On a recent weekday afternoon, cars were already parked bumper to bumper along the residential streets near Pico Boulevard. On the boulevard itself, parking spots were filling up as drivers hurtled down the busy roadway.

The corridor is lined with small businesses: neighborhood markets as well as nail salons, repair shops, sign makers and restaurants.

Business owners say they recognize that Pico Boulevard has a speeding problem and can be dangerous for pedestrians.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation wants to make the corridor safer for pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers. But that will come at the expense of 228 parking spots, which are already hard to come by in the neighborhood.

LADOT is set to overhaul 3.5 miles of Pico Boulevard between Crenshaw Boulevard and Figueroa Street to reduce speeding and unsafe turns and lane changes. The agency says the project is intended to improve safety by adding a center turn lane for left turns and emergency vehicles, protected bike lanes and new “two can cross” traffic signals at Manhattan Place and New Hampshire Avenue. The transportation department also will repair sidewalks and curb ramps.

To make room, the city will remove parking on the north side of the street and reduce travel lanes from two to one in each direction. Construction is set to begin by the end of the year.

City officials say the changes are needed after years of serious crashes. Between 2014 and 2023, 75 crashes on this stretch of Pico resulted in severe injury or death. Nearly three-quarters involved people walking or riding bicycles, and all 11 people killed were pedestrians, according to LADOT.

Jose Gonzalez, owner of Jagarhaus, a gallery and event space that has been in the neighborhood for six years, supports most of the city’s proposed improvements. But removing a full side of curb parking from a narrow commercial street does not make sense to him

Joey Bang, who has run Sign Art on Pico for two decades, said parking is already difficult for both businesses and residents nearby.

“There already isn’t enough parking,” Bang said. “Even residents of this neighborhood park here in front because there isn’t enough parking. If they get rid of the parking out front, business will go down so much.”

Bang said he had not received any communication from LADOT before a visit last month from department representatives who told him about the project.

Bang said he’d be on board if Pico were a wider street. He’s also concerned about how construction will affect his business.

“Small businesses are already struggling,” he said. “If this goes through, Pico as we know it will come to an end.”

The city Department of Transportation began outreach in May 2025 and spent about a year gathering feedback from businesses and residents, according to spokesperson Colin Sweeney. The agency said it went door to door, mailed notices to 1,842 nearby addresses, distributed door hangers, met with the Byzantine Latino Quarter Business Improvement District, emailed stakeholders, conducted surveys and shared information online. Outreach materials were available in English, Spanish, Korean and K’iche’.

LADOT said it reached more than 2,500 people, with 75% of survey respondents favoring a design that includes protected bike lanes.

Construction will be completed in phases over about a year. Sweeney said the city would notify residents and businesses before work begins, and LADOT will provide traffic control and detour assistance during construction.

The project is one of the major street redesigns moving forward as Los Angeles implements Measure HLA.

Lorenzo Martinez, owner of Olympic Tools, learned about the project in June when someone brought him a flier. Martinez has a few parking spaces behind his business, but said trucks still need to stop in front for deliveries.

“If trucks cannot park in the front, that will affect me,” Martinez said. “I like how it is now. I don’t really see a lot of bikes out here. I want it to stay as it is.”

Sweeney said LADOT is still making adjustments to the project, including adding loading zones, creating more parking on the south side of Pico and nearby streets, relocating some bus stops and identifying additional ADA-accessible parking. Peak-hour parking restrictions will also be removed.

Fashion designer Galadriel Mattei owns a brick-and-mortar clothing store on the same long block between Union Avenue and Bonnie Brae Street.

She said the lack of alleys and limited places to cross the street already make it difficult for customers to reach her business, particularly older adults and people with disabilities who need to park nearby.

She also worries customers will end up parking deeper in the neighborhood, adding pressure to already crowded residential streets.

“With neighborhoods like this that are so densely populated, it is really always a fine line with how the businesses interact with the people who live here,” Mattei said.

A cyclist herself, Mattei said she doesn’t oppose bike lanes or other safety improvements. She agrees that drivers often speed along Pico and that the street can be dangerous for pedestrians. But her concern is that the city’s design doesn’t account for how the block actually functions.

During the school year, parking on the north side of Pico is restricted for several hours each day for student drop-offs at a nearby school, she said, forcing drivers onto her side of the street.

Hanna Kang writes for the L.A. Local, a nonprofit newsroom serving Los Angeles communities.

Imagine you were traveling at the speed of light, racing alongside a single photon, the fastest possible thing in the universe. What would you see? What would the universe look like to you? Einstein wondered the exact same thing. As a teenager he imagined what it would be like to race a bicycle alongside a beam of light (listen, we didn’t have rockets yet, so a bicycle was the best he had to work with).

After decades of toil, he arrived at his answer. What’s it like to travel at lightspeed? You can’t. You just can’t. You never get to know what the universe is like from a photon’s point of view. It isn’t a bad question, or a stupid one. It’s just a malformed one.

And that insight reveals something genuinely strange about the universe: your experience of reality is shaped by your speed. A photon has a different conception of reality, one that simply does not map onto our own. And the best part is that we don’t even have to reach lightspeed to see the weirdness start leaking out.

Let me get one thing out of the way first. In special relativity, which is honestly my favorite flavor of relativity and the way we’re going to approach today’s question, when we talk about perspectives and views we are really talking about rest frames. The easiest way to think about a rest frame is as your own point of view. In relativity there is no such thing as perfect, absolute stillness. All motion is referenced against other objects. You see a baseball whiz past you, and from your perspective you are perfectly still while the baseball does the whizzing. You are in your own rest frame. You always are, in fact, because you are always you.

But the baseball has its own rest frame too, which is its own point of view. From its perspective, IT is perfectly still and YOU are the one rushing past in the opposite direction. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Which account of the universe, yours or the baseball’s, is the correct one? Relativity’s answer: it’s all relative. Both perspectives are perfectly valid, and neither one is more correct than the other. It just means that when we talk about motion, we first have to specify which frame of reference we’re working from. I am still and the baseball is moving fast, from my reference frame.

The same goes for stillness. If you and I are standing next to each other, I can say that you are at rest, with respect to my frame of reference. So when we ask about the point of view of some particular object, whether it’s you or me or a baseball or a photon, what we’re really asking is what the universe looks like from a frame of reference at rest with that object. You know. Like racing your bicycle to catch a beam of light.

I know I’m deep in the relativity weeds here, and I’m doing it on purpose, for two reasons. One, it’s cool stuff. Two, I need this language to explain what happens with light itself. When we ask what the universe looks like to a photon, we are really asking what the perspective is from a frame of reference at rest with respect to a photon.

And the answer is: light has no rest frame.

Light has no rest frame. There is no frame of reference that sits at rest with respect to a beam of light. There just isn’t. The entire machinery of relativity is built from this single insight. Einstein realized it was impossible to catch up with light. Here’s one of the arguments he used: light is a wave of electricity and magnetism, and if you caught up with it the wave would appear frozen in place. But a frozen wave isn’t waving, and if it isn’t waving then it isn’t light anymore, which rather defeats the purpose of the exercise.

So we can’t talk about what the universe is like from the point of view of a photon because, strictly speaking, a photon has no point of view. It has no sense of time, or space, or duration, or length, or measurement, or speed, or anything else we normally bundle into the idea of a perspective.

I know this is weird. But everything about relativity is weird. Some of it we just get used to. The price of relativity is that measurements of time and space become relative to your speed and your point of view. Moving clocks run slow. Moving rulers shrink. All of that is the toll we pay to make the real prize work: the laws of physics stay the same for everyone.

I’ve done plenty of episodes on relativity, so we’re all old hands by now. Sure, cute, if one twin takes a rocket ride and comes home they’ll be younger than the twin who stayed. Neat. But we’re a lot less used to following relativity all the way to its conclusion. Effects like time dilation and length contraction get worse the closer you get to lightspeed. Which means that at lightspeed itself, they break. They stop. Time and space stop meaning anything at all, because our very idea of spacetime rests on clocks and rulers obeying the laws of relativity, and those laws were built to operate below the speed of light.

But none of that stops us from getting CLOSE to the speed of light and watching what happens. And the nice thing about almost-but-not-quite lightspeed is that I don’t have to spend the whole rest of this series telling you the question is unanswerable, which would get old fast.

Oh, and your speed doesn’t just change your measurements of time and space. It quite literally edits the universe you experience.

In Part 2, we start warping that view, as the entire cosmos compresses into a blazing cone of light aimed straight at your face.