Here\u2019s the story of how the four intersections around Stoner Park finally got their crosswalks.<\/p>\n
Jonathan Hale was already familiar with guerrilla tactical urbanism before he moved to Los Angeles from the Bay Area. In Oakland, the Urban Compassion Project<\/a> has proven adept at trash cleanups when the city fails. Streetsblog SF readers are familiar with the Bay Area Bench Collective<\/a> which, as the name suggests, puts down benches at neglected transit stops.<\/p>\n So when he moved to Los Angeles and saw the need for crosswalks to protect pedestrians near his own local park, he took action. Hale’s local park is Stoner Park, named after an early city leader<\/a>. It’s a hundred-year-old 8-acre park, well loved and heavily used. The park has a 50-space parking lot, but most of the park perimeter has no sidewalks – just well-trod dirt paths. Some surrounding streets also lack sidewalks. <\/p>\n Hale trained with the L.A. Crosswalk Collective<\/a>, whom he credits with \u201cgiving him the sauce\u201d and found a few other volunteers in his neighborhood. If anyone is interested, the Crosswalk Collective has its own online guide<\/a> for anyone else interested in some DIY painting projects.<\/p>\n At first, the crosswalk painting was aimed at just two intersections, and it took a little time.<\/p>\n \u201cWe started painting Saturday May 24, and then we painted every Saturday for four weeks,\u201d Hale remembers.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOur goal was to try and have crosswalks leading to Stoner Park at all the corners before summer camp started. At the end of the four weeks, we had eight new crosswalks, which I was pretty stoked about.\u201d<\/p>\n A big part of the decision to do it themselves was they knew the city bureaucracy wouldn\u2019t move quickly to install the crosswalks, if it ever got around to it at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt would take months, if not years, to probably hear back that there wasn’t anything in the budget for it. So we figured we would just do our own thing, organize a group of neighbors,\u201d he continues.\u00a0<\/p>\n The city proved Hale\u2019s point when it told the Los Angeles Times<\/a> there were no active requests for crosswalks near the park, although there were a flurry of requests in 2017 and 2018. <\/p>\n This is a particularly baffling claim by the city. In 2020, the city of Los Angeles designated Westlake Boulevard a “Slow Street” and it received pedestrian improvements designed to allow people to exercise and be outside on the street during the pandemic while remaining social distancing. When the city used the Slow Streets as places to site more permanent infrastructure, it placed quick-build mini traffic circles at intersections and other modest mid-block traffic calming.<\/p>\n While nobody may have recently used “my311” to ask for a crosswalk, it is disappointing to see that five years after Slow Streets was launched the second slow street in the entire city still didn’t have something as basic as crosswalks.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Hale and friends hard at work.<\/p>\n Hale chose to release the story to the Westside Current, a favorite publication of the more conservative wing of the westside Democratic Party and Councilmember Traci Park. The Current\u2019s first story, \u201cNo Red Tape, Just Yellow Paint: Locals Make Crosswalks Appear Overnight at Stoner Park<\/a>,\u201d painted Hale and the rest of the team as frustrated and hard-working residents. Media followups from local news and television stations took a similar tact.\u00a0<\/p>\n The first Current article appeared on July 17. Two weeks later, city crews were busy ripping up the crosswalks. As expected, news coverage was uniformly negative against the city. When quoted, Park used the crosswalk removal to hit city bureaucracy and when pushed about the crosswalks mused that they looked fine to her.<\/p>\n Hale witnessed the city\u2019s efforts to remove the crosswalks first hand, and wrote a scathing manifesto<\/a> to the city. Streetsblog heard third-hand (from two different sources) that a Parks\u2019 field deputy raised the issue with LADOT at a private meeting. Parks\u2019 office was asked to comment and confirm for this story but hasn\u2019t returned Streetblog\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n But in the weeks between when the DIY crosswalk was painted and the city erasure, Park did speak to LAist<\/a> and urged that the crosswalks remain. On July 29, she was quoted as saying, \u201c\u200aWhat is the worst that could possibly happen? This intersection is at least slightly more safe [with the DIY crosswalks] while we try to figure out the next steps.\u201d See LAist for thorough coverage of whole Stoner crosswalk saga<\/a>.<\/p>\n One week after the crosswalks were removed, the city returned to not just paint them again, but paint them at all four intersections at the corners of the park.<\/p>\n \u201cMayor Bass and Councilwoman Traci Park believe that it should be safe for people to walk, roll, bike and drive in their neighborhoods,\u201d read a statement provided by the Mayor\u2019s Office about the crosswalks being returned.<\/p>\n While Hale is grateful to the city, and especially Park, for getting the crosswalks in, the work isn\u2019t done yet.<\/p>\n \u201cI really appreciate Tracy Park\u2019s public support in repaving the crosswalks and making improvements to Stoner Park,\u201d he concluded. While Hale wants to see more improvements to the Stoner Park area, at least 90% of the street adjacent to the park doesn\u2019t have sidewalks, there are also larger lessons for the city.<\/p>\n In the aftermath, the story of the Stoner Park crosswalks has brought back into focus the broken nature of Los Angeles\u2019 process for new pedestrian facilities. Last weekend the Los Angeles Times published an op\/ed by Thomas Irwin entitled, \u201cIt\u2019s No Wonder Angelenos Are Painting Crosswalks Themselves<\/a>,\u201d highlighting, again, that it takes upwards of a decade once a project is proposed for it to come to fruition (if ever). The op\/ed echoed issues highlighted in earlier L.A. Times news coverage of DIY crosswalks at Stoner and in Ktown<\/a> (see also SBLA coverage of the Ktown facility<\/a>).<\/p>\n City department heads recently rejected requiring new crosswalk installations<\/a> in the city’s Measure HLA compliance. Advocates had urged the city to routinely install crosswalks in the city’s approved pedestrian enhancement districts. The city instead opted to treating its pedestrian districts the same as all other crosswalk-insufficient areas.<\/p>\n This broken process results in another statistic making the rounds on social media: the city spends hundreds of millions of dollars on lawsuits caused by unsafe sidewalks ($289 million in 2024 according to the Los Angeles Times<\/a>) then it does on actually improving them.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/StonerParktrafficcircle2023GSV.jpg\")
City Slow Streets treatment at Stoner Park: signage and mini-traffic circle with plastic bollards. 2023 photo via Google Street View![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Screenshot-2025-08-11-at-4.03.04-PM.png\")
<\/a>The Slow Streets map submitted by the Sawtelle Neighborhood Council<\/a> in 2020.<\/p>\n