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. announced this week it will end production of its popular Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles (full disclosure: I own a Bolt). Private industry deserves a dishonorable mention too, as General Motors Co. 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.
This is in the era of Vision Zero, a goal the city set in 2015 to work toward zero traffic deaths by 2025. 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 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 objective good of safer roads and cleaner air lost out to elected officials’ need to placate impatient motorists. 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.īut 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. 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 program, called Move Culver City, added a protected bike lane alongside the bus-only lane in its downtown. 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 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. 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’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, April 29, 2023.
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