Update 8/6/2025: the city reinstalled the crosswalks in response to the media attention, intense backlash, and community members reaching out to local elected officials. They have also agreed to a community meeting in the near future, where we’ll get to ask questions about the state of safety infrastructure in Los Angeles.
Let’s talk about the crosswalks at Stoner Park.
My name’s Jonathan Hale and I live in Sawtelle. I love to walk my dog to Stoner Park, but I hate the number of times we’ve almost been hit by drivers. I really worry about my dog getting hurt by somebody rolling through a stop sign.
This park is also a place where a lot of children hang out. It’s a place for summer camps, picnics, and water fights by the pool. People come here with their families. You’ll see moms pushing strollers, groups of kids getting out of tennis practice, teenagers kicking it after school.
Stop and watch the flow of traffic and people at the corners around the park and you won’t have to wait long before witnessing a close call. Getting hit by a car is the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 5 and 14 in Los Angeles. That’s why I decided to organize a group of neighbors and community members to paint two crosswalks leading to the park at each of the park’s four corners. I didn’t want to wait for a child to die before we took action to make our streets safer.
There was a group called the Crosswalk Collective already painting unsanctioned crosswalks in other parts of the city, so I reached out to them to learn how to do it. They invited me out to Hollywood, where we painted two brand-new crosswalks at the corner of Sycamore and De Longpre. As we painted, I learned that it can take years to get basic road safety improvements done, if they happen at all. The Crosswalk Collective’s website contains a form where residents can submit local intersections. They have received requests to install crosswalks at intersections officially approved by the city and budgeted after a years-long process only to be rescinded due to budget constraints.
When LADOT heard what the Crosswalk Collective was up to, they called the cops. LAPD fined the crosswalk painters $250 each and cited them for “injury to public property”. The police threatened fines of $1,000 if they were caught painting crosswalks again. LADOT also took steps to remove the crosswalks, sending teams out with heavy equipment to pressure wash the paint away. Although there were risks, I’d seen enough close calls by the park and had enough myself. It was worth it to make the streets safer for kids.
Beyond the Crosswalk Collective, I’ve always been inspired by the works of artists and activists who have taken the initiative to make a change in their communities: Richard Ankrom, who covertly installed a freeway sign to help direct drivers to the 5; Ron Finley, the gangsta gardner; the undercover carpenters at the San Francisco Bay Area Bench Collective (SFBABC) and Chris Duderstadt; and so many others. It was in the spirit of these groups and individuals that I decided to paint crosswalks at Stoner Park.
We started painting on Saturday, May 24, and painted two crosswalks every Saturday until we’d hit every corner, finishing on June 14. Our goal was to have crosswalks at every corner before summer camp got started because there’d be a surge in the number of kids crossing the streets.
The painting parties took two hours, from 8-10 AM, and a half hour of that was waiting for the paint to dry. It was fun: we listened to music, chatted with our neighbors, and made new friends in the area. Community members chipped in to cover the cost of paint and supplies, which wasn’t really all that much. It costs about $50 for everything you need to lay down two crosswalks.
Yellow paint is standard within 600 feet of a school, which means that the crosswalk at the corner of S Westgate Ave and Missouri should be yellow because of its proximity to New West Charter School. There are also already yellow crosswalks on the adjacent blocks at the corners of Missouri Ave and Armacost Ave, La Grange Ave and Stoner Ave, and La Grange and Barrington.
California Vehicle Code § 21368 states that yellow is appropriate whenever “it appears that the facts and circumstances require special painting or marking of the crosswalks for the protection and safety of persons attending [a] school”. Given the number of children’s programs and recreational activities at the park, the amount of schools in the area, and the existing yellow crosswalks nearby, I decided we’d paint all the crosswalks at Stoner Park yellow.
We considered the possibility of presenting a liability risk to the city. From a legal standpoint, crosswalks exist at every intersection, regardless of whether they are marked. Cars must yield to pedestrians when they approach a stop. So marking the crosswalks alerts drivers to the presence of pedestrians, especially at a place like Stoner Park where there are frequently children crossing. We often place the blame for traffic violence on bad drivers, but oftentimes collisions happen when drivers are operating normally on streets designed without consideration for the safety of anybody not in a car.
When we started painting, I let a reporter at the Westside Current know what we were up to. I thought the paper’s readers might have kids themselves and be sympathetic to our effort to make the streets safer. But I requested that the reporter hold off on publishing the story for some time so that we’d be able to enjoy the crosswalks as a community for a bit before they got removed. The Westside Current finally broke the news on Tuesday, July 22, almost two months after our first crosswalk painting party. Fox 11, NBC, KTLA, and other media outlets soon followed.
The attention the story was getting got somewhat overwhelming as news vans arrived at Stoner Park to interview me and my neighbors. But the positive reception was incredibly encouraging. People from all over town reached out to ask how they could help or do something similar in their neighborhoods. The stories also received no small amount of negative pushback, because I admittedly hadn’t asked the city for permission before I painted.
On Friday, July 25, I got a text from a neighbor alerting me that the city was removing the crosswalks. I hurried over to the park and was disheartened to find a team of workers blocking off the road and using skid steers and a street sweeper to scour the traffic paint from the asphalt.
The timing was frustrating: this was less than 72 hours after the first news story came out. This meant that the city was entirely capable of quickly mobilizing resources, but only to remove crosswalks instead of proactively installing them.
I tried to talk ask the workers if the city had an official statement or reason for removing the crosswalks, but they were contractors and not authorized to speak about it. With all the heavy equipment, I wondered how much it cost to remove the crosswalk we’d painted compared to how much it would cost to install an official one, or just let ours be – which would cost nothing.
The city had made no effort to reach out to me or my neighbors. Even though I knew I should have filed a 311 request before taking things into the community’s hands, I’d imagined a different response from the city: Hey, we see what you’re trying to do but we’d appreciate it if you went about things the official way. We both want safer streets for kids, let’s work together to quickly achieve this goal. But I realize that was wishful thinking.
This isn’t the end of the story. If the city can move that quickly to remove crosswalks, they can move equally quickly to install them. Crosswalks hurt nobody and they benefit us by making our streets safer for children. Additionally, the city leadership should legalize, normalize, or otherwise affirm acts of civil society to make up for the city’s shortfalls.
I’m counting on our city councilwoman Traci Park, a staunch advocate of local control, to make a public statement unequivocally supporting our neighborhood effort to make the streets safer for children. Park’s field deputy, Michael Amster, has publicly expressed support for guerrilla crosswalk painting: “At Stoner Park, at the intersection of Stoner and Nebraska, one guy went out there and painted yellow blocks to assist people in crossing, and it looks beautiful,” said Amster in a public West LA Sawtelle Neighborhood Council meeting on June 25.
Crosswalks are clear common ground, and we’ll need Traci Park’s support if we want to take action to make our streets less dangerous for kids. I welcome the opportunity to work together on addressing this issue.
It’s clear from the timeline of the crosswalk removal that the city is capable of acting quickly. So we are giving the city until Saturday, August 2nd to either replace all four crosswalks around Stoner Park with official markings or publish clear guidelines for how neighborhoods can organize, fund, and complete infrastructure projects when the city cannot or will not make necessary safety improvements.
I am also requesting an official answer to the questions that I tried to ask city workers as they were removing the crosswalks we painted:
How much does it cost to install a single crosswalk in LA?
How many crosswalk requests has the city gotten, and how many have they fulfilled? How long does it take to handle them?
How much did it cost to remove the crosswalks at Stoner Park, and how long did the process take?
How long is the backlog of road repair work, and why did the city prioritize removing the crosswalks at Stoner Park over other projects?
Our common goal is to make our streets safe for children. If the city cannot install crosswalks at Stoner Park due to budget constraints, we’ll gladly do it ourselves and foot the bill. And I acknowledge that there’s a limit to what can and should be accomplished by cutting red tape – bureaucratic processes serve an important purpose. But we should also acknowledge the failure of a civic culture that prioritizes spending time and money to remove crosswalks near a park where children play just because they’re unpermitted.
I’m looking forward to the city’s response, and I’m excited to have our crosswalks back at Stoner Park.
I searched through city council files and found a Continental Crosswalks initiative from 2012 that says painted crosswalk improvement at a large intersection averages $2,500.
https://cityclerk.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2012/12-1949_rpt_dot_12-17-12.pdf
Thank you for your service Mr. Hale!