LA's "Urban Acupuncture" Plan

Mayor Sets Out to Transform L.A. Streets through 'Urban Acupuncture'

Mayor Eric Garcetti's plan to transform some L.A. streets into pedestrian havens is a tall order
'Urban acupuncture': That's what Mayor Eric Garcetti is calling his plan to change 15 L.A. streets

San Pedro's Gaffey Street is no one's idea of a quaint village.

Cars pour off the 110 Freeway, frequently at high speeds. The street's palm trees

provide little shade. The corridor is dominated by businesses catering to the automobile — KFC, Taco Bell and 7-Eleven, among others.

Yet Mayor Eric Garcetti hopes to transform Gaffey and 14 other major thoroughfares into hubs of neighborhood activity. In a process the mayor describes as "urban acupuncture," the city plans to add bike racks, plazas, crosswalk upgrades and other amenities aimed at drawing in pedestrians and attracting new businesses.

Los Angeles is famous for wide and frequently traffic-clogged boulevards that stretch across the landscape, built more for getting people from point A to point B than for fostering street life and a sense of community.

These are places that people collectively want to bring back or, for the first time, kind of bring up. - Mayor Eric Garcetti

Garcetti's "Great Streets" effort has been met with both excitement and skepticism. Several communities have hailed their selection, but some people in the targeted neighborhoods are dubious their boulevards can be tamed.

"Twenty years ago, a street was a place that moved cars. You moved through it, and there were very few people who conceptualized a street any other way," said Marlon Boarnet, a professor of urban planning at the USC Price School of Public Policy. Now, L.A. is looking to make streets people "would want to go to and spend time at, as opposed to places you just want to move through."

Behind Garcetti's initiative is a hard calculation: Los Angeles lacks the money and the space to add the types of transportation that would significantly reduce traffic congestion, such as widening streets or adding expensive mass transit. So Garcetti is pursuing the reverse strategy: bring enough amenities to a neighborhood so that residents stay closer to home and, quite possibly, avoid using their cars altogether.
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