“We’re out here today because the city of Los Angeles signed Vision Zero as a directive in August 2015 to prioritize saving lives on our roads — to achieve zero traffic fatalities by 2025,” said SAFE founder and executive director Damian Kevitt, who lost his right leg in a violent traffic incident in 2013. “Not manage or reduce [them] but eliminate traffic fatalities. We are a decade later and we are at 290 traffic fatalities. ... It’s a 26% increase in traffic fatalities since the start of Vision Zero.”
Kevitt had been bicycling in Griffith Park with his wife in 2013 when he was hit by a car, pinned underneath it and dragged a quarter mile onto and along the 5 Freeway. The driver was never found. Kevitt not only survived but vowed to dedicate his life to road safety advocacy, founding SAFE in 2015.
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“The city has tools, it’s just not using them,” Kevitt told The Times. “In 2024, voters approved measure HLA by a two-thirds margin. It requires the city must follow its own mobility plan … to make roads safer for cyclists, for pedestrians, for better transit.” He also cited state measure AB 645, which in 2023 authorized a pilot program for speed cameras in a handful of California cities including Los Angeles, as “a tool the city could be implementing — it’s speed safety systems.”
City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez was on hand to support the demonstrators.
“When we have a city where more people die of traffic violence than homicides, and it doesn’t get that level of attention, yes, absolutely we could be doing more,” he said in an interview. “These are things that are absolutely preventable. But unfortunately, we don’t put enough funding into making our streets safer.”
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Kevitt had one parting comment for The Times: “Don’t use the word traffic ‘accident’ when writing about this,” he said.
“In the road safety arena, it’s ‘crash’ or ‘collision,’” he said. “ ‘Accident’ implies non-responsibility. It’s just an ‘oops.’ But when you’re driving drunk or distracted, that’s a choice. If you hit and kill or severely injure someone, it’s not an ‘oops.’ We’re trying to say: This is preventable.”