For several years, I’ve been a grassroots activist for safe streets in West Hollywood. I’ve spent countless hours walking biking, and motoring along the streets of this city. When you’re moving at a human scale, you notice a lot of things – I get to see the neighborhood for what it’s made of – children walking to Plummer Park, neighbors with laundry carts, couples with pets, families returning from the farmers’ market. In fact, the longer anyone spends on our streets – our most abundant source of public space – the clearer it becomes: our most valuable neighborhood assets are the people — yet the way we budget our public space belies what we claim to value most. Fountain Avenue is a neighborhood street festooned mostly with the front and side yards of single- and multifamily homes, peppered with schools, houses of worship, and a few small businesses. Designing Fountain Avenue appropriately as a neighborhood street is not about taking away parking spaces; it’s about giving us all back something far more important: our safety, our health, and our right to a community where walking, biking, driving is not a dire safety risk.