May 21, 2025 • 21 mins
When fires swept through the wealthy L.A. enclave known as the Pacific Palisades, the images were chaotic: cars abandoned on Sunset Boulevard, people fleeing on foot. A bulldozer had to plow through the traffic just so firefighters could reach the flames.
Planners and researchers recognize the dangers of evacuating thousands at a moment’s notice and argue that our streets urgently need to be redesigned.
“In the event of a climate disaster, we can't always count on our cars to protect us,” notes Maylin Tu, Next City's L.A.-based Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Social Impact Design. “You kind of get a sense of safety and .. insularity in being in a car and feeling like you are not only mobile, but you're safe and you're protected. And this really kind of brought home that in a, in the case of some climate disasters, like your car is not going to save you.”
Tu recently covered UCLA urban planning professor Adam Millard-Ball's recent research on street connectivity in Los Angeles. He and other transportation planning experts hope rebuilding is an opportunity to rethink how L.A.'s streets work.
“If all the traffic that's coming out has to flow through one or two intersections, that's a recipe for chaos in a emergency situation,” says Adam Millard-Ball, a professor of urban planning at UCLA and director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. “This is not what the streets were built for.”
Planners and researchers recognize the dangers of evacuating thousands at a moment’s notice and argue that our streets urgently need to be redesigned.
“In the event of a climate disaster, we can't always count on our cars to protect us,” notes Maylin Tu, Next City's L.A.-based Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Social Impact Design. “You kind of get a sense of safety and .. insularity in being in a car and feeling like you are not only mobile, but you're safe and you're protected. And this really kind of brought home that in a, in the case of some climate disasters, like your car is not going to save you.”
Tu recently covered UCLA urban planning professor Adam Millard-Ball's recent research on street connectivity in Los Angeles. He and other transportation planning experts hope rebuilding is an opportunity to rethink how L.A.'s streets work.
“If all the traffic that's coming out has to flow through one or two intersections, that's a recipe for chaos in a emergency situation,” says Adam Millard-Ball, a professor of urban planning at UCLA and director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. “This is not what the streets were built for.”
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Straw Hut Media. There's only one, maybe two ways out
from any of these neighborhoods, and if all the traffic
that's coming out has to flow through one or two intersections,
(00:22):
that's a recipe for chaos in the emergency situation.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
This is Lucas Grinley from Next City show about change
makers and their stories. Truth is, there are solutions to
the problems of pressing people in cities. If you're listening,
I hope it's because you want to spread good ideas
from one city to the next city. We've been talking
about the historic wildfires in Los Angeles over the last
few shows, from what happened when donations overwhelm the relief
(00:46):
system to how a landmaker Altadena is helping protect homeowners
from displacement. This week we turned to the Pacific Palisades,
the wealthy enclave where the median home price within the
fire zone was around three million dollars, and yet when
fires swept through the neighborhood, the images were chaotic. Cars
abandoned on Sunset Boulevard, people fleeing on foot. A bulldozer
(01:09):
had to plow through the traffic just so firefighters could
reach the flames. It might have looked like a lot
of problems compounded, and one of them was how the
neighborhood was designed. Some are hoping rebuilding is an opportunity
to rethink how our streets work. To help us understand
what happened, We'll speak with Adam Millard Ball, a professor
of urban planning at UCLA and director of the UCLA
(01:31):
Institute of Transportation Studies. His research mapped street connectivity around
the world and shows how disconnected design locks us into
car dependency and could put lives at risk. We'll talk
about why creating more connected neighborhoods might be the key
to saving lives, and on the other hand, why street
network's almost never change even after disaster. First, let's check
(01:51):
in with Next City reporter Mayland Too, who lives in
Los Angeles and wrote about this story earlier this year.
There's got to be a lot of reflection happening in
Los Angeles and thinking about, well, what do we do
now with these neighborhoods and the homes that were affected.
(02:14):
One change you've covered. You spoke with a researcher who
said LA should take this moment as an opportunity to
reimagine its streets. What was wrong with the streets the
way that they were as he saw it.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
I mean, I think it's like decisions that were made
probably decades ago about like how to construct the streets,
and also just the level of access to these neighborhoods.
They were built to be pretty exclusive, whether intentionally or not,
at least in the case of the Palisades, Like there's
only a few entry points and it's hard to get there,
Like there's really windy streets, you have a lot of
(02:48):
dead ends and places where you can't really like cut through.
And what I see in LA is just there's definitely
been more of a push to kind of wall things
off and like fence things off. I would say in
recent years, there's a lot of anxiety about homelessness, there's
a lot of anxiety about crime, and sometimes those two
(03:09):
things are considered to be you know, related, And so
his suggestion that we should make things like more connected
where it's like a lot of la Is actually built
on a grid, so it's really relatively easy to get
from point A to point B. You don't have to
go on this like long srecruitous route, you know, to
go to the grocery store. So I think, yeah, his
suggestion was to build back these like more connected neighborhoods.
(03:31):
I don't think that there's a lot of openness for
that idea. I mean, that's just my sense. I think
people are very attached to like the way things were
and like the way the.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
Neighborhoods looked previously.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
But yeah, I think it's just thinking about not just
like how we build back these homes, but how do
we build back these streets. Because one of the things
about the Palisades, it's like pretty hard to access by
public transportation, but there are people that do need to
take public transportation to get to those neighborhoods.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
So well, in the inverse consequence was being hard to
get to meant it was hard to evacuate from.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
Yeah, that's yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
I think that's something that really hit home for a
lot of people in LA just the image of all
those cars like blocking the road and people abandoning their
cars and having to flee on foot, Like it's like
really a worst case scenario, and I think a lot
of people like don't feel very safe or comfortable as
a pedestrian in Los Angeles. So I thought it was
ironic that like in this situation. You know, people became
(04:29):
extremely vulnerable, not only because of the fire, because like
you're a pedestrian. Now you're like out there, you know,
without their.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Car protecting you.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
And obviously, like the situation is, you know, is pretty extreme,
but maybe it brought home this sense of like in
the event of a climate disaster, like we can't always
count on our cars to protect us.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
Like I don't personally have a car, but.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
I think there is like, you know, you kind of
get a sense of safety, and I think there's a
little bit of an insolarty in being in a car
and feeling like you are not only mobile, but you're
safe and you're protected. And this really kind of brought
home that in the case of some climate disasters, like
your car is not going to save you.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
It was just I think, just really scary and yeah,
situation that I don't think people ever expected to be in.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Your car is not going to save you. Yeah, that
is interesting. Meanwhile, in La, voters were considering something called
Measure HLA, which would add bike and bus lanes all
over the city, and the firefighters union opposed it. The
measure passed, But what was that all about? Like, why
(05:34):
would firefighters oppose bus and bike lanes.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
I think traditionally fire departments haven't been to enthus about
adding like gon car infrastructure. I think the idea is
that you want to have access, like in the case
of emergency, like fire trucks need to have access.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
I think it's like a cultural thing.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Well it's a cultural thing, and maybe can you help
us understand the culture in LA and how that would
make sense there?
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Oh yeah, I mean I think in some cases it
really is sort of like a way to oppose bus
lanes and bike lanes is to say that, like a
fire trucks be able to go through. I think the
real issue is that they don't want those things. They
don't want to make it harder to drive, Like this
whole idea that cars should always be prioritized in every
aspect of transportation planning.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
I think that's such the culture, you know, that's so
much the culture of Vala. So it's very easy to
say like, oh, what about this, what about that, what
about emergencies, et cetera. And then when you look at
actual studies, you see that like, actually, like a fire
truck in the case of an emergency, can they can
use the bus lane, they can use the bike lane
in order to get through and.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Get through the traffic that's like blocking them because usually
actually what's blocking fire trucks is not bikes, bike lanes
or bus lanes.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
It's just cars that are stopped there.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
After the break, we talk with Adam Millard Ball, Professor
of Urban Planning at UCLA and director of the UCLA
Institute of Transportation Studies. He says what happened in the
palis reflects long standing design challenges, and despite understanding those challenges,
they're difficult to fix once a neighborhood is built. Welcome back.
(07:16):
When wildfires broke out in the Palisades, quidlock traffic forced
people to abandon their cars and flee on foot. For
Adam Millard Ball, a researcher at UCLA, those images connect
to a larger story.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
So what's crossing my mind when I see this picture
of abandoned cars in the middle of what is scary
and tragic situation. The first of all, this is not
what those streets were built for. These streets are not
built for rapid evacuation by car, let alone, for evacuation
(07:56):
rapid or not by people who don't have access to
a car, and that could be because they're the disability,
they're too young, they're too old, or perhaps their partners
had at work and they're at home and their partner
took the car with them. So the abandoned cars of
the most kind of visceral images of the evacuation. But
(08:20):
I think that only scratches the service of the challenges
of people getting out of these neighborhoods very rapidly. And
then the abandoned cars also just tell us that there's
these tope points right the way. The street network is
designed partly by choice, and this is the case in
many suburban developments, but partly because of the topography with
(08:41):
canyons and hillsides. There's only one, maybe two ways out
from any of these neighborhoods. And if you only all
the traffic that's coming out has to flow through one
or two intersections, that's a recipe for chaos in an
emergency situation, especially if the smoke and people are understandably scared,
(09:02):
I mean.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Talk about KOs. Then the firefighters had to use a
bulldozer to clear a path through the abandoned vehicles so
that then they could go and fight the fires. Do
you think that the clogging of streets and people having
to abandon their cars was something that was foreseeble in
a way that we could have said, hey, let's do
this differently.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
I think these are well known vulnerabilities for in not
just in Los Angeles, but in many parts of the country,
that this is not a secret that the planners and
emergency planners know that these are hard places to get
out of in an emergency, not just for people to
(09:42):
get out, but that the first responders to get in
to fight a fire and effectuate rescues. But there's really
stuck with what's there right to a large extent, because
once you lay down the pattern the streets in a
community that's pretty much permanent, it's really hard to change.
And so there's some things that are possible around the edges,
(10:06):
perhaps some extra connections or emergency egress roads or pedestrian
cut throughs, but really this communities are locked into the
decisions that were taken when these places were being built
in the first place.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
That's something you talk about in your research, is this
idea that we're stuck with what's there and it almost
never changes over time once a street pattern is made.
Why is that, though, if we know we're looking around
and we can see in climate disasters this is a risk.
Why don't things change what is needed this time so
that maybe we do change it.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
So street networks are really hard to change, and partly
that's because that property is divided up among a lot
of different landowners, and normally to change the alignment to
the streets, it needs some process where all different landers
(11:08):
can come together and agree to that change. And that's
really hard when understandably people want to rebuild and get
the neighborhood back on their feet. And also people choose
a neighborhood because they like the way it was when
they bought it. So if someone chooses to live in
a cal desack, they don't want that cul de sac
(11:28):
to suddenly become a through street. And so I think
those two factors that the residents reluctance or resistance to
change plus the land ownership means that even after most
major disasters, we see the streets being rebuilt pretty much
of the way they were before, even when there's plans
(11:51):
for the country and a great example of San Francisco
after the nineteen and six earthquake and fire, those big
grand plans city beautiful inspired to change the streets of
San Francisco. But after the earthquake and fire, well people
just built the way it was before. And that's not unusual,
(12:12):
like even after bombings, fires, earthquakes, other disasters natural and
human caused. Ye, but the streets stay there same as
the streets are resilient.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
They are, Yeah, And do you wonder what can be done?
Is there any narrative change or is it just awareness
that has to happen or is it really just like
we accept they're not going to change.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Well, I think that number one is to think about
this when building a neighborhood, right, to think about a
pattern of yeah, from the outset exactly, to think about
a pattern of streets that is going to be resilient
to land, you social other changes further going to come
in the decades and centuries in the future. And we
(13:01):
see so mariagely from the UK and you still see
the patterns of Roman roads shaping a lot of the
geography of the country. But once a neighborhood is built,
it's not that things can't change, right, It's just it's
more difficult. And I think the main options for planners
(13:21):
are to think about cut through so not necessarily changing
streets for vehicles, but allowing more connections for pedestrians, and
that could be a path that links to cult attacks
that are going head to head, and so you have
a way to get into the adjacent neighborhood, and that's
(13:41):
especially good for kids walking to school and maybe to
see friends in the next neighborhood, or even if a
bus service comes from the other side, or stairways are
sometimes an option as well, and it's much harder to
do once a neighborhood is being finished and populated then
(14:03):
when it's being planned from the adset.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
After the break, we'll talk about what is possible to
change about our streets in what cities around the world
can teach us about safer, more connected design Welcome back.
In his research, Adam miller Ball has looked beyond Los Angeles,
(14:26):
even beyond the United States to see how other cities
are designing safer, more connected neighborhoods, and it turns out
there's more than one way to build a better street network.
You know, I wanted to ask you about what kind
of changes we need to our streets, especially because you're
being asked about this a lot now because you created
(14:49):
a sort of sprawl index looking across the whole world,
not just La and the Palsades. And I wonder what
you learned from creating that sprawl index about the way
we should be creating streets from the outset.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
I think one of the lessons that stood out from
me is that certainly, connected streets have many advantages. This
is not just about emergency evacuations. This is about walkability,
this is about access to public transit, this is about
long term resilience to land these changes. But there are
(15:23):
different ways to do that. And so we see in
the US, and in fact actually in Latin America too,
that the main way that neighborhoods have connected streets is
with a grid, and this is perhaps what we think
of than even historic downtowns in the US, But also
(15:44):
we see grids in a lot of smaller farming towns
in the midwest of the Prairies, and we see this
in Latin America as well. A lot of Argentinian and
Brazilian cities were formed around a grid. But that's not
the any way to do it. And so my opening
(16:05):
for me was that some of the most connected streets
in the world are in Japanese cities, and this isn't
just historic, this is neighborhoods that are being built today.
But these aren't usually grids. These are a much more organic,
irregular pattern of connected streets that just link up pedestrians
(16:25):
have lots of different ways out of the neighborhood. On
top of that, the streets are usually pretty narrow on
residential streets, so it's caust me more slowly. They're more
comfortable for walking and cycling, and so you don't need
a grid to have connected streets. And then the other
model that stood out was most common in Northern Europe
(16:48):
in places like suburban Danish cities, but we also see
it a bit in places like Irvine in the US
is a fused grid, and this is the more betther model,
where you have dead ends to cars that crucially pedestrians
can walk through. So it's like a grid for pedestrians,
but there's no through streets within the neighborhood for cars,
(17:13):
and so that fuse grid is perhaps combines The reason
that people like to live in color sacks in the
first place is there's less through traffic, there's more privacy,
but you also have much of the walkability because the
color sacks don't access the pedestrians.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
All of this raises larger questions not just about how
we build streets, but what kind of communities we create.
For meland two, who lives in Los Angeles without a car,
the way a neighborhood is rebuilt affects everything from daily
life to disaster response.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's going to be
a tendency, is my guess, to be kind of like
more exclusionary and more kind of fenced off in terms
of how things are being built back. And I understand,
you know, the instincts to protect the neighborhood, to protect
you know, from outsiders. But that tendency to like build
back in like a more insular way in which like
(18:13):
neighborhoods are not connected to the rest of the city,
I think is really risky when it comes to these
natural disasters because, like you said, it's like it makes
it hard to get in and you're like, yeah, like
I don't want people to like I don't want people
to come into my neighborhood.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Like I think that's like such a real thing.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
You know, that's why we have like gated communities and
stuff like that. But also it can be really difficult
to get out, and you also lose I think some
aspects of what make it, I don't know, just like
quality of life things like if I can walk to
my friend's house and I don't have to go like
five miles out of my way, you know, that affects
(18:49):
my quality of life, That affects my ability to get
around without a car, And so these sort of more
exclusionary roads are sort.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
Of like difficult to access.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Also also, like I think makes it really hard to
get around with a car. It enforces car dependency to
where it's like, well, you have to have a car
to go to the grocery store, you have to have
a car to go visit a friend. And if it's
like no, like I don't want to drive, like I
want to walk, I want to ride my bike to
go see my friend. You know.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
I think it's just such a quality of life issue.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
And so, yeah, making it easier for people to get
around without a car and also making it easier for
people to evacuate and to find safety in the event
of like a wildfire or something like that, I think
those two things are really related.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Yeah, it's interesting that you say that there would be
more of an inclination toward exclusion, and maybe because we
as a society think of exclusion as equaling safety, and
you're saying, actually, connection is what makes us safer. Interconnection, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
I mean one of the things I've written about too
is that like in the event of any kind of
emergency or disaster, it really is like your neighbors are
going to save you. Like it's not your parents live
like in another state. It's not your best friend who
lives twenty miles away is going to be your neighbors
that are going to be there for you.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Next City Show
about change makers and their stories. Together we can spread
good ideas from one city to the next city. Thank
you for listening this week. Thank you to our guest
Adam Millard Ball. He's a professor of urban planning at
UCLA and the director of the UCLA Institute for Transportation Studies.
Thank you to next Citi as Meiland two for her
reporting on this story. Our audio producer is Silvana Alcala,
(20:45):
Our show producer is Maggie Bowles, Our executive producer is
Ryan Tillotson, and I'm Lucas Grinley. Executive director for Next City.
By the way, next City is a news organization with
a nonprofit model. If you like what we're doing here,
please consider pitching in to support our work. Visit next
city slash membership to make a donation. We'd love to
hear any feedback from our listeners. Please feel free to
(21:05):
email us at info atnextcity dot org and if you
haven't already, subscribed to the show on Apple, Spotify, good Pods,
or anywhere you listen to your podcasts.
Straw Hut Media. There's only one, maybe two ways out
from any of these neighborhoods, and if all the traffic
that's coming out has to flow through one or two intersections,
(00:22):
that's a recipe for chaos in the emergency situation.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
This is Lucas Grinley from Next City show about change
makers and their stories. Truth is, there are solutions to
the problems of pressing people in cities. If you're listening,
I hope it's because you want to spread good ideas
from one city to the next city. We've been talking
about the historic wildfires in Los Angeles over the last
few shows, from what happened when donations overwhelm the relief
(00:46):
system to how a landmaker Altadena is helping protect homeowners
from displacement. This week we turned to the Pacific Palisades,
the wealthy enclave where the median home price within the
fire zone was around three million dollars, and yet when
fires swept through the neighborhood, the images were chaotic. Cars
abandoned on Sunset Boulevard, people fleeing on foot. A bulldozer
(01:09):
had to plow through the traffic just so firefighters could
reach the flames. It might have looked like a lot
of problems compounded, and one of them was how the
neighborhood was designed. Some are hoping rebuilding is an opportunity
to rethink how our streets work. To help us understand
what happened, We'll speak with Adam Millard Ball, a professor
of urban planning at UCLA and director of the UCLA
(01:31):
Institute of Transportation Studies. His research mapped street connectivity around
the world and shows how disconnected design locks us into
car dependency and could put lives at risk. We'll talk
about why creating more connected neighborhoods might be the key
to saving lives, and on the other hand, why street
network's almost never change even after disaster. First, let's check
(01:51):
in with Next City reporter Mayland Too, who lives in
Los Angeles and wrote about this story earlier this year.
There's got to be a lot of reflection happening in
Los Angeles and thinking about, well, what do we do
now with these neighborhoods and the homes that were affected.
(02:14):
One change you've covered. You spoke with a researcher who
said LA should take this moment as an opportunity to
reimagine its streets. What was wrong with the streets the
way that they were as he saw it.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
I mean, I think it's like decisions that were made
probably decades ago about like how to construct the streets,
and also just the level of access to these neighborhoods.
They were built to be pretty exclusive, whether intentionally or not,
at least in the case of the Palisades, Like there's
only a few entry points and it's hard to get there,
Like there's really windy streets, you have a lot of
(02:48):
dead ends and places where you can't really like cut through.
And what I see in LA is just there's definitely
been more of a push to kind of wall things
off and like fence things off. I would say in
recent years, there's a lot of anxiety about homelessness, there's
a lot of anxiety about crime, and sometimes those two
(03:09):
things are considered to be you know, related, And so
his suggestion that we should make things like more connected
where it's like a lot of la Is actually built
on a grid, so it's really relatively easy to get
from point A to point B. You don't have to
go on this like long srecruitous route, you know, to
go to the grocery store. So I think, yeah, his
suggestion was to build back these like more connected neighborhoods.
(03:31):
I don't think that there's a lot of openness for
that idea. I mean, that's just my sense. I think
people are very attached to like the way things were
and like the way the.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
Neighborhoods looked previously.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
But yeah, I think it's just thinking about not just
like how we build back these homes, but how do
we build back these streets. Because one of the things
about the Palisades, it's like pretty hard to access by
public transportation, but there are people that do need to
take public transportation to get to those neighborhoods.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
So well, in the inverse consequence was being hard to
get to meant it was hard to evacuate from.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
Yeah, that's yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
I think that's something that really hit home for a
lot of people in LA just the image of all
those cars like blocking the road and people abandoning their
cars and having to flee on foot, Like it's like
really a worst case scenario, and I think a lot
of people like don't feel very safe or comfortable as
a pedestrian in Los Angeles. So I thought it was
ironic that like in this situation. You know, people became
(04:29):
extremely vulnerable, not only because of the fire, because like
you're a pedestrian. Now you're like out there, you know,
without their.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Car protecting you.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
And obviously, like the situation is, you know, is pretty extreme,
but maybe it brought home this sense of like in
the event of a climate disaster, like we can't always
count on our cars to protect us.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
Like I don't personally have a car, but.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
I think there is like, you know, you kind of
get a sense of safety, and I think there's a
little bit of an insolarty in being in a car
and feeling like you are not only mobile, but you're
safe and you're protected. And this really kind of brought
home that in the case of some climate disasters, like
your car is not going to save you.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
It was just I think, just really scary and yeah,
situation that I don't think people ever expected to be in.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Your car is not going to save you. Yeah, that
is interesting. Meanwhile, in La, voters were considering something called
Measure HLA, which would add bike and bus lanes all
over the city, and the firefighters union opposed it. The
measure passed, But what was that all about? Like, why
(05:34):
would firefighters oppose bus and bike lanes.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
I think traditionally fire departments haven't been to enthus about
adding like gon car infrastructure. I think the idea is
that you want to have access, like in the case
of emergency, like fire trucks need to have access.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
I think it's like a cultural thing.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Well it's a cultural thing, and maybe can you help
us understand the culture in LA and how that would
make sense there?
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Oh yeah, I mean I think in some cases it
really is sort of like a way to oppose bus
lanes and bike lanes is to say that, like a
fire trucks be able to go through. I think the
real issue is that they don't want those things. They
don't want to make it harder to drive, Like this
whole idea that cars should always be prioritized in every
aspect of transportation planning.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
I think that's such the culture, you know, that's so
much the culture of Vala. So it's very easy to
say like, oh, what about this, what about that, what
about emergencies, et cetera. And then when you look at
actual studies, you see that like, actually, like a fire
truck in the case of an emergency, can they can
use the bus lane, they can use the bike lane
in order to get through and.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Get through the traffic that's like blocking them because usually
actually what's blocking fire trucks is not bikes, bike lanes
or bus lanes.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
It's just cars that are stopped there.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
After the break, we talk with Adam Millard Ball, Professor
of Urban Planning at UCLA and director of the UCLA
Institute of Transportation Studies. He says what happened in the
palis reflects long standing design challenges, and despite understanding those challenges,
they're difficult to fix once a neighborhood is built. Welcome back.
(07:16):
When wildfires broke out in the Palisades, quidlock traffic forced
people to abandon their cars and flee on foot. For
Adam Millard Ball, a researcher at UCLA, those images connect
to a larger story.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
So what's crossing my mind when I see this picture
of abandoned cars in the middle of what is scary
and tragic situation. The first of all, this is not
what those streets were built for. These streets are not
built for rapid evacuation by car, let alone, for evacuation
(07:56):
rapid or not by people who don't have access to
a car, and that could be because they're the disability,
they're too young, they're too old, or perhaps their partners
had at work and they're at home and their partner
took the car with them. So the abandoned cars of
the most kind of visceral images of the evacuation. But
(08:20):
I think that only scratches the service of the challenges
of people getting out of these neighborhoods very rapidly. And
then the abandoned cars also just tell us that there's
these tope points right the way. The street network is
designed partly by choice, and this is the case in
many suburban developments, but partly because of the topography with
(08:41):
canyons and hillsides. There's only one, maybe two ways out
from any of these neighborhoods. And if you only all
the traffic that's coming out has to flow through one
or two intersections, that's a recipe for chaos in an
emergency situation, especially if the smoke and people are understandably scared,
(09:02):
I mean.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Talk about KOs. Then the firefighters had to use a
bulldozer to clear a path through the abandoned vehicles so
that then they could go and fight the fires. Do
you think that the clogging of streets and people having
to abandon their cars was something that was foreseeble in
a way that we could have said, hey, let's do
this differently.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
I think these are well known vulnerabilities for in not
just in Los Angeles, but in many parts of the country,
that this is not a secret that the planners and
emergency planners know that these are hard places to get
out of in an emergency, not just for people to
(09:42):
get out, but that the first responders to get in
to fight a fire and effectuate rescues. But there's really
stuck with what's there right to a large extent, because
once you lay down the pattern the streets in a
community that's pretty much permanent, it's really hard to change.
And so there's some things that are possible around the edges,
(10:06):
perhaps some extra connections or emergency egress roads or pedestrian
cut throughs, but really this communities are locked into the
decisions that were taken when these places were being built
in the first place.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
That's something you talk about in your research, is this
idea that we're stuck with what's there and it almost
never changes over time once a street pattern is made.
Why is that, though, if we know we're looking around
and we can see in climate disasters this is a risk.
Why don't things change what is needed this time so
that maybe we do change it.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
So street networks are really hard to change, and partly
that's because that property is divided up among a lot
of different landowners, and normally to change the alignment to
the streets, it needs some process where all different landers
(11:08):
can come together and agree to that change. And that's
really hard when understandably people want to rebuild and get
the neighborhood back on their feet. And also people choose
a neighborhood because they like the way it was when
they bought it. So if someone chooses to live in
a cal desack, they don't want that cul de sac
(11:28):
to suddenly become a through street. And so I think
those two factors that the residents reluctance or resistance to
change plus the land ownership means that even after most
major disasters, we see the streets being rebuilt pretty much
of the way they were before, even when there's plans
(11:51):
for the country and a great example of San Francisco
after the nineteen and six earthquake and fire, those big
grand plans city beautiful inspired to change the streets of
San Francisco. But after the earthquake and fire, well people
just built the way it was before. And that's not unusual,
(12:12):
like even after bombings, fires, earthquakes, other disasters natural and
human caused. Ye, but the streets stay there same as
the streets are resilient.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
They are, Yeah, And do you wonder what can be done?
Is there any narrative change or is it just awareness
that has to happen or is it really just like
we accept they're not going to change.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Well, I think that number one is to think about
this when building a neighborhood, right, to think about a
pattern of yeah, from the outset exactly, to think about
a pattern of streets that is going to be resilient
to land, you social other changes further going to come
in the decades and centuries in the future. And we
(13:01):
see so mariagely from the UK and you still see
the patterns of Roman roads shaping a lot of the
geography of the country. But once a neighborhood is built,
it's not that things can't change, right, It's just it's
more difficult. And I think the main options for planners
(13:21):
are to think about cut through so not necessarily changing
streets for vehicles, but allowing more connections for pedestrians, and
that could be a path that links to cult attacks
that are going head to head, and so you have
a way to get into the adjacent neighborhood, and that's
(13:41):
especially good for kids walking to school and maybe to
see friends in the next neighborhood, or even if a
bus service comes from the other side, or stairways are
sometimes an option as well, and it's much harder to
do once a neighborhood is being finished and populated then
(14:03):
when it's being planned from the adset.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
After the break, we'll talk about what is possible to
change about our streets in what cities around the world
can teach us about safer, more connected design Welcome back.
In his research, Adam miller Ball has looked beyond Los Angeles,
(14:26):
even beyond the United States to see how other cities
are designing safer, more connected neighborhoods, and it turns out
there's more than one way to build a better street network.
You know, I wanted to ask you about what kind
of changes we need to our streets, especially because you're
being asked about this a lot now because you created
(14:49):
a sort of sprawl index looking across the whole world,
not just La and the Palsades. And I wonder what
you learned from creating that sprawl index about the way
we should be creating streets from the outset.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
I think one of the lessons that stood out from
me is that certainly, connected streets have many advantages. This
is not just about emergency evacuations. This is about walkability,
this is about access to public transit, this is about
long term resilience to land these changes. But there are
(15:23):
different ways to do that. And so we see in
the US, and in fact actually in Latin America too,
that the main way that neighborhoods have connected streets is
with a grid, and this is perhaps what we think
of than even historic downtowns in the US, But also
(15:44):
we see grids in a lot of smaller farming towns
in the midwest of the Prairies, and we see this
in Latin America as well. A lot of Argentinian and
Brazilian cities were formed around a grid. But that's not
the any way to do it. And so my opening
(16:05):
for me was that some of the most connected streets
in the world are in Japanese cities, and this isn't
just historic, this is neighborhoods that are being built today.
But these aren't usually grids. These are a much more organic,
irregular pattern of connected streets that just link up pedestrians
(16:25):
have lots of different ways out of the neighborhood. On
top of that, the streets are usually pretty narrow on
residential streets, so it's caust me more slowly. They're more
comfortable for walking and cycling, and so you don't need
a grid to have connected streets. And then the other
model that stood out was most common in Northern Europe
(16:48):
in places like suburban Danish cities, but we also see
it a bit in places like Irvine in the US
is a fused grid, and this is the more betther model,
where you have dead ends to cars that crucially pedestrians
can walk through. So it's like a grid for pedestrians,
but there's no through streets within the neighborhood for cars,
(17:13):
and so that fuse grid is perhaps combines The reason
that people like to live in color sacks in the
first place is there's less through traffic, there's more privacy,
but you also have much of the walkability because the
color sacks don't access the pedestrians.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
All of this raises larger questions not just about how
we build streets, but what kind of communities we create.
For meland two, who lives in Los Angeles without a car,
the way a neighborhood is rebuilt affects everything from daily
life to disaster response.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's going to be
a tendency, is my guess, to be kind of like
more exclusionary and more kind of fenced off in terms
of how things are being built back. And I understand,
you know, the instincts to protect the neighborhood, to protect
you know, from outsiders. But that tendency to like build
back in like a more insular way in which like
(18:13):
neighborhoods are not connected to the rest of the city,
I think is really risky when it comes to these
natural disasters because, like you said, it's like it makes
it hard to get in and you're like, yeah, like
I don't want people to like I don't want people
to come into my neighborhood.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Like I think that's like such a real thing.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
You know, that's why we have like gated communities and
stuff like that. But also it can be really difficult
to get out, and you also lose I think some
aspects of what make it, I don't know, just like
quality of life things like if I can walk to
my friend's house and I don't have to go like
five miles out of my way, you know, that affects
(18:49):
my quality of life, That affects my ability to get
around without a car, And so these sort of more
exclusionary roads are sort.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
Of like difficult to access.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Also also, like I think makes it really hard to
get around with a car. It enforces car dependency to
where it's like, well, you have to have a car
to go to the grocery store, you have to have
a car to go visit a friend. And if it's
like no, like I don't want to drive, like I
want to walk, I want to ride my bike to
go see my friend. You know.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
I think it's just such a quality of life issue.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
And so, yeah, making it easier for people to get
around without a car and also making it easier for
people to evacuate and to find safety in the event
of like a wildfire or something like that, I think
those two things are really related.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Yeah, it's interesting that you say that there would be
more of an inclination toward exclusion, and maybe because we
as a society think of exclusion as equaling safety, and
you're saying, actually, connection is what makes us safer. Interconnection, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
I mean one of the things I've written about too
is that like in the event of any kind of
emergency or disaster, it really is like your neighbors are
going to save you. Like it's not your parents live
like in another state. It's not your best friend who
lives twenty miles away is going to be your neighbors
that are going to be there for you.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Next City Show
about change makers and their stories. Together we can spread
good ideas from one city to the next city. Thank
you for listening this week. Thank you to our guest
Adam Millard Ball. He's a professor of urban planning at
UCLA and the director of the UCLA Institute for Transportation Studies.
Thank you to next Citi as Meiland two for her
reporting on this story. Our audio producer is Silvana Alcala,
(20:45):
Our show producer is Maggie Bowles, Our executive producer is
Ryan Tillotson, and I'm Lucas Grinley. Executive director for Next City.
By the way, next City is a news organization with
a nonprofit model. If you like what we're doing here,
please consider pitching in to support our work. Visit next
city slash membership to make a donation. We'd love to
hear any feedback from our listeners. Please feel free to
(21:05):
email us at info atnextcity dot org and if you
haven't already, subscribed to the show on Apple, Spotify, good Pods,
or anywhere you listen to your podcasts.
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