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LA has stopped repaving our streets
StreetsLA has resurfaced exactly zero miles since July 1st. And they stopped pretty abruptly - their list of resurfacing work completed has lots of projects leading right up to June 30th, and then nothing. Notice the list is updated as of last week.
For decades—many, many decades—the City of LA has chosen to fully ignore a Federal mandate to add accessibility ramps when repaving streets. In July of this year, the Federal rules tightened (or were rewritten; unclear) in such a way that the city apparently decided those rules finally needed to be followed. So, in order to comply, they simply stopped repaving streets. No repaving; no need to install accessibility ramps.
But it gets better: they then invented a new term—one that according to Google Searches, didn’t exist before July in any other city in the world—and decided that work under the new term, “Large Asphalt Repair”, did not qualify as repaving, and thus did not require the Federally mandated accessibility ramps.
LA has about 80,000 curb ramps, many of them outdated, plus over 12,000 corners with no ramp at all, but we budget for building only 200 ramps a year. At that rate, it would take 60 years just to cut curb ramps on the corners that don’t have them, and then another four centuries to update all the existing ramps.
When you defer maintenance for decades, it does catch up with you.
To make matters worse, the city—under Measure HLA—is now also on the hook for implementing its own mobility plan that it created in 2015 and then, mostly ignored. Citizens (including myself) pushed the City Council to implement the sidewalk, bike/alternate mobility, and other related improvements to basically no effect. So, we put it on the ballot, voted for it in a roughly 2/3 margin, and now the city has found a new way to ignore it: Large Asphalt Repair.
LA simply doesn’t spend enough on its streets and sidewalks – $267 per capita according to Streets For All. That’s “almost half of what NYC and San Diego spend, and a third of what is spent in Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco”. Worse, the city has never comprehensively planned how it installs or maintains its infrastructure…
I’m aware of where I live. It was naive of me to have even a small amount of hope that a 2/3 majority vote would coax the city into implementing the most basic of safety improvements for those of us outside of cars. But now we’re not even keeping pace on the car infrastructure we’re famous for. We spend less per capita than any other major U.S. city while having significantly more street miles to maintain.