Good morning. I'm Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, April 29, 2023. Let's look back at the week in Opinion.
I hope you're sitting down, because what you're about to read is shocking: Public officials sometimes ignore the advice given in editorials. I know my Opinion colleagues serving on The Times' editorial board don't feel personally insulted when this happens (and during the Trump era, it happened a lot), but some slights can hurt more than others. And the Culver City Council's decision to ignore the editorial board's recommendation and curb its street-safety pilot program hurts a lot.
I mean that almost literally. The program, called Move Culver City, added a protected bike lane alongside the bus-only lane in its downtown. This week, the Culver City Council (or should it be "Culver City City Council"?) voted to remove the protected bike lane and add one lane for vehicle traffic, a change that will immediately put cyclists in harm's way. The council members were told this by some of the more than 200 public commenters who spoke before the vote, most of them strongly in favor of Move Culver City, including young residents who pleaded with their leaders to consider the sorry state of the climate they will inherit.
But what moved council members more — more than pleas from youth, and more than statistics showing the program was meeting its goals of increasing cycling and transit use — were complaints from drivers who felt inconvenienced by having less space. The objective good of safer roads and cleaner air lost out to elected officials' need to placate impatient motorists.
This points to a larger problem: the disconnect between what officials (and a lot of their voters) say about improving street safety and fighting climate change, and what they're willing to do to achieve both. The Culver City Council's vote is only one piece of evidence for the vastness of this disconnect: Just across the municipal border, traffic fatalities in the city of Los Angeles hit a two-decade high in 2022. This is in the era of Vision Zero, a goal the city set in 2015 to work toward zero traffic deaths by 2025. As we're tragically finding out, that goal is elusive when City Council members kill "complete street" plans or shut down scenes of thriving street life or work behind the scenes to cancel promised bike lanes.
Private industry deserves a dishonorable mention too, as General Motors Co. announced this week it will end production of its popular Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles (full disclosure: I own a Bolt). This isn't the end of EVs for GM, but it most certainly is the end of smaller, safer, affordable EVs for the company, which will shift production to electric pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. While GM can still tout its electrification, almost all of its EVs will be of the hulking SUV and truck varieties driving up pedestrian fatalities in the U.S.
A greenwashing company killing its most accessible EV. A Vision Zero city undermining its own stated safety goals. A small city kowtowing to drivers at the expense of cyclists and transit users — none of this bodes well for a society that needs to make transformative changes but resists even piecemeal ones.
Speaking of changes, she's thinking of ditching her electric car. I can sympathize with my colleague Mariel Garza, who loves her Kia Niro EV but doesn't love the charging infrastructure that makes road tripping a hassle. It's hard not to envy drivers paying $5 a gallon when the charger plugged into your car in the middle of nowhere suddenly goes offline. Garza writes: "Things are improving, but if the pace of change over the last three years is an indication of what's in store for the next three years, the policies to push increasing numbers of EVs by California and the Biden administration are in trouble. It's not enough to set sales targets and offer tax credits. If we want people to embrace fully electric cars, we have to make it easier to charge up away from home." L.A. Times
Tucker Carlson joked about deporting him on air for "good TV" — that's the kind of host the fired Fox News personality was. Jose Antonio Vargas writes: "I've been a guest on various Fox News shows over the years, and appeared on Carlson's show three times. I did it to demonstrate to Fox viewers that the immigrants that Carlson constructed nightly — the rapists, the thugs, the freeloaders — were just convenient figments of his imagination. 'Here I am,' I hoped to convey to people watching, 'I'm just a person, like you, paying my taxes (did you even know that undocumented workers pay taxes and contribute to Social Security?), living my life, calling this country my home.' But to Carlson, it was all a performance." L.A. Times
More on Tucker Carlson: Jonah Goldberg, who knows Carlson and was a colleague of his at Fox News until resigning in 2021 over the paranoid conspiracy-laden "Patriot Purge," says that the ex-host "turned tactics — ridicule, nastiness, flipping the script — into an ideology unto itself." LZ Granderson says he does not delight in Carlson's firing because he wasn't "fired for being Tucker Carlson — the white nationalist apologist known for his spitfire misinformation and shameless hypocrisy." A reader warns that Fox News without Carlson is still dishonest and dangerous to our democracy.
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E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against former President Trump is extremely damning. Former U.S. Atty. Harry Litman sums up the peril facing Trump in the assault and defamation trial: "The law, the evidence and the personalities involved portend a lopsided and relatively brief trial that will portray Trump vividly as a liar, bully and sexual predator. And we can probably add 'coward' to that because Trump decided not to even show up Tuesday to face Carroll's serious allegations. It's a calculation that is likely to provoke resentment and contempt from the jury." L.A. Times
How can L.A. Metro make train service safer? Look to what's working on buses. Rail service and ridership are still below pre-pandemic levels; bus service, however, is humming along. Ridership is up, and crime is uncommon. There's a lesson here for Metro as it tries to improve safety on its trains, writes Madeline Brozen: "The best way forward is to take lessons from the bus and get more people on board to enforce public transit's social norms. These social norms and unspoken rules of engagement guide the public transit experience. Someone's quiet, uneventful journey is often reinforced by other people doing the same, with an occasional moment of people coming together to help. Those moments like when a passenger is standing at the rear bus exit trying to leave, and a chorus of other passengers shouts 'BACK DOOR' to make sure the driver can hear the request." L.A. Times
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