ACTIVE STREETS LA
Active Streets LA (ASLA) is a partnership between BikeLA, TRUST South LA, and Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT). ASLA co-powers communities through participatory planning to create safe walking and bicycling routes to parks, schools, and local businesses along their neighborhood streets.
The ASLA participatory planning model continues to evolve over time, but consists of two key community engagement components:
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Mapping Ride & Walk: Members of the ASLA team take a walk and/or bike ride with community members to document and photograph their neighborhood streets and stories, identifying opportunities to makes streets feel safer and more welcoming.
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Community Charrette: Members of the ASLA team lead a community charrette, where community members discuss what they saw and felt during the mapping exercise and learn about potential ways to make their neighborhood streets safer using the Active Streets Toolkit.
Each event also incorporates a number of family-friendly activities such as a bike safety lesson, music, food, crafts, and fun atmosphere. The ASLA team works hard to ensure that each event is linguistically and culturally accessible to people in Spanish and English. Due to the multiple community concerns that often go beyond bike lanes and sidewalks, the ASLA community engagement events provide an opportunity to share additional resources with community members around city services, housing and tenant rights, and enforcement. The ASLA team approaches these events as opportunities to build community cohesion and trust, and the team continues to learn from the community.
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The final outcome of the events is a conceptual design for a Bicycle Friendly Street designed with community needs in mind. The conceptual design can then be used to pursue funding to implement street improvements.
The following is a link to the Active Streets LA toolkit. Be advised that not all treatments in the toolkit may be available to use on your street.
Please work with your local city government
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