A residents’ group filed a lawsuit today challenging the city’s recently adopted mobility plan aimed at adding bicycle lines and making other transportation infrastructure changes across Los Angeles over the next 20 years.
Members of the group Fix the City, which filed the lawsuit, contend the city’s Mobility Plan 2035 will take away car lanes to accommodate bicycles and buses, resulting in more traffic congestion and air pollution.
The mobility plan is “an immobility plan that will have significant, un-mitigatable environmental impacts,” attorneys wrote in the 17-page lawsuit filed on behalf of Fix the City. “These impacts were accepted by the City Council on the basis of unfounded hopes, not on substantial evidence, as required by the law.”
Rob Wilcox, spokesman for the City Attorney’s Office, declined to comment, saying the city has not yet been served with the lawsuit.
Fix the City member Laura Lake said if the “dangerous, nightmarish plan” were put on the ballot, “there’s no question in my mind that voters across the city would send this plan packing in a New York second.”
The lawsuit contends amendments to the plan did not go through the city Planning Commission as required before the City Council ultimately approved the plan on Aug. 11.
Fix the City Vice President James O’Sullivan said the city acted as a “social engineer” when approving the mobility plan.
“They want to make driving our cars unbearable by stealing traffic lanes from us on major streets and giving those stolen lanes to bike riders and buses,” O’Sullivan said.
“Don’t get me wrong– I love bike riders and buses,” he said. “But not all of us — in fact, very few of us—have the luxury of being able to ride to work on a bike or bus. We rely on our cars. If there were meaningful options to car travel that would be another matter. But there aren’t.”
O’Sullivan said 85 percent of people in Los Angeles still drive and a “reasonable and effective traffic mobility plan” would not punish them “in favor of the 1 percent of bike riders.”
“Again, we support a plan that respects multiple transportation modes but it has to be practical and balanced,” he said.
