Save the date: February 11th
& get your typing fingers ready to Support MANGo.

MANGo is due to be presented to Santa Monica City Council a week from today, Tuesday February 11th. We are looking forward to seeing the Final Project Report & Presentation to Council on this major improvement to the Santa Monica Bike network and a long overdue investment in the Pico Neighborhood.

MANGo will create a safer calmer street and an inviting alternative east/west walking and biking connection to numerous destinations along its spine. This includes safe routes to many schools (SRTS, including SMC & Samohi), Farmers Markets, parks and recreation, the Civic Center, beaches and the new Expo Line stations.

Through a very inclusive process MANGo planners presented a variety of options to address the traffic and safety issues on Michigan Avenue, including reduced traffic goals. We are advocating for establishing an ambitious project goal of less than 1500 vehicles per day* on MANGo along with easy steps that measure if project implementations are effective, and a tiered implementation approach over time to meet goals.

You could say it is a bold and scary move to create a street that demands slower car traffic. There are editorials and pockets of resistance who think that doing anything to impede auto circulation is a bad idea. We have suffered decades of increasingly car dominant culture that has divided cities, created smoggy skies, and hurt and killed too many people. MANGo is a big step toward encouraging a change in that thinking of how we get around and can help set the tone for the next fifty years of the way Santa Monica works. What kind of city do you want? One for cars, or one for people? We hope our decision makers will choose the latter and cement their legacy as the City Council that said yes to MANGo and everything that will follow.

More on what you can do and how coming soon..

*Design guidelines from National Association of City and Transportation Officials (NACTO)