School had recently let out, summer was almost here. But Terence Heuston and his sons – then five and nine – still had work to do. Heuston, a lead organizer for Sunset4All, a grassroots organization advocating for a road redesign on a dangerous 3.2 mile (5.15km) stretch of Sunset Blvd – roughly between Fountain Ave and Dodger Stadium – wrangled his kids for yet another Saturday of community activism.

In June 2022, the family joined about 20 other volunteers gathered in front of Woodcat Coffee in Echo Park and set out for what they called “the last mile” – walking the boulevard, talking to businesses that could be impacted by a redesign. In Spanish and English, volunteers took their time – talking about the 40 severe and fatal collisions on this part of the road in the past decade, and discussing fine points of the group’s nearly six-year effort to get the city to change the roadway. A couple of hours in, Heuston’s boys lagged behind a bit but were still in decent spirits.

“I’d like to say that I’m proud that I’m showing my kids not to give up on something you believe in,” says Heuston. But he also admits that sometimes he feels guilty. “They’d probably rather be having fun at a park.”

For Heuston, this long haul began shortly after their second son arrived in 2016 and the childcare his partner’s Los Angeles medical school program pledged fell through. Heuston unexpectedly became a stay-at-home dad. And then a “dad-vocate”: he began organizing local parents when the city threatened to remove pedestrian safety measures at a nearby elementary school. After success with the school, Heuston’s small band of parent-advocates set its sights on creating a safer Sunset Blvd in the Silver Lake-Echo Park area where many lived.

The families wanted to safely bike to the businesses on the traffic-heavy boulevard, and wanted to help the environment. They decided to advocate for protected bike lanes – passages buffered by large planters or barriers with parking nearest the lanes and traffic beyond that. Research suggests that the lanes allow safer passage for active transportation – ie, biking as well as walking. And, of course, active transportation also benefits individual health and the environment. When it’s safe, that is.

Among the 10 largest cities in the US, Los Angeles has the unsavory distinction of leading for pedestrian deaths, followed closely by New York and Houston, according to the latest data from the Governors Highway Safety Association. And BikeLA’s 2023 Bicycle Safety Report indicates 26 bicyclists lost their lives on LA county roads in 2022. Nationwide, protecting pedestrians and cyclists has become a growing concern. After years of decline, deaths are now rising. The most recent data from the US Department of Transportation says nationwide 7,388 pedestrians were killed in 2021. Nearly 1,000 cyclists were killed in 2021, according to the national non-profit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). These latest numbers put us back to where we were 40 years ago, said Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice-president of research. “Anything we can do to improve the roads for cyclists is going to be a good thing. Certainly, separated lanes can reduce crashes.”

‘If we can change it here, then we can change it anywhere’

Heuston says that at the time his group formed, safety problems with the Sunset corridor were already on many radars. The section of Sunset made it on the LA department of transportation’s Vision Zero High Injury Network, a list of the most dangerous roadways in Los Angeles. And safer biking on Sunset fit with Los Angeles’ Mobility Plan 2035, a blueprint launched in 2015 to transform LA’s streets into “complete streets” – roadways that can be safely used by bikers, pedestrians, cars and mass transit alike – by the year 2035. Furthermore, in 2015 the LA Metro Active Transport (Mat) program identified the Sunset corridor as high priority for safety improvements because it would make a significant impact on resident use of active modes of transportation, as well as the Metro.

Then, in 2018, Avital Shavit, a transportation planner, was hit by a car while riding her bike to work on Sunset. Shavit’s bike got demolished, but she was luckier. She was wearing a helmet and sustained only cuts and bruises. The collision instilled fear, though.

“I had to face the facts: I don’t have nine lives,” she says. “I used to love biking to work but, sadly, getting hit changed that.” She switched to taking the bus and channeled her outrage into activism: she began researching the number of victims of collisions on that stretch of road – about 1,000 in the past 10 years, according to UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System (TIMS). Shavit joined Heuston’s group. Eventually, the two became BikeLA (formerly LA Bike Coalition) neighborhood ambassadors and then persuaded BikeLA to take on Sunset Blvd. That’s when the effort officially became “Sunset 4 All”.

Eli Akira Kaufman, executive director of BikeLA, says the group looked to many different successes across the nation for inspiration, and one stood out: the Indianapolis cultural trail. “Indianapolis is hardly known as a bike town, but advocates in that city realized that if they called their project a ‘bike lane’, they were going to get push back. Kind of like, ‘Why do these entitled cyclists need to have their own infrastructure?’ When they reframed that loop around Lucas Oil Stadium as a trail for everybody, it made a difference.”

With Heuston leading the charge, activists were buoyed by the idea that they were advocating for something so many agreed should be done. “We were hoping this could be a model project,” says Heuston. “Sunset is this iconic boulevard in the most iconic ‘car-centric’ city in North America. The idea was: if we can change it here, then we can change it anywhere.”

They had community buy-in thanks to countless events like the coffee walk gathering and long hours spent talking to various groups, lots of volunteers and the support of their city council – or so they thought.

Mitch O’Farrell was then the city council member of District 13, a district that includes some of the city’s more diverse and well known neighborhoods such as Echo Park, Hollywood, Little Armenia and Silver Lake. Heuston says O’Farrell pledged support for Sunset 4 All and even suggested the group hire independent traffic engineers to produce reports, plans and renderings so that the city could collaborate with them. Under the BikeLA umbrella, Sunset 4 All crowdfunded to do this; it was all labor intensive and time consuming – plus bad advice.

Hugo Soto-Martinez, who defeated O’Farrell for District 13 in the 2022 general election, says his predecessor lied to the group. Studies conducted by third parties aren’t accepted by the city. O’Farrell was “just sitting on the project”, Soto-Martinez said.

When asked for comment, LADot spokesperson Colin Sweeney offered this statement:

“The Sunset4All advocacy coalition’s proposed project requires additional planning, community engagement, and engineering design work to determine feasibility. As it currently does not have dedicated funding, such resources would need to be identified in order to advance the necessary work. LADot is in regular communication with Council District 13 and the Sunset4All coalition to determine the next steps to improve safety and mobility on this corridor.”

Says Heuston now: “I’m just so frustrated. I keep coming back to this: we’ve spent all these years just so that we could change the narrative in this one neighborhood. And we’re supposed to be a progressive blue city?”

Soto-Martinez empathizes. “This project is near and dear to my values. I grew up in poverty and organized workers most of my life. The people who move around the city on bikes … are by and large the working poor. These sorts of projects are about equity too.” Yet the best he can do is pledge to have the Sunset corridor initial engineering report completed by the end of his term in 2026.

The slog has taken a toll on Heuston. As a doctor’s spouse, he’s been privileged enough to donate thousands of hours to the project. Now even he needs to get back to paid work.

Like all parents, Heuston measures time by his kids. His oldest turned 11 and recently his youngest celebrated his seventh birthday. It doesn’t escape the dad that so far Sunset 4 All has been the background music to their entire childhoods. He’s not certain the tune’s changing any time soon. “I think that if everybody’s telling the truth, the best-case scenario would be maybe when [my youngest] is in the fourth or fifth grade Sunset 4 All could be happening,” says Heuston. “Then again, it is a possibility that it might never happen.”