Whose bridge? Our bridge!
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I am pretty sure that if I was a teenager in LA right now I would be up there climbing that bridge with friends most weekends.
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The street I grew up on was about two miles long, straight as an arrow, and illegal to park on after dark without a permit. It was a magnet for the local drag racers.
Until one fateful night one car lost control and slammed into a telephone pole, killing the driver and passenger instantly. It was about a block from our house, and the noise woke up everyone in the neighborhood. It was a long, long night with lots of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances processing the scene and hauling away the bodies.
Some of the neighbors got license plate numbers, Hennepin County got into the investigation, and a bunch of people were charged and convicted for drag racing, manslaughter, you name it.
Wasn’t another drag race on that road for as long as I lived there.
No moral to the story, just a sad waste of lives.
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We live off a main thoroughfare in LA County and cars race down the street at all hours. Sometimes they do donuts in the intersection in the late hours. There is a residential area in the far northeast area of our city that is known as Copland. This road is a straight shot from a police substation to their homes. I strongly suspect that many of the speeding drivers are off-duty cops. I mean, the entire city knows it’s an issue and they’ve had exactly one speed trap in the 10 years that we’ve lived here.
Possibly? Although I don’t know what political statement was being made by the guy getting a haircut in the middle of road.
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These sideshows and takeovers are overwhelmingly Black and LatinX. There simply aren’t enough young whites in LA to achieve this. LA county as a whole is 25% white, mostly older. LAUSD gives a better indication of young whites: it’s 10% white. LA just doesn’t enforce many laws. They should impound and destroy all the vehicles involved in these and revoke the licenses for everyone involved (I don’t care what race), but that doesn’t happen.
Yeah that’s certainly true.
That’s sort of the point of them. They are totally dangerous and it’s very scary to be caught up in the traffic that they block, as you don’t know what’s going to happen or how you’re going to get out of the situation.
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yeah, unfortunately there are some streets that just scream “race me.”
long straight aways with wide lanes, no medians, no stoplights or intersections, no structures right up against them: where you feel like you can see forever in front of you… just like this bridge
to me it’s wild there’s no median and that the bike lanes are essentially part of the road. ( why with such a traffic heavy bridge wouldn’t they have put the bikes next to the peds?? )
@mr_raccoon : that video you posted has a moment where the architect says:
“bridges knit communities together” .
and i couldn’t help think about how highways and vehicular bridges have long been used for exactly the opposite, especially with racial segregation
not really here nor there, but it’s like they decided to completely ignore the actual history of urban planning
( they are nice arches though )
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Is there a reason why the sort of reckless negligence that could easily get a hapless passer-by on a public road killed is only good for a vehicle impound; rather than the sorts of long-term license implications and in some cases fines and imprisonment we use on drunk drivers because of their dangerous reckless negligence?
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It’s unfortunate that nothing effective was done until after the trivially predictable bad outcome happened; but having a former racing hotspot go dead for at least some years after enforcement was dialed up from ‘nonexistent to perfunctory’ to ‘actually serious’ sounds like a moral of the story to me.
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Way back during the Clinton administration some idiotic radio shock jocks did a similar stunt on the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge. It was supposed to be some kind of political commentary in response to reports that Bill Clinton had tied up air traffic at LAX by getting a haircut while Air Force One was sitting on the runway.
The stunt went over about as well as anyone with a room-temperature IQ could have predicted.
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This seems like another great case for defunding the police. With all their resources and huge budgets, the only way police can think of to address the problem is to shut down a main municipal route??? Community organizers would have better outcomes and not need to close the place down over and over.
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