is it easy to get in your car and drive somewhere? We used to have rush hours. Now it seems like it's just all day, every day. There's just a ton of traffic. Are you happy doing that? I'm not anti-car. There's a car in Streets for All's logo. I'm just anti-cars having all the space. I want a more balanced transportation system and I don't want to have to risk my life to cross the street on foot or to ride a bike, and I think we need to go in that direction. That's been proven to work in cities worldwide.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and that's part of it right, because there's a lot of the oppositional arguments and you're very fortunate in this effort that the opposition actually emerged quite late, but you definitely heard a lot of them when you're interacting with the community one-on-one, and first one being you know you're removing a lane, you're removing parking, how's this going to affect my personal life? And it's everything from you know where I stick my car when I go home. If I'm not fortunate enough to have my own driveway to businesses saying you know how's this going to affect traffic in and out of my restaurant, or whatever it might be. There are answers to those. What were the answers that you came up with that worked?
Speaker 2:
Well, it's been shown. It's been proven that businesses overestimate the amount of customers they get from people driving there and dramatically underestimate the people that happen to be walking by or walk there or bike there, et cetera. So part of it was using data, but in our campaign we didn't even have to go that deep. We focused on the safety issue. Is it conscionable that we live in a city? First of all, we know how to prevent pedestrians dying and cyclists dying. It's called just building proper infrastructure. Prevent pedestrians dying and cyclists dying it's called just building proper infrastructure. Is it conscionable to know the solutions, to ignore the solutions for maximum driver convenience and to live in a city where a pedestrian is injured every five hours and killed every two days, including kids walking to school? There's been horrible crashes over the last couple of years of kids and or their parents getting hit and killed by cars just trying to get to school, and so we focused on those stories.
Speaker 2:
At the end of the day, it's about safety. It's about fairness too. Should you have to drive a car to get around? I don't think you should have to, but at the end of the day, everyone one of the most shocking things and I think this was in your first poll that you returned to us was I think the number was 51% of Angelenos didn't feel safe crossing the street. There is no more basic interaction with the street than just crossing it on foot, and most people in LA don't feel safe even doing that. That was very telling and Measure HLA's success with nearly nearly two thirds voting to pass. It proves that we're not the only ones that are sick of how unsafe the status quo is.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, it was a shocking number. It really was. That's the sort of thing you expect when someone says you know I feel unsafe, you know walking into I don't know a pen full of untrained dogs or you know walking nearby a prison, not walking a crosswalk, which seems like the sort of thing you should feel pretty safe about. It's extraordinary, and the proportion by which you want so this is be very clear about this a transformational piece of legislation. It will absolutely change the way LA is feels, the way it looks, the way people travel around in. It is, uh, you know, within 20 years, um, it will be dramatically different and it passed by an extraordinary high, extraordinarily high proportion.
Speaker 1:
It is very hard to get that that number of people to agree about anything. Um, now, these things don't happen overnight. Have you started to see some? Some, uh, some. It's very hard to get that number of people to agree about anything. Now, these things don't happen overnight. Have you started to see some change already? Are there streets that were scheduled to be repaved and are already seeing those transformations, or will that really happen in a year or two?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, we have not seen a plan from the city yet. It's been. What is it? We're in late July here, so it's been a little over four months since the election, almost five months. The city has yet to produce a plan to comply with Measure HLA and so far they have reacted to it by pausing all street repaving on any street that has mobility plan treatment. So they can do that for a little while. I do think they're working in good faith to come up with a plan. It's taking too long. It was supposed to be heard early next month. Now I don't think it's going to come until October, but they do seem like they're moving towards it.
Speaker 2:
There is a project going on right now on Hollywood Boulevard, one of the most iconic streets in the country, and the council member there, hugo Soto-Martinez, was an early endorser of Measure HLA. He actually, in his district HLA passed by 80% I don't know many issues that you could get 80% of people that vote to agree on and he is transforming Hollywood Boulevard. It's almost done. It's opening in about two weeks. They have installed pedestrian improvements, a new protected bike lane and they've taken the street down from two lanes of traffic in each direction to one and they've left the parking which protects the bike lane, and that may not sound like a big deal, but A it's the single longest continuous stretch of road LA has ever reconfigured on the west side, not in the valley.
Speaker 2:
And two, it's an iconic street Hollywood Boulevard. And three by having one lane of traffic in each direction instead of two, it becomes more like a neighborhood street. It feels more like a main street of a small town versus a highway that you're also trying to take a picture of your favorite actor on the sidewalk. So that's an example. It fully complies with Measure HLA, which has protected bike lanes in Hollywood, and I think that's an example of just a project, of a kind of projects we're going to see going forward.
Speaker 1:
Now that's exciting and it's wonderful to see. And the nature of cities is they're slow, right. The nature of all governments is they're not as quick as we'd like them to be, but the fact that they're being responsive and communicating says something and I certainly hope the best, and I'm sure there are legal avenues that you can go down if you have to, but one certainly hopes that they respect the will of the people and move forward with this and ultimately embrace it. It's an exciting time for LA. Is this the sort of thing that you're going to see or want to be involved with? Translating to other communities around the States?
Speaker 2:
I would love to. Since HLA passed and we got a bunch of press off that, I think there's been six or seven cities, people from different cities, that have contacted me saying, hey, what about HLA? Here, including some cities that border Los Angeles, we're going to fully open source the campaign. We've already done it a bit, but we're going to give everybody our playbook, our ads. They can use whatever they want. I just think that cities should be held accountable. They can use whatever they want. I just think that cities should be held accountable.
Speaker 2:
All too often cities pass plans that sound great on paper. Politicians stand up at lecterns and wax poetic about how great XYZ plan is and then the plan just collects dust because it's a suggestion, it's not a requirement. There's no ordinance saying you have to implement your own plans, and the county, by the way of LA, I'm hoping, is going to introduce its own version of HLA, not at the ballot box, necessarily, but at the county board of supervisors level. There's no good excuse anymore for knowing how to save human lives in our streets and not implementing your own plan to do it. So, yes, I would love to see it spread.
Speaker 1:
There are a lot of folks and this is not knocking the younger generation I value it. I yes, I would love to see it spread. There are a lot of folks and this is not knocking the younger generation I value it. I think it's a terrific thing and a beautiful thing who begin life wanting to change the world and make a meaningful impact and a positive impact, whatever their lens is that they see that in, but very few do right, mainly because it's just extremely hard. This is a remarkable achievement and my hunch is you probably talk to folks fairly regularly who are wanting to change and improve their community.
Speaker 2:
What are the key lessons you took out of this that anyone could do, whether they're working as a waiter in LA looking for their big break, or they're coming out of tech, like you were, and are successful and can make a meaningful change to their community and even larger. You know, before I started doing this work, I really didn't pay attention to government much. I pay attention to the federal politics, election years, president, et cetera. But I didn't know who my council member was. I couldn't tell you the structure of government in LA. I barely knew what was its own city versus part of the city of Los Angeles, what was a neighborhood versus its own incorporated city. And I think most people live that way. They don't really pay much attention to local government. They kind of want to just be left alone. If you're going to do something at government level, make my life easier, don't make it harder and just leave me alone. And I don't think I appreciated actually how easy it is to be that kind of drip drip that eventually gets results. And what I mean is community meetings actually matter, Calls to a local elected's office or emails to them actually matter. Politicians all want one thing they want to get reelected, and so they actually care when, if you can organize I mean some of the most effective campaigns I've seen aren't even a lot of people. Sometimes it's 10 people from a three block radius that all want one thing, and if those 10 people go to the council office, they will meet with them and they'll likely get their way, because that's a lot of people in just a small, small area. So you know, if you're interested in changing government A consider running for office. It was one of the best experiences of my life to run for my neighborhood council and get elected. I got reelected twice after that. And going door to door, talking to strangers that's a great skill to have, even if you never run for office. Being able to have those conversations and learning from people is really amazing. So consider running for office, consider working for an elected office.
Speaker 2:
Politicians aren't just bubbling bureaucrats that are these mostly boring white guys on TV on C-SPAN that you never really watch. There is a whole crop of younger generation politicians in LA. That's much more diverse. That's not a professional politician. I mean that in a positive way. They're just a normal person that decided to change their community and it's inspiring. And I think the last thing I'll say is alliances are really important. Hla had one of the broadest coalitions I've ever had the good fortune of helping build and be part of. We had labor unions, we had business organizations, we had climate organizations. It was an unbelievably broad coalition. If you can find other groups, especially groups that already have political power and influence and they want what you want, that can be a shortcut to getting attention and actually getting what you want from the government. What's next? Well, right now it's being a policeman and making sure the city actually follows the law. That would be nice, so we're closely tracking that. The herding cats part.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean, the good news is the law is on our side now, so we're not just asking and hoping for the good graces of somebody. They really have no choice. They know they have no choice. But how quickly they get to it, how good of a job they do, is up to the city, so we'll see what happens there. We're very active in Sacramento. We had 10 sponsored bills this year, the majority of which are still alive and going to hit the governor's desk soon. So we're going to do a lot of advocacy around that. We have a specific bus rapid transit project be the longest in LA County that we're working on. So we're working on a whole bunch of fun stuff, love it.
Speaker 1:
Michael Schneider, it has been a genuine pleasure to have you and it's great to see you again. My friend, congratulations again on the incredible success. It's well-deserved, it's a beautiful thing and I love seeing it in LA. Thanks, justin. Thanks for having me. Thank you for tuning in to Interesting People. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform, and don't forget to follow us on social media for updates and behind the scenes content. I'm Justin Wallen, and until next time, remember that the world is more interesting with you in it.
