Long Beach streets got deadlier last year than they\u2019ve been in a decade. Now the city wants to build a whole new division bent on reversing that, powered by the $5 million it expects to get annually by ticketing people with new speed cameras.<\/p>\n
As part of Long Beach\u2019s budget, city leaders are proposing a new traffic safety division, which consolidates two Public Works teams and adds more than a dozen staff who will administer a state pilot program for 18 automated speed cameras around the city.<\/a><\/p>\n A proposed traffic safety division<\/p>\n It comes after the city saw a record number of fatal traffic collisions in 2025<\/a> \u2014 53 last year, the most in more than 10 years \u2014 that includes 32 pedestrians, cyclists and e-scooter riders killed. That eclipsed the number of people murdered in the city that year.<\/p>\n High rates of traffic deaths and collisions coincide with a record number of public requests to overhaul dangerous arterial streets, calibrate traffic lights and add traffic calming measures to neighborhoods known for dangerous driving. Long Beach currently sits on a backlog of more than 1,400 open traffic requests.<\/p>\n Many delays are tied to the 4% completion rate of traffic investigations. Officials explained many of those unresolved cases involve arterial streets the city already knows need expensive, yearslong overhauls. Neighborhood traffic calming requests have also spiked, from about 35 in the second half of last fiscal year to 306 in the first half of this one.<\/p>\n Councilmember Joni Ricks-Oddie said the shift reflects years of pressure from residents.<\/p>\n She added that the old system wasn\u2019t built for the volume of requests coming in now.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we all recognize that the old ways of managing these requests simply just wasn\u2019t working for the volume that we are seeing come into Public Works,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Public Works Director Josh Hickman put it more bluntly: \u201cWe\u2019re barely keeping up,\u201d citing data that requests have risen swiftly this year compared to late last year.<\/p>\n He explained the current model only adds unnecessary delays, even on simple fixes.<\/p>\n \u201cIn order to do street sweeping and in order to enforce parking control, you need to have signs,\u201d he said as an example. \u201cThose require our engineers to review and approve the signs, which are in a different bureau. Once it gets approved, well, then it requires another bureau to go and install those signs.\u201d<\/p>\n The new division could streamline the city’s traffic system<\/p>\n This division would alleviate that, he said, by folding the city\u2019s existing traffic engineering and traffic operations divisions into one unit under the Transportation Services Bureau.<\/p>\n