Jilla Nadimi and her partner were struck by a car in Los Angeles last year. First responders had to cut out Nadimi from the car’s windshield, while her partner needed spinal surgery.
“That really traumatized our lives,” said Nadimi, a student at the USC Price School of Public Policy. “And that’s a story that’s real for many people in Los Angeles.”
Nadimi and three other Master of Public Administration (MPA) students – Robert Fierro, Matan Marder Friedgood and Alexander Ryan – recently got the chance to work on a project that will hopefully prevent more car accidents like the one that injured Nadimi. They advised L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park on how to make part of Washington Boulevard safer for bicycle riders.
Their findings not only identified safer street designs and a phased approach to implement them, they also won the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation Recognition Award for Outstanding Capstone. It’s the USC Price School’s top honor for MPA capstone projects and entails students tackling real-life policy problems to complete their degrees.
“As someone working already in local government, I think this capstone was the perfect blend of policymaking and public administration in one project,” said Fierro, who is Senior Management Analyst at the City of Montebello. “Being able to see behind the scenes of what an elected office goes through and how that’s implemented to their staff – it was just a phenomenal experience.”
Councilmember Park, who represents L.A.’s 11th Council District, tasked students with examining a 1.4-mile stretch of Washington Boulevard that severs the Marvin Braude Trail, a 22-mile bike path that borders the Pacific Coast from Will Rogers State Beach to Torrance County Beach. The stretch is a difficult corridor for cyclists to navigate, with parked cars and as many as five travel lanes for motor vehicles. Adding to the complexity is that the roadway is regulated by overlapping government jurisdictions, and cyclists are just one of several stakeholders with an interest in how the street is designed.
“We found that there are five different, real government actors involved in just making this bike lane exist, from the state level with the California Coastal Commission to Council District 11 and County Supervisors who oversee different sections of Venice,” Ryan said. “We had to look at maps to understand, where is this street starting? Where’s this ending? And where is the nexus of how we should focus our efforts?”
The Price School team recommended a phased approach to redesign the roadway, starting with short-term solutions, such as reducing speed limits and improving street lighting, and ending with long-term proposals, such as converting the 1.4-mile stretch to a Class IV bikeway, which would add curbs or bollards to create a bike lane separated from vehicle lanes.
Students conducted more than 15 hours’ worth of stakeholder interviews and surveyed more than 400 people as part of their research. One challenge was finding areas of consensus among so many different stakeholders. For example, the business community supported vehicle access to Venice Beach, with a large parking lot where Washington Boulevard meets the sea. However, residents noted the parking lot creates a backlog of traffic that spills onto the street.
The students proposed a solution: require drivers to pay for parking as they leave the lot instead of when they enter.
“The people of Venice are very passionate,” Marder Friedgood said. “This was a moment where we said ‘Let’s leverage everything that we have together and find this consensus between two communities that could otherwise be in opposition to each other.’”
For Nadimi, the project was personal.
“Regardless of whether you think we need a bike lane, you probably think we need road safety, and those are all tied together. So this was a very interesting deep dive for me,” Nadimi said. “After the accident, I just felt like it was very personal. And on top of all the things that we learned, now I have tools to dig into things that really matter to me.”
