LOS ANGELES — As the sun set over the Pacific Ocean one Sunday this past spring, Cecilia Milbourne returned from a walk on the beach with her dog, Gucci. To reach her parked Tesla, she had to cross a road that city officials have known for years poses a danger to people on foot.
Eight years ago, as part of a national initiative to stem traffic deaths called Vision Zero, the city shrank the number of lanes on the road, Vista Del Mar, and several connecting streets in the shoreside community just south of Venice. But they restored it to four lanes after an uproar by drivers — among them Octavio Girbau, who railed against a city official in a 2017 Facebook post stating he was stuck on one of those intersecting roads “in the traffic hell you created.”
On March 16, Girbau was driving south on Vista Del Mar as Milbourne was about to cross in a spot with no crosswalk and no sidewalk — just a concrete curb separating her from the moving cars. Girbau bumped another car, lost control and struck Milbourne on the side of the road, sending her flying as his Mercedes flipped onto the beach, according to a police report. Milbourne, 29, a hairdresser and actor who had moved to Los Angeles from Atlanta, was pronounced dead at the scene. Her dog died with her.
Milbourne’s death on the hazardous road encapsulates the widespread failure of Vision Zero, a plan endorsed by the federal government during the Obama administration and adopted by cities across the country. The core concept, which emulates a Swedish model, is that the government — through engineering, vehicle standards and police enforcement — can ensure that the mistakes of drivers are not deadly.
But the program has foundered in city after city in the United States, according to an examination of pedestrian death data by The Washington Post, even though lifesaving measures such as lower speed limits and more pedestrian crossings can be relatively inexpensive.
Vision Zero’s failures in more than two dozen cities fit a predictable pattern, according to the Post analysis and interviews with experts in traffic safety. Motorists are hostile to measures that slow traffic and favor pedestrians. Local leaders give token or tepid support. Spending on pedestrian-friendly improvements is not prioritized. The U.S. government, meanwhile, never backed up its pledge with federal action or significant funds.
A Post analysis found that of 27 cities that had at least five pedestrian deaths each year before adopting Vision Zero, all but one now have the same or higher pedestrian death rates than when those declarations were made.
That includes Albuquerque, where the pedestrian death rate nearly doubled in the five years since the city announced it was signing on to Vision Zero. It also encompasses Long Beach, California; Sacramento; and Greensboro, North Carolina. Nationally, annual pedestrian deaths surged 70 percent from 2010 to 2023, as authorities have continued to prioritize the flow of motor vehicle traffic.
“The real problem isn’t that Vision Zero doesn’t work; it’s that many places have adopted that slogan without making any real changes,” said Amy Cohen, who founded Families for Safe Streets after her son, Sammy, was killed in front of their New York City home. “It has not been implemented with the resources and commitment and courage from legislators that is required.”
Los Angeles was one of the first cities to adopt Vision Zero in 2015, pledging to eliminate crash deaths by this year. The trend has been in the opposite direction. The number of people on foot who were killed by cars has increased more than 60 percent, from 97 in 2015 to 158 in 2024, according to statewide traffic data from UC Berkeley.
An independent audit found “a lack of accountability” in the Los Angeles effort and said it was mired in “conflicts of personality, lack of total buy-in” and disagreements about how to run it. City officials say they are trying: L.A.’s transportation agency pointed to 7,000 safety improvements it has made since 2017. The agency said it “continues to identify and refine methods to improve safety conditions on streets.”
In the week after Milbourne’s death, friends and family began sending her mother articles about past deaths on Vista Del Mar: Two teenagers whose cars collided last year, a mother crossing the road while holding her 3-year-old in 2021, a teenage girl heading home from a party on the beach in 2015. In all, she learned, eight people have been killed on the road since 2015.
“On the same roadway, same beach — that’s an atrocity,” Kim Milbourne said in an interview.
Police say Girbau swerved after seeing Milbourne at the edge of the road, then collided with another car before hitting her. Police initially said Milbourne was at fault, according to their reports on the accident, which took note of signs prohibiting pedestrian crossing along that stretch. But after an investigation, Girbau, 72, was charged with a misdemeanor count of vehicular manslaughter, according to court records. Girbau declined to comment; his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.
A plan to save lives
In other countries that have curbed pedestrian deaths through Vision Zero, governments made it a national priority. While the goal is to eliminate all traffic deaths, much of the focus in the United States and elsewhere has shifted to protecting vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists as cars have become safer.
Sweden redesigned roads, increased enforcement, put money into expanded public transit networks and required new safety features from car manufacturers. Road deaths were cut by 60 percent, and pedestrian deaths by 65 percent. Other countries adopted the same commitment: The European Union made it continentwide in 2011. Road deaths in the E.U. have declined 25 percent since then, even as car use has grown. More than 900 European cities have made it a year or more with zero traffic fatalities.
In the United States, advocates for road safety took notice. Traffic deaths in the United States, after falling for years, started to rise in the 2010s.
“We had heard of Vision Zero, but in our minds we were like, ‘That will never work in the U.S. We’ll never find an elected leader brave enough to say that out loud,” said Leah Shahum, who now runs the national Vision Zero Network, the nonprofit she founded to support cities making the commitment. Then Bill de Blasio, while running to be mayor of New York City in 2013, made Vision Zero a campaign pledge. The Obama administration embraced it in 2016.
“Our vision is simple — zero fatalities on our roads,” then-Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said that year.
But federal spending has been anemic. The 2016 kick-off was supported by a token $1 million a year in federal funding. The work of developing a plan for Vision Zero was turned over to the private, nonprofit National Safety Council and the research organization Rand.
Thomas Machado, a spokesman for the safety council, said it continues to award grants of up to $200,000, allowing communities “to test innovative approaches.” Leah Polk, a Rand spokeswoman, said that the organization stands by a 2018 report outlining a path to zero deaths by 2050, but that it hasn’t conducted any more research.
Lawmakers provided billions in funding for pedestrian safety in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, including $1 billion a year in safe streets grants available to cities. But the money is a small fraction of overall transportation spending, according to federal data.
In 2022, Pete Buttigieg, President Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, launched a road safety strategy with the goal of zero deaths at its core. He said in an interview that he embraced the initiative after seeing how the country recoiled at airline deaths while seeming to accept “carnage on our roadways.” Buttigieg, a former mayor, said his aim was to provide federal money and political support for the local leaders who often must contend with the fiercest opposition to safety projects. But he says that much more needs to be done.
“To get this right clearly requires sustained effort that includes real resources going to physical infrastructure,” he said.
This article is part of a Washington Post investigation into a surge in pedestrian deaths on U.S. roads. Read the stories:
The Trump administration has shifted spending priorities even further in favor of cars, seeking to cancel some grants Buttigieg awarded for pedestrian safety projects. Trump officials branded one project in Boston “hostile to motor vehicles” and said they were pulling money from projects that risked creating traffic jams.
In July, Sean P. Duffy, the current transportation secretary, asked states to identify safety projects on the kinds of major roads most dangerous for pedestrians. The department did not respond to questions for this story.
The evidence is irrefutable that Vision Zero improvements — such as adding crosswalks, giving pedestrians more time to cross and narrowing multilane roads in busy areas — do work, according to multiple transportation officials and engineering experts.
New York City lowered speed limits, added cameras and most successfully — if controversially — limited car traffic in Lower Manhattan. The city averaged 141 pedestrian deaths per year before it announced its Vision Zero goals in 2014. Since then, it has averaged 111 per year. Hoboken, New Jersey, focused on removing parking close to crosswalks that made it hard to see people crossing the street. Hoboken has gone eight years without a traffic death.
Los Angeles Department of Transportation General Manager Laura Rubio-Cornejo said at a city council meeting in August, “Where we are redesigning streets, we are seeing the most improved safety outcomes.”
The problem, she said, is that “these outcomes are limited in scale.” The city said it has redesigned about 20 miles of its “high-injury” streets since 2017, but it also has identified 549 miles of those dangerous roads. A city transportation department spokesman said Mayor Karen Bass is pursuing reforms that “will lead to more projects that prevent crashes and save lives citywide.”
Political opposition
On the Tuesday after Memorial Day 2017, Karla Mendelson would later tell a local paper, her husband came home from work late and looking distraught.
“Who died?” she asked.
His answer: “They closed lanes on Vista Del Mar.”
Soon she had founded a group, “Keep LA Moving” (KLAM), that became the face of the opposition to the lane restrictions in the area known as Playa del Rey. They said the changes had caused chaos: lengthening commutes, creating confusion and sparking conflicts between drivers. The owner of a shoe repair store, who had bought the shop from a man who died crossing a road near Vista Del Mar, said in a lawsuit KLAM filed against the city that the changes were crushing his business. Mendelson argues that the city “fostered the bike vs. cars vs. pedestrians narrative that prevents progress and foments road rage.”
At first, a local city council member was defiant, saying: “We should never buy into the notion that convenience is worth endangering lives.” But the backlash only grew. A recall campaign was launched. The city of Manhattan Beach threatened to sue Los Angeles on behalf of commuters.
Caught off-guard, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered the changes undone. The council member apologized. City officials made no further attempts to change the road. KLAM moved on to opposing similar projects in and around Los Angeles, and then to advising groups across the country that were forming in opposition to Vision Zero initiatives.
“Outside a few primarily East Coast corridors, the car is absolutely superior every conceivable way” to other modes of transportation, said Christopher LeGras, a writer and lawyer who joined KLAM after Venice Boulevard added bicycle lanes in 2017.
The Vista Del Mar episode proved to be a watershed moment for Los Angeles’s efforts to protect pedestrians. Projects would move forward only if the city felt the community was fully supportive, said two people involved in those discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations. Advocates say the city failed to make the case that speeding was a problem worth solving, even if it caused some traffic delays.
“They made these changes and got a bunch of backlash because they didn’t do it right,” said Damian Kevitt, who became a traffic safety advocate after losing his leg in a hit-and-run crash in Griffith Park. After that, he said, “you had just the bare minimum.”
In some cases, Angelenos have died as planned safety upgrades stalled.
It has been over a decade since the city decided to put a roundabout at the corner of 4th Street and New Hampshire Avenue in Koreatown, a neighborhood where 34 people have been hit by cars and trucks and killed between 2015 and 2023. But there was a dispute between the city and the state over funding, and some objected to the plan to include bike lanes. The roundabout was delayed.
On July 31, Nadir Gavarrete, a 9-year-old, was killed at the intersection while crossing the street on his scooter by a driver in a motor home.
Within days, a crosswalk was painted at the intersection — the work of a group called the Crosswalk Collective, which for years has resorted to covert, guerrilla-style street striping at residents’ request. Last month, the city installed a temporary roundabout and plans to upgrade to a permanent one next year. Another group, People’s Vision Zero, has started striping dangerous intersections based on crash data.
Both groups said they would not touch the stretch of Vista Del Mar where Milbourne was killed, however. They say cars go too fast there for pedestrians, even with a crosswalk.
In South Los Angeles, Adé Neff, who runs a bike co-op, partnered with the city 10 years ago to try to reimagine a dangerous intersection with diagonal crosswalks. But nothing came of it, and the street has become a popular place for spinning in circles at high speed, he said. A 24-year-old nursing student standing on the sidewalk was killed there when a driver doing donuts lost control and hit the crowd of observers.
“People are so invested in their vehicles,” Neff said. “The culture needs to change, and people in power need to be brave enough to make those decisions.”
Gridlocked
At the beginning of Vision Zero, top transportation officials in Los Angeles called for an $80 million annual budget to begin reducing deaths. But, like other cities, it never spent as much money on Vision Zero as its own plans said was necessary, according to the city’s audit of its program, released in April. The audit also highlighted how some proven strategies for slowing cars — setting safer speed limits, changing those limits based on traffic or weather, and using camera enforcement — were limited or outlawed by California state regulation.
Only recently were cities in California allowed to lower or maintain limits for safety reasons, with a move away from rules that linked speed limits to the habits of the fastest drivers. The old rules are why, in 1976, the limit on Vista Del Mar was raised from 35 miles per hour to 40.
Kevitt lobbied state legislators for years to change the rules as well as add speed cameras, finally getting a pilot program of a few cameras in six cities last year.
One of the first locations being considered is the spot where Milbourne was killed on Vista Del Mar. This fall, Kevitt and some of his colleagues did their own radar testing on the road. They found that about half of drivers are going above the speed limit during rush hour. In the morning, more than a quarter of cars are going over 50 miles per hour.
Milbourne died near two sets of stairs that lead from the wide expanse of Dockweiler Beach to Vista Del Mar. At the top, there is barely space to stand between the sandy bluff and the road. Cars whip by fast enough to be heard over the sound of planes taking off at Los Angeles International Airport, which sits just east of the beach.
A water lover, Milbourne had left college and the East Coast so she could be near the Pacific Ocean. Her aunt and uncle introduced her to Dockweiler Beach. It’s where they had gone on their first date and where the family spread her uncle’s ashes last year. Milbourne would go there to meditate, her family said.
Milbourne’s mother was awoken in Atlanta at 3:32 a.m. on March 17 by a call from an unfamiliar number. The man on the line said he was from the Los Angeles coroner’s office and wanted to know if her daughter had an infinity symbol tattooed on her hip enveloping the word “love.”
The police officer who responded to the scene stated in the police report that Milbourne was responsible for the accident, saying she had failed to “yield the right-of-way to all vehicles upon the roadway so near as to constitute an immediate hazard.” Girbau’s car hit a sign with the symbol for “No Pedestrian Crossing,” police stated.
But Detective James Dickson, who is in charge of the investigation, said he “immediately overturned that,” based in part on Girbau’s handwritten statement after the crash, saying he saw her “walking on the curb or side of street.”
“She was absolutely not at fault,” Dickson said.
Kim Milbourne spoke to her daughter on the phone every day. During the Los Angeles wildfires in January, Cecilia texted her mother a photo of the black smoke and said she was picking up diapers and baby clothes to deliver to people who lost their homes. When her mother suggested she get as far away from there as possible, Cecilia replied: “Mom, you always told me if I have the capacity to help somebody, to do it.”
Milbourne was buried in Atlanta, and there were so many people at the service that not all could fit in the church. Friends and family also walked the beach where she died about a week after the accident. They lit candles and draped white sheets over the sandy cliff by the side of Vista Del Mar. They planted purple flowers, her favorite as a child, on the rocks where she fell. Six months later, they were blooming still.
Methodology
The Post used multiple public records to assess the performance of dozens of cities across the country that adopted Vision Zero.
Reporters identified cities with Vision Zero goals by relying on lists from the Department of Transportation that detailed cities’ action plans and from Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit that helps cities reach their goals. They then reviewed city council resolutions, mayoral proclamations and other records to determine the year in which they announced their commitment.
To identify the pedestrian deaths for 66 cities that adopted Vision Zero, The Post used data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration known as the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). The dataset contains all motor vehicle accidents where someone died: the driver of a vehicle, a passenger, cyclist or pedestrian. It doesn’t include accidents that resulted only in injuries.
For this analysis, reporters focused on those accidents that included a pedestrian death between 2010, when pedestrian deaths began to increase, to 2023, the most recent year with data available.
FARS includes the latitude and longitude of each accident. Reporters used those coordinates to plot deaths on city maps, which they downloaded from the Census Bureau, to get the total number of deaths. They also used the census to download total population data to calculate the pedestrian death rate.
To be included in the analysis, cities must have announced their Vision Zero goal at least five years before 2023 and averaged at least five deaths a year before their announcement. This narrowed the list to 27 cities.
Reporters averaged the death rate for each city for the years before the announcement and separately for the years after. They then took the percent change between the two. One city, New York, saw a decrease in the years after it made the announcement. In the other 26 cities, the death rate either stayed the same or increased.
About this story
Reporting by Rachel Weiner and Ian Duncan. Data analysis by Emmanuel Martinez. Graphics by Dylan Moriarty. Design and development by Tyler Remmel. Graphics editing by Tim Meko. Photo editing by Maya Valentine and Monique Woo. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Editing by Christopher Rowland and Meghan Hoyer. Additional editing by Juliet Eilperin and Paola Ruano. Project editing by KC Schaper. Additional support from Nate Jones, Jordan Melendrez and Chris George.