Have you noticed more potholes than usual on Los Angeles’ streets lately? More bumps in the road as you drive your car, ride your bike or take the bus? You’re not imagining things. It might be hard to believe, but L.A. hasn’t repaved a single street since early summer. The city’s StreetStat Dashboard says crews have resurfaced zero miles since July 1, the beginning of the city’s fiscal year. And this isn’t a temporary or unintentional stoppage: In its draft budget, the city is proposing to repave zero miles next year too.
Instead of repaving, the city has shifted most of its street maintenance budget to doing what it calls “large asphalt repair,” which is patching portions of the street only where it’s most worn down. Patching might sound OK, but it’s more expensive than full repaving, because the same trucks and equipment need to be mobilized for a smaller amount of work. It also doesn’t bring a whole street up to date.
Less new asphalt means worse streets. The city measures the quality of our streets with something called the Pavement Condition Index. A 0 is a completely failed street, and a 100 is a street in perfect condition. Under the new strategy of patching only, the city now projects its index will fall to 56 next year, a 4% drop in just one year. At that rate, it won’t be long before the city is one big pothole. Cross over into a neighboring city, and you’ll see a big difference: Santa Monica’s index is 82, West Hollywood’s is 77 and Culver City’s is 74.
Putting off fixing our streets also makes them much more expensive to fix later. Streets that are in decline but still in decent shape can get slurry sealed, which is a common maintenance treatment that costs only $30,000 a mile. Streets in worse condition need to be resurfaced at about $200,000 a mile. If a street gets so degraded that it must be completely reconstructed, that can cost up to $1 million a mile. Every year that we don’t resurface our streets risks costing the city up to 33 times more later, not to mention the human cost of people getting hurt on streets that are falling apart, or the large amount of money the city pays out in settling lawsuits to those hurt on our broken streets.
Why has the city stopped repaving? Bet you didn’t have the Americans With Disabilities Act on your bingo card. The federal government says that when a street gets repaved, the curb ramps on the adjacent sidewalks have to be brought up to the latest ADA standards to be accessible for wheelchairs. If you’ve spent any time on the sidewalks of L.A., you know the city has very few updated curb ramps: If a ramp doesn’t have one of those bumpy yellow rectangles, it’s out of date and probably not accessible. Many corners have no curb ramps.
These accommodations are expensive, and updating them can double the cost of repaving a street. So the city decided that instead of fixing the ramps, it would invent a workaround: “large asphalt repair,” which it could pass off as maintenance to avoid triggering the curb ramp requirements.
Of course, curb ramps would not have to be updated when repaving if the city had invested in basic infrastructure over the years. Streets for All found that Los Angeles spends half as much per capita on its streets and sidewalks as New York City and San Diego, and a third of what Chicago and San Francisco spend. We may be one of the wealthiest cities in the developed world based on gross domestic product, but we are one of the poorest based on what we invest in our streets and sidewalks.
The city is shirking another responsibility when it doesn’t fully repave the street: implementing the Mobility Plan. Remember Measure HLA, which voters overwhelmingly passed last year? The measure says that when a street is repaved, the city has to install any bike lanes, bus lanes or other mobility elements planned for that street. The city may be trying to skirt the law’s requirements in a dubious way by working on patches rather than full repaving.
Why are we in this situation? It comes down to money. The city’s general fund is broke, and much of it is our City Council’s own doing. Actions such as giving large raises to police, the Fire Department and civil servants with no plan to pay for them, as well as expanding our convention center at a time when we can least afford it, and record lawsuit settlement payouts, we are headed toward insolvency.
There is not a single simple fix for the budget problems, but there are easy steps to make the transportation spending go further. For example, our Department of Transportation stripes the lines on the street but doesn’t repave it, install the curb ramps or fix the sidewalks; that’s the job of another city department, StreetsLA. In other big cities such as New York City, the DOT is responsible for the entire street and sidewalk, resulting in a more efficient use of precious dollars.
We also should make curb ramps more affordable. Los Angeles spends $35,000 to $50,000 per corner, or up to $200,000 per intersection. This is approximately 10 times what Dallas spends on its ramps, and five times what Beverly Hills spends. The city probably is overengineering the ramps it creates and spending precious dollars inefficiently.
Ultimately, we’ll need to find more funding. One possibility — similar to how we fund libraries and parks — would be to guarantee the Department of Transportation a set percentage of assessed property values per year, which would fund streets even in tough budget years; this could be done as part of the charter reform work currently going on, which will go before voters in November. We could also pass a ballot measure that provides a specific source of funds to the city dedicated exclusively to fixing streets and sidewalks.
Los Angeles is one of the most famous and wealthy cities in the world, and we should act like it. More funding and less bureaucracy would better maintain and repair our largest public asset: our streets and sidewalks.
Oren Hadar is the president of Destination: Pico and writes at “The Future Is LA.” Michael Schneider is the founder and chief executive of Streets for All.
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