Does West Hollywood Still Deserve Its Enviable Walk Score?

The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter to walk the streets of West Hollywood last week. Not that kind of walk the streets. The kind where you test the claim: “Welcome to West Hollywood! One of the most walkable cities in America!”

Walk Score gives West Hollywood a 91 out of 100.

The Times writer started at Butcher’s Daughter on Melrose, cut through Norma Triangle looking for the Lloyd Wright house, hit the Sunset Strip, stopped at Book Soup, and ended at Zinque with a prosciutto sandwich and an Arnold Palmer at happy hour. The piece has been in everyone’s feed since Tuesday. It earned it. West Hollywood is indeed a wonderfully walkable city. But… does it still deserve the score it’s held for years?

The City has held the Walker’s Paradise designation for more than a decade — two points above San Francisco, 22 above Los Angeles. There are 339 restaurants, bars, and coffee shops in the City. You can walk to an average of 13 of them in five minutes. Nobody who lives here is going to argue with any of that.

I live on the eastside. My car sits in the driveway most days. I walk or ride everywhere, and I do mean everywhere. Outside of long hauls or big trips to stock up, I manage to live a full life on just two feet or two wheels. So yes, indeed, I concur — West Hollywood is genuinely one of the most walkable places in this state. I’m blessed to live it every day.

But the Times reporter noted one thing and kept moving. On the Sunset Strip she described a surge of those cute oval-eyed delivery robots — “seriously, so many,” she wrote — and then turned into Book Soup. Most people who live here don’t get to just keep walking.

The City Council voted 4-1 last December to make the Serve Robotics sidewalk delivery robot program permanent. The Disabilities Advisory Board voted against it first. Board members told the City that many sidewalks in West Hollywood are too narrow or too damaged for a wheelchair to share with a robot. The Council voted anyway. Three months earlier, West Hollywood therapist and disability advocate Mark Chaney-Gay, who uses a mobility scooter, was blocked and struck by one of those robots near the Sheriff’s Station on Santa Monica Boulevard. He filmed it with the video drawing more than 20 million views. WEHOonline covered it here.

The robots are not the only thing on the sidewalks.

Electric bicycles move at speeds that have no business on a pedestrian walkway. Scooters cut through at all hours. Residents have written to us about coming face to face with an e-bike headlamp on a sidewalk where they thought they were safe. That’s not a walkable city. That’s a hazard.

Here’s the thing too many forget too often. West Hollywood’s sidewalks are not used only by people who have the gift to walk at a normal pace. West Hollywood is blessed with residents who move at a slower pace, even some who need walkers or assistance. Not to mention our friends in wheelchairs and on mobility scooters. Families pushing strollers. All of them are on the same sidewalks. All of them navigating the same robots, e-bikes, and scooters. Even I’ve come too close too many times to being struck down by these motorized “bicycles” and scooters on the sidewalks.

And let’s not forget what happened to Nicole Stevens — a West Hollywood businesswoman struck at approximately 20 miles per hour by a man riding an electric scooter on the Santa Monica Boulevard sidewalk on December 29, 2023. She suffered skull fractures, brain trauma, seizures, and post-concussive amnesia. The rider fled. Every time one of those scooters blasts past me I think of Nicole.

The Times piece sorta acknowledges the city isn’t walkable for everyone. A resident named Sean Patrick Doherty said: “It’s walkable if you are walking east to west. If you have to venture north or south, you are destined to hit inclines that are not for every able body.” One sentence. The piece moved on.

So here’s a fair question for the City Council, the City’s Transportation and Mobility Commission, and for the candidates running to sit on the Council that oversees it: what are you doing about this?

Transportation and Mobility Commissioner Helen Krieger is running for City Council. She’s a Chelsea Byers appointee. Krieger told the Beverly Press this week that car collisions between cars, bikes, and pedestrians “keep going up” and that the City “just isn’t taking enough action to make those streets safer.” But streets are only part of the problem. The sidewalks are the other part. We’ve tried to get answers directly from Krieger. Full disclosure, WEHOonline invited Krieger for an interview so our readers could get to know her. She eagerly agreed and went so far as to suggest setting up a time the following week. Then she went quiet. Her first explanation for the dodge was she was “waiting for a couple of things to settle.” When we still hadn’t heard back she said “for now I’m gonna keep focusing on grassroots efforts until it gets closer to the election.” We’ve yet to receive a response to our request to speak with her. That silence leaves us with more questions than answers — about many things — including what role she has in any of this and what she plans to do to help secure West Hollywood’s sidewalks for all of its residents. Not just for the able bodied and young. But I digress.

Another West Hollywood resident was riding his bike home from work recently when he stopped to shoot video on the Sweetzer Avenue side of West Hollywood City Hall. Lime bikes blocked the sidewalk. A person in a wheelchair could not have passed. Neither could someone with a walker. You even see pedestrians having to walk around the bikes. He copied WEHOonline on a letter sent with the video to City Council and City staff. He wanted to know how seniors and people with limited mobility are supposed to navigate the City’s sidewalks under what he called really bad public policy. “Kids, you’ve lost control of this city,” he wrote. “If there’s an adult in the room, please explain to me how a senior citizen, or a person in a wheelchair, or anyone of limited mobility is supposed to navigate our sidewalks when your really bad public policy acquiesces to the billionaire tech industry — who happen to fund some of your campaigns.”

Walk Score’s 91 measures distance to amenities and road metrics. It does not measure whether a resident using a walker can get down the block without an e-bike coming at them from the wrong direction. It does not measure what it costs, in real terms, to share a narrow West Hollywood sidewalk with an autonomous robot when you’re in a wheelchair. Some residents would argue that number needs a second look — not because the cafes aren’t close, or the streets pretty to stroll, but because the path to get there is harder than it once was.

The Times told a true story. West Hollywood earned that piece. What’s also true? The residents who actually live here, especially those who depend on the sidewalks as their passageways, know there’s more to tell.