Guerrilla community group paints crosswalks to make L.A. streets safer

A group of volunteers take to the streets, literally, with buckets of paint and rollers, creating crosswalks in hopes of making walking in Los Angeles safer.

Just last month in the mid-Wilshire area, a mother and her daughter were walking to school when they were struck by a truck and the mother died from her injuries. In fact, there are hundreds of pedestrian deaths from crashes each year in Los Angeles.

So, taking matters into their own hands, the renegade group called the Crosswalk Collective came together in March 2022 to paint sidewalks. While the group does have a website and a social media presence, all members remain anonymous.

City street sidewalks are approved, painted, and maintained through legal and official means, and the sidewalks painted by the collective usually are removed by the city, or painted over.

But the message has still been sent, and awareness of the need for improved street safety is raised. The collective feels it's doing its job.

"We get requests. We have a form on our website and people can request an intersection and they can tell their story on why they want a crosswalk painted there," said an anonymous Crosswalk Collective member.

The latest crosswalk to go down was in University Park, one block away from Alliance Gertz-Ressler High School, where on any given day there could be up to 800 to 1,000 students crossing the streets.

"Sometimes people have to stop abruptly, and people have to like run across the street," said one student.

Before the freshly installed crosswalk went up, student after student told their stories of near-misses and tactics to avoid being hit while crossing the intersection, posted with stop signs, to get to school.

"And like cars would just run (the stop signs) and like they wouldn't even notice we were walking," said another high school student.

For this reason, the collective keeps painting. "And we can't stop, we won't stop," said an anonymous Crosswalk Collective member.

The city did respond that crosswalks can only be installed by LADOT or a department-assigned contractor to meet standards set by the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices for California. 

"We share the community's urgency to make our streets safer and, working with individuals and community groups, install and improve thousands of critical safety improvements every year," wrote the Los Angeles Department of Transportation.