Of all the bad ideas.

Nithya Raman and her allies want to make LA — a city built around the automobile — more congested and even less drivable. 

The mayor-elect and some of her large campaign donors have pushed for a $3.1 billion road overhaul that would add bike and bus lanes, while squeezing and subtracting driving lanes. 

That would mean less space for motorists, more traffic and longer drives on main city arteries such as Lincoln, Santa Monica, Sunset, Venice, Sepulveda and Ventura boulevards — along with the streets around them.

What a bleak prospect for LA residents. This plan is woke ideology masquerading as a health initiative. 

Raman would do well to drop it, and spend city time and resources on initiatives that would enhance — rather than degrade — the lives of everyday Angelenos.

While the road-slimming plans are sold as health, safety and climate initiatives, they’re really just leftist snobbery. 

Elites enjoy telling others how to live: from which shower heads you buy to where you live and how much you drive. 

These elites include two wealthy donors to Raman’s campaign, who reportedly spent $2 million combined on the race to help advance their anti-car cause.

But reconfiguring LA roads would likely decrease safety — clogging and removing lanes used by police, fire and paramedics — while doing nothing to lower global temperatures. In fact, all the idling in extra traffic might drive emissions up. 

And the left’s carless utopian vision is particularly ill-suited for LA.

The city is vast, sprawling, spread out. It’s often impractical to take a bike or a bus to one’s destination. 

And even if it were feasible to ride a bike for, say, 10 miles each way to work, what then? Can a person also pick up the kids from school on a cycle, and then balance a few grocery bags on the handlebars? 

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Then there’s the reality that impeding mobility impairs economic growth. Large-scale road reconfigurations that restrict vehicle traffic or scrap parking — already a grand frustration in LA — would deter shoppers, hurt merchants and dampen prosperity.

Yes, voters in 2024 did pass Measure HLA, which requires City Hall to add bike and bus lanes and pedestrian upgrades whenever it makes substantial road repairs. This is all nice-sounding stuff until one considers what it means in practice.

Raman conceded on Tuesday that HLA’s exorbitant costs have slowed road fixes to a crawl, and she vowed to determine how many barrier-protected bike lanes the cash-strapped city can afford to install.

But so long as HLA remains on the books, City Hall should address it without punishing motorists. That means no road diets, no lane subtractions, and no pipe-dream notions that people will suddenly, en masse, find the bus convenient.

LA does not need $3.1 billion worth of street redesigns.

It needs mobility — including and especially by car.

It needs common sense, rather than smug green elites imposing their preferred way of life on the working-class people of the city.

Which raises a question about the mayor-elect.

Will she govern for those elites — or for the millions of everyday folks who need practical transportation?