I have been a Strong Towns follower/member for about 6 years. I really don't think people realize the world of pain we're signing up for by not actually fixing the underlying problem of lack of density and walk-ability and their effect on the municipal budgets of American cities.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Towns" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Towns</a><p>I know municipal finance is about as exciting socks for Christmas, but if the Strong Towns thesis is correct, we've basically found ourselves in slow moving crisis, where city budgets start very slowly, but very surely, become unsustainable, and by the time anyone notices, it's mostly too late to do anything about it. Pipes cost money, repaving costs money, replacing your wastewater system costs money... <i>lots of money</i>. The fact that they only have to be replaced every 30-50 years doesn't mean the costs go away... they just disappear temporarily. Deferring that maintenance doesn't actually do anything except make the problem worse tomorrow.<p>The idea that LA literally can't afford to bring it's sidewalks up to ADA code is insane. The idea that they're engaging in penny-smart, pound-foolish solutions is a strong signal that the city budget is already deeply broken, and likely is not fixable under the current paradigm of LA politics.<p>California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density, but it seems they are determined to do nothing until the wheels finally fall off, and the city's budget crisis spirals out of control. Even then, I wonder if they will take the Detroit-route and declare bankruptcy before actually addressing the problem.
Not true.<p>California is doing a ton of things to create housing — just look at the many state bills that have passed in a span of 2-3 years: <a href="https://cayimby.org/legislation/?_filter_by_status=signed" rel="nofollow">https://cayimby.org/legislation/?_filter_by_status=signed</a><p>Sure, some cities are resisting or having trouble but even the state is overriding them with state policies.<p>It’s just going to take time between passing bills, incentives lining up, and getting money for building homes. That’s also why the state has focused on ADUs too — because individuals can get through a whole decision process to develop housing quicker than a big developer can. ADUs have a lot of problems but the state knows this and is attacking the issue on <i>both</i> short and long term scales.<p>You don’t just steer the 4th largest economy in the world. It’s built like a steakhouse and steers like one.
Scott Wiener is my state senator. My point is exactly that many California cities are being <i>forced</i> to allow density, instead of just coming to that conclusion because it's a responsible one.<p>They don't <i>want</i> it, even if they <i>need</i> it. They're kicking and screaming and doing anything they can to stop it, while at the same time their city budgets are in the toilet. The only thing that's actually driving this reform is that housing prices are out of control, so you have a large demographics of people fighting to increase density.<p>Where this is <i>not</i> happening is everywhere else (think: Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Arizona). Those areas don't have the same demand for density, but they still have the same long-term structural deficit problems.
I've been shocked by how much my rural / politically red city (pop ~80k) here in California has moved on this issue over the last 5 years. Doubled the allowed meters per lot, super relaxed ADU rules and city + developer funded 5 over 1's in the renovated city center for some impressive density. Also all the new construction for restaurants or whatever in the area requires adding apartments above. Not to mention a massive initiative for safe bike paths from the commercial areas to the park trails. They also bought some longtime closed hotels and converted them to housing for homeless. Really big stuff and huge quality of life improvements.
You use the phrase "trivially fix". If your definition of "trivially" means several decades with the investment of billions of dollars, then perhaps. There are no "trivial fixes" in city infrastructure. Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land. For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move. This drives the price of any development up making it unprofitable in most cases. I'm sorry but I can't take you seriously.
In Australia, as zoning changes, developers and owners alike tend to take advantage. If a house was being rented out, they might rebuild as 2-4 homes and rent those out. Otherwise, an owner might rebuild as two semi-detached homes, live in one and sell/rent the second to finance the build. If it is owned by someone who prefers to keep what they have, the next generation might not feel the same. Where there are opportunities, developers (and owners) will find them.
When I say "trivially fix" I mean that, if the City/State <i>wanted</i> to fix the problem, they could.<p>>Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land.<p>Developers <i>very obviously</i> want to redevelop the vast majority of LA. The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit. To raise long-term tax revenues, LA could not just <i>legalize</i> redevelopment. They could actually <i>incentivize</i> it.<p>>For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move.<p>The people living in SFH don't want to move exactly because they're not generating enough tax revenue to keep the city afloat (mostly due to Prop 13). Eventually the city will start having to raise taxes <i>very dramatically</i> or declare bankruptcy. That's the entire message from Strong Towns.<p>The more we put it off, the bigger the impact will be. When your city is effectively long-run insolvent, but you have the ability to change that even if it's politically unpopular (and LA does), then it's "trivially" doable, it's just that people don't want to.<p>That's not the case in many other cities.<p>In other cities demand isn't there. People will just leave when taxes go up, and the town will declare bankruptcy. At that point, they will effectively lose most of their population, or people will just live without things like clean water. An example of this happening is Jackson Mississippi, where the water system failed, and the city didn't have the money to fix it. The ultimate solution was just a federal bailout, which is not sustainable if these types of crises become endemic: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_crisis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_cri...</a>
>The people living in SFH don't want to move exactly because they're not generating enough tax revenue to keep the city afloat<p>So the kernel of the argument is that 1) someone bought a single-family home and based on ground truth (property tax, cost of living, etc.) and 2) that property tax isn't sufficient to fund the city?<p>Can you really blame someone for not sacrificing his position under these circumstances? If I'm meeting my obligation, what do I stand to gain from leaving my house and moving into an apartment? That's saying "I need you to move so that someone else can take your property." It's not going to go over well.
> The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit.<p>The cost of building a housing unit is rather out of control in LA right now, due to a number of factors. Some of those factors involve permitting, but some involve complexities of complying with building regulation, and there is also insufficient availability of contractors and insufficient availability of labor.
The demand is there: <a href="https://la.urbanize.city/post/plan-skyline-altering-tower-above-blocs-garage-moves-forward" rel="nofollow">https://la.urbanize.city/post/plan-skyline-altering-tower-ab...</a><p>The point is that the vast majority of budgetary issues in LA could be solved by just legalizing, and streamlining the production of something as simple as three-story row housing like the kind that's normal in San Francisco (which has a surprisingly good long-term outlook despite their current budget woes).<p>It's not rocket science here. If you make it easy to build housing, the industry grow to meet demand. If you make it difficult, it will be dominated by a handful of major players who can navigate the process.
To add to what the central city budget problem is - each new piece of street and road in LA has, on average, not paid for itself in terms of increased revenue from taxes or otherwise.<p>So for each new street widening, new road, and piece of highway capacity, LA was increasing it's financial liability to revenue ratio.<p>Add over decades all of the street and road construction that LA has done, and it now has a unsustainable amount of road maintenance it's responsible for compared to the amount of revenue it pulls in. I'm having a hard time finding numbers though so please correct me or add numbers if you can find them.
I think Chuck Marone and his group make good points but their admonition by ASCE is also deserved. He really went too far with disparaging the profession because of differences in purely value judgments. Furthermore, the type of infrastructure you get is a political decision. Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built. The “what” is never a designers decision.<p>Now I think this is a problem with reflecting on. Why is it that given the choice, many people with financial means move away from America’s cities? I did. I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning.
Not liking Chuck Marone is irrelevant. The question is whether or not the thesis is correct, and it seems correct.<p>Everyone hates Nassim Taleb and he can be an asshole, but his math is impeccable. When your concern is with someone's personality because you don't like their math, then you've lost the plot.
> Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built.<p>I would disagree. The engineers absolutely steer the space of available solutions. Caltrans is a prime example, I have personally met Caltrans engineers who might as well have stepped out of a time machine from 1970. This absolutely influences the priorities of both the state and the cities that depends on the framework it sets up.<p>And yes city politics is separately a major problem.
> I have personally met Caltrans engineers who might as well have stepped out of a time machine from 1970.<p>This is the problem with outsourcing everything in the name of "efficiency".<p>If you don't actually do things in house, you don't know how to do them.<p>Everybody wants the US to manufacturer and build more until they have to cut a check.
>I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning.<p>I am willing to guess they probably did, even if it doesn't seem directly related.
> California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density, but it seems they are determined to do nothing until the wheels finally fall off, and the city's budget crisis spirals out of control.<p>The state of California already mandated certain density improvements:<p><a href="https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/10/newsom-signs-massive-california-housing-overhaul/" rel="nofollow">https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/10/newsom-signs-massive-...</a><p>There is another law that mandated local communities plan to manage housing to accommodate population growth or the local community loses it's ability to deny permits. Struggling to find that but it was well before 2025 I believe.<p>The more likely reasons is corruption and paying off rising CalPERS costs:<p><a href="https://californiapolicycenter.org/repeat-pension-history/" rel="nofollow">https://californiapolicycenter.org/repeat-pension-history/</a>
<a href="https://www.ppic.org/publication/public-pensions-in-california/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ppic.org/publication/public-pensions-in-californ...</a>
I live in CA. My state senator is Scott Wiener. We are making <i>some</i> progress.<p>Your argument might be plausible if it weren't for the fact that this issue is happening -- <i>predictably</i> -- in every major sprawling city in America. Strong Towns has literally built a tool to effectively convert cities' cash-accounting budgets into accrual-accounting budgets. You can see it happening over time... you just need to account for the future liabilities in the way you look at your budget instead of ignoring them until it's time to replace the infrastructure.<p><a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/decoder" rel="nofollow">https://www.strongtowns.org/decoder</a>
Indeed, the problem is the same in Texas which is about as opposite California as you can get. Sprawling suburbs over old farm fields. Installing infrastructure is vastly cheaper when you are doing so in an unoccupied empty field.<p>None of those cities are saving money or even _planning_ for the inevitable repaving, pipe re-lining, etc. Worse: many of them were built up in waves so much of the city's infrastructure will "come due" around the same time.<p>I never imagined we would see San Francisco (of all places) overhaul its permit process. I can now build a deck in my backyard, add a story to my house, or build an ADU without having to pay DBI to send certified letters to all my neighbors asking if they'd like to object, then being forced in front of the planning commission when they do so. That's a direct result of the pro-housing legislation at the state level, something Wiener has been heavily involved in.
I haven’t visited California in a couple years, but I wouldn’t call anything I saw over there progress. Carcinogen warnings on the rental car. People defecating in the street. Addicts wandering the streets clearly being provided drugs by NGO volunteers. History will remember this time as an absurd caricature the way we think of Public blood sports, vomitoriums, and horses being appointed to the Roman Senate.
Hahaahahah wow.
I think CA has bigger issues to tackle than repealing Prop 65 (IIRC, that's the one about carcinogen warnings). The other, may be happening in some places, but having lived here 20+ years in the Bay, I haven't seen even one example of either.
Those policies will take decades to make a difference in road costs, though—if they do at all (infill is often very hard to get financed).
> lack of density<p>One interesting question: what is "density"? Is it number of people per road-mile? Number of households? Structures? Sales tax revenue? Property tax revenue? Property value per road mile?<p>LA has somewhat insane property values right now, and by the metric of millions of dollars of residential value per road-mile, I think one might imagine the density to be sufficient to afford decent streets. Of course, that does not translate to municipal budgets or even to disposable income of the owners or the residents in those properties.
The Strong Towns argument is effectively talking about density as tax-revenue per road mile liability, and trying to keep that positive. Areas with high liabilities (sewer, water, buried electric, fiber, etc.) need to have higher tax-revenue per mile (more people, more businesses, etc) to support that infrastructure.<p>There are other ways around this though. If you force your citizens to maintain their own septic and well water (or even small-pipe potable water), and have unsurfaced roads, then you can do with much less revenue-per-road mile.<p>The point is that the federal government usually pays for the infrastructure up from (as an "investment"), but when that subsidized infrastructure is a net money-loser in the long run, cities growing actually makes the problem worse.
50 years ago, the U.S. was a nation that _made things_ whereas today it's primarily people conference calling and making slide decks for each other (perhaps not for long, given the progress of LLMs). What if that's the real underlying problem and not how many layers of people we can stack on top of each other in a small space?
> replacing your wastewater system costs money... lots of money. The fact that they only have to be replaced every 30-50 years doesn't mean the costs go away... they just disappear temporarily. Deferring that maintenance doesn't actually do anything except make the problem worse tomorrow.<p>I kind of disagree. Deferring maintenance does make emergency repairs more likely, but if you need to replace your sewer piping (for example) every 30-50 years, doing it at 33 year intervals means three installs in 100 years, and doing at 50 years means two installs in 100 years.<p>As long as you don't push the deferral so long that you end up having emergency repairs and remediation of significant leaks, deferring maintenance reduces the burdens of maintenance.<p>You do need to invest more in surveillance if you want to run your installed infrastructure longer, but surveillance is a good practice regardless, because sometimes 30-50 year infrastructure fails early. For sewers, the idea is camera inspections of all the municipal lines every 3-5 years to generate a prioritized list of maintenance/replacement projects; do the work as budget allows, rinse and repeat. Older sewer systems will benefit from more frequent inspections and newer systems can get by with less. You really shouldn't fully eliminate inspections on new systems, because earth movement and early material failure due to manufacturing error don't always happen on your schedule.<p>That said, a lot of sewers were initially installed in the post war boom times of the 1950s and deferred maintenance is coming due -- many portions may have been replaced as needed, but a lot of original pipes are hitting 70+ years of service life and are likely nearing the end of their life. There's an argument to be made that if they had been replaced at their forecast service life, things would be better now ... but that really just brings forward the next replacement.<p>IMHO, The City of Los Angeles really should be multiple municipalities. The boundary is pretty wonky, in part to capture the port of Los Angeles and Los Angeles International Airport, but also downtown vs San Fernando Valley; and that has got to make a lot of administration stuff significantly harder than if it were multiple geographically focused municipalities.<p>> California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density<p>I agree that density is likely the right way forward, but I don't think it's trivial. Especially since organic density increases have been suppressed for so long, it's helpful to coordinate rapid increases in density so that dense housing lands in places with appropriate transit and other services; but coordination is difficult.
I'm of multiple minds about this. I like high density. I like a car-less lifestyle of the last 30 years I lived without a car.<p>That said, currently I live in West LA. Traffic is atrocious! Doubling or tripling density will make it even worse, probably exponentially worse. Adding non-car transit options just isn't in the cards in any reasonable time frame because of all the people that block construction and because the USA, like most countries, refuses to setup a win-win situation for transit (like Japan) and instead continues to insist it be government based and therefore most likely to go over budget during construction and then under budgeted during operation.<p>At the same time, I wish our entire coast was 30-50 story high-rises. It's ridiculous to me that only a few elites get to view the ocean from their homes on the coast and everyone else is shut out because no one is allowed to build the high-rises.
A number of cities in Northern California are doing just this. We have at least 12 high density projects being built in Santa Cruz and we are a small city.
I've been thinking recently about how with the impending demographics crunch hitting a lot of countries soonish you're going to see a sort of day of reckoning for municipalities that were run poorly in the past because people will just move to ones that that don't have horrible budget and infrastructure deficits and the one sthat do will just shrivel up and die.<p>Tha perpetually increasing population growth is no more and that means no more growing tax base to paper over terrible decisions to pass them onto another generation.<p>For the first time in a long while we're looking at actual, real selection pressures on municiptalities.
Once I became a Dad, getting socks for Christmas suddenly turned into one of the most thoughtful gifts possible. A self-care item. The flip was very sudden and surprising.
so the story is about a silly law requiring bike lanes and handicap curbs and your proposal is to kick everyone out of their homes and remigrate them into the cities?<p>ADA code is insanely expensive. We did a couple blocks of those silly dimple ramps for $250,000 . You could hire every blind person in town a personal guide for less than it would be to ADA all the side walks.
I suspect you don't understand how serious the problem is. The problem isn't "we need to add bike lanes." The problem is that <i>the streets have to be repaved anyway</i> and if the city can't afford to simply bring them up to code in the <i>short run</i>, then they can't afford to keep repaving them <i>at all</i> in the long run.<p>The sidewalks are going to have to be completely replaced eventually... not just the sections that need ramps. Right now the city can't afford to replaces <i>just the ramp sections</i>.
"the code" is the issue. This isn't building code like protecting earthquakes, electrical, fire safety. When people hear "the code" -- they think critical safety measures.<p>Activists came up with a doorjamb law to require bike lanes, ADA and road diets on every block that receives repair. That's just not practical in LA. You can't punish drivers into riding a bike to work.<p>this is coming from someone who biked and bussed to work in LA for 10+ years.<p>It's reckless policy that will only undermine your efforts and never reach the desired outcome.
Why does it cost so much?
all the typical reasons, largesse, govt contractors, consultants, insurance , regulations, inflation etc etc.
We just need one more bike lane bro, then people will start using them for sure.
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Maybe roads would last longer if we weren't all being forced to buy super heavy SUVs just so automakers can skirt emissions and fuel economy requirements.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPm4de6-eTg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPm4de6-eTg</a>
For people that don't watch the video (I don't even know if this is in the video): road wear is a function of axle weight <i>to the fourth power</i>. [0]<p>That means a 6,000lb escalade creates 3x the road wear than a 4,500 wagoneer from 1990.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law</a>
This model is the basis of the 1993 AASHTO guide on a flexible pavement design, which is not the state of the art, but is still commonly used. This is why pavement design is mostly controlled by commercial traffic. For estimation purposes, I would not even consider the load of passenger vehicles in a flexible, pavement design.
You are incorrectly assuming the Esclade isn't on 32+" tires with 285+mm width and the Wagoneer isn't on pizza cutters. Tire size has increased greatly on SUV and light trucks, which exerts less ground pressure.<p>It's not realistic to do this on a heavy truck, which run 110+ PSI on heavy wall tires and why they cause the power law damage to roads.
Keep this in mind next time some crank on Nextdoor dot com goes off about taxing bicycles. "Sure, as long as we're both paying according to the road wear and tear we cause".
one garbage truck - 40,000 pounds wears road 2000x than escalade.
I only need the garbage truck to do a run for me and a couple hundred others once a week. My Escalade is transporting me and maybe 1 other person on average 7 days a week.
We can't do without garbage trucks though
I've heard that cars have negligible impact on roads. 99% damage comes from heavy haul trucks, especially those who violate weight restrictions.<p>By the way, I've never seen SCALES OPEN sign for the trucks, it's always SCALES CLOSED, or maybe I'm just extremely unlucky.
I designed highways. This is correct, and this is why weight restrictions exist. Noncompliance is not that much of an issue, and there are occasional permitted loads anyway when there’s a need to haul industrial equipment or unusually large objects.<p>The most important thing to remember about flexible, pavement lifespan is that asphaltic pavements are not designed to last forever. The asphalt binder will eventually oxidize and become brittle even with no traffic. These surfaces are meant to be consumable bearing services that last for 10 or 20 years and then have to be removed and or overlaid.
I’ve done a lot of trips on I5 from Central Valley to San Diego and those stations were open most of the time and I usually did it near holidays in November/December/January. Enforcement probably depends highly on location and amount of traffic.
The damage scales with weight. Cars cause less damage because they are lighter. Heavier cars still cause greater impact.
Damage scales with the 4th power of weight.<p>From what I can find, the standard weight limit for a truck in 20 tons per axle (less when multiple axles are close together).<p>In contrast, the average weight for a car is a bit under 4 tons (even for SUVs). Even a pickup truck is under 5.4 tons. Since these have 2 axles, that comes out to every class except loaded freight trucks having under 2.7 tons per axle on average. So a freight truck acting at the legal limit (without tandem axles) would be over 7.4 times as heavy per axle as a passenger pickup truck. Applying the 4th power law, this means a single maximally loaded truck causes about 3000 times (300,000%) as much damage as an average pickup truck; and 10,000 times (1,000,000%) as much as an average SUV.
In contrast, the difference in damage caused by an average SUV and an average sedan is only about 40%<p><a href="https://www.autoinsurance.com/guide/average-car-weight/" rel="nofollow">https://www.autoinsurance.com/guide/average-car-weight/</a>
It’s extremely super linear, supposedly 4th power of axle weight. So it doesn’t make sense to argue over the relative size of mice when there are elephants around.
I don’t think SUV vs car makes a meaningful difference when e.g. delivery vans and garbage trucks exist.
> Maybe roads would last longer if we weren't all being forced to buy super heavy SUVs<p>Maybe not.<p>Due to battery weight, EVs are super heavy even if they aren't SUVs, so are delivery trucks without which an urban community cannot and will not exist. Urban roads should be able to handle the weight even if everyone converted to EVs.
This has little to do with EVs, and much more to do with the idea that whoever brings a heavier vehicle to collision, wins (and lives). Hence the propensity to drive truck-sized SUVs and actual F-150s with just the driver, and the light load, but the pleasant feeling of <i>safety</i>. Who's gonna survive in an incident of road rage gone bad, a Ford Explorer or a Fiat 500?<p>Coming back to the EVs, a small EV is a possibility, because it takes less power to move a lighter and smaller car. But would it sell on the US market?
Even EV weight is tiny compared to haul trucks. Yes they have multiple axles (hence "18-wheelers"), but even then pressure on the road surface is much greater still.
No one is "forcing" anyone to buy a "super heavy SUV. Make a better argument.
People in cities generally want deliveries of goods, which requires heavy trucks.
Typical meme. Passenger vehicles of any type cause negligible road wear. The weight of a sedan (say, 4000lbs) versus a light truck (say, 6000lbs) is just not significant, further the ground pressure will be close due to tire sizing (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure</a>)<p>Road wear is a power law, and heavy trucks cause the wear <a href="https://blog.ucs.org/dave-cooke/trucks-cause-the-lions-share-of-road-damage-and-their-industry-wants-you-to-keep-paying-for-it/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.ucs.org/dave-cooke/trucks-cause-the-lions-share...</a>
Correct, one of those “fun facts” of public policy is that (at least in the US) taxes and other fees, including on fuel, paid by heavy commercial trucks don’t come anywhere near paying for the damage they do to roads. The rest of us subsidize shipping-by-road with our taxes.<p>(Whether this is a good idea or not is debatable, but it’s the way things work right now and the fact that we subsidize truck shipping to the tune of <i>a large amount of money</i> is not widely known)
The average American wants a big SUV/Truck
This is not supported by good data,
Car manufacturers are pushing to make bigger larger vehicles because they require very little additional manufacturing overhead over smaller vehicles and the manufacturers are able to sell them at higher prices.<p>What people want are Inexpensive vehicles, not necessarily larger ones. American car manufacturers have been actively suppressing cheaper smaller vehicles for their own benefit.
Isn't "able to sell them at higher prices" a consequence of and an indicator of the demand by buyers?<p>Surely, if buyers didn't want these vehicles, makers couldn't sell them at high prices, right?
> This is not supported by good data<p>It's supported by sales data.
"Forced"???
A lot of EVs are heavier than SUVs... but don't let facts get in the way of your crusade.
EVs tend to be about 10% heavier, like for like.
Instead of assuming bad faith and resorting to insults, simply make the point. EVs can cause road damage too, yes.<p>I would reply that pound for pound EVs create far fewer issues in other categories than its weight-equivalent ICE vehicle, and that to an extent that weight is justified for the urban environment far more than a 2025 Chevy Duramax.
People buy SUV's because they want to avoid being injured in crashes (at the detriment of the other driver)
Title is a little bit misleading. Article says they repave part of the streets, just not the whole street, because of ADA ramps they would have to rebuild etc.
We do the same here in Indianapolis and my read is that it's about cost containment. Our tax base here really doesn't fully support city services. And then more people move to the high-tax-base suburbs for better services, and the cycle repeats and gets worse.
This means that the divisions of administration are too small. Perhaps it should just a be county level or even state level concern
Weirdly what I bet you find is that the services move to where the white rich people are and are removed from where they aren't.
To be fair, Indiana is now a Northern South state. MAGA governor, doing MAGA things to the state run universities, demolition of decency, acquiescence to federal power when it should fall to the state. And the AG is attacking doctors doing legitimate surgeries (abortion) with criminal harassing charges. Brain drain is also significant around West Lafayette, Marion county, and Bloomington due to anti-immigrant activities. And even small towns like Spencer are getting ICE presence.<p>Its becoming a place to actively leave, if you haven't already.
The amount we pay just to settle the liability claims for police misconduct is almost as much as our entire street services budget.<p>LA government is an enormous corrupt police department with a few measly services slowly decaying as their funding gets cut.
US cities over the past decade seem to be in a competition to see who can be the least competently run.
Isn't this just the end result of larger and larger portions of budgets going to interest payments?
A lot of city governments no longer really focus on the day-to-day living experience in their city. Instead, they focus on property value and the discovery of increasingly palatable ways to limit or justify raising property taxes in order to stay in power.
Governments at all levels have accreted increasingly ravenous parasites who are on the verge of killing any effective functions of the host.
I think they built the majority of the Eisenhower Interstate System in 15 years. Now we cant figure out how to pave roads.
Cutting taxes has consequences.
Americans have enjoyed a huge increase to their living standards over the years and have become decoupled from many of the services that their taxes fund. In turn, large swaths of the populace are insulated from the consequences of degrading government services and infrastructure. This has caused a shift in attitudes towards taxes as most of these Americans no longer see the benefit of paying their taxes, incentivizing politicians to focus on cost reduction and tax breaks.
The problem here is that this attitude of Anti-Taxation has translated into no longer addressing the root cause, and people believing things like unproven stories of government corruption as being the sole cause of these degrading services despite the evidence for such being low to non-existant.
They dont want to address the real cause, so look to a convenient scapegoat that explains the degredation without accepting that they should pay more taxes.<p>Just like how at the federal level DOGE found almost no waste and corruption during their crusade against the federal services (stoked by similar anti-tax sentiment) it seems that every time a narrative of "corruption" takes hold enough to actually tackle the issue and launch a program to handle it, the program in turn finds its just wasting money.<p>People just need to accept paying more taxes in order for their society to flourish.
red tape, regulations, corruption, low pay, inflated prices, a gamed system.
Although the topic is unrelated, I came across this the other day ... makes one think <a href="https://youtu.be/JTEJH-tKv9Q?t=910" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/JTEJH-tKv9Q?t=910</a>
So the city can't afford to comply with its own regulations, and instead of fixing the regulation, they find loopholes. I wonder if there's a lesson to be learned, here.
The article says the city claims the biggest issue is federal regulations (the ADA) not city regulations.<p>My neighborhood in NJ just got those fancy ADA compliant curb ramps last year, along with a repaving. It did take them much longer to install the curb ramps (like a week or two?) than it did to pave (one day) so I can imagine there is a significant cost, even if it's a smaller amount of materials.
According to the cdc 1 million.people are blind and 7 million people have serious vision impairment.<p>It would be cheaper to pay 60k a year per blind person to hire them a full time guid for waling outside.
One wonders if you could prefabricate kerb ramps and drop them in, rather than (I assume) casting them in place.<p>Maybe they'd settle badly if vehicles drive over them, kick up in the opposite corners and become a trip hazard.<p>The UK mostly skirts this by using tarmac and paving slabs instead of concrete.
Or make the asphalt "ride up" onto the sidewalk itself, so the complicated part is made of asphalt.<p>Likely this won't be terribly faster, and I did see the company near us using a machine that was building curb cuts directly.
I looked up kerb cutting machines and it's interesting how much of the process is cutting through cast-in-place kerbs with special saws.<p>There are hardly any of these in the UK, for example, and kerbs are nearly always made of kerbstones that are sunk into the ground. They have their own problems with sinking when driven on, and I imagine frost heave in areas where the ground freezes seasonally. But it does mean that a dropped kerb installation is quite quick. Most dropped kerbs are simple tarmac ramps rather than concrete castings here.
The ones I saw didn't actually cut the curb - they had arms that held out the form and "built" them in place. I was surprised, as the still-recent but earlier curb cuts had very obvious examples of actual cuts. It was similar to this, perhaps <a href="https://www.curbmachines.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.curbmachines.com</a>
I wonder if you could just ignore ignore settlement by provisioning for hydraulic slab jacking instead?<p>Include a built channel for injecting hydraulic grout a few months later once the settlements happened to correct it out.
I don't think there's a way to do this without casting <i>something</i> to connect the pre-fab to the surrounding concrete sidewalk. Like how do you precisely cut out the existing curb so the prefab <i>just</i> fits (including elevation/slope) without excessive gaps or something? And if you're pouring concrete anyway, might as well pour the curb itself.
With prefabs you first dig up both road and sidewalk, set up pre-cut granite curbs (kerbs?) on a mild concrete foundation (negates sinking completely), then repour and repave sidewalk and road. Lasts many years in -20C winters +35C summers climate.
Damn. I've been curious what the deal is with the rubber lego knob coverings on sidewalk ramps and here it is. I mostly notice because they're such hell for skateboarding, so it never occurred to me they'd be an ADA thing as I assume they're equally hard to navigate in a wheelchair, but apparently the idea is to provide a tactile warning that the street is nearby for people with vision impairments.
> because they're such hell for skateboarding, so it never occurred to me they'd be an ADA thing as I assume they're equally hard to navigate in a wheelchair<p>Why do you think so? Even the front wheels of wheelchairs are much larger than those of skateboards, and their main wheels typically are pneumatic (front ones, too, probably, but cheaper ones might skimp on that)
>I mostly notice because they're such hell for skateboarding, so it never occurred to me they'd be an ADA thing<p>"Be hell for skateboarding" wasn't likely considered a bonus by the disability people because it would rally "those sort of people" to their (otherwise legitimate) cause.
Typically taxes need to go up 2x to cover the costs. Most infra projects get done with Fed money because cities can't afford it. Also why home developers build the road and then hand it over to the city for upkeep. Its too expensive.
It can easily afford it.<p>What the city can't seem to do is rid itself of corrupt employees and corrupt practices.<p>These people talk a big game, but when it comes to basic office management, they're less than worthless.<p>I wish I could vote to leave the offices empty. I honestly think that would improve things.
I do wonder if a little part of this is, they talk a big game, get into office and then see the details of full picture and realise they over promised.<p>It is a nice theory but then they bring out the same rhetoric when seeking re-election. So yeah, corruption may be abound.
> Mozee went into detail comparing slow concrete curb accessibility work to the faster asphalt street work. Per Mozee, “there’s approximately 14 ramps in a mile.” So for “one crew to build out those 14 ramps will take approximately three months.” In contrast, he said, “a paving crew on a good day … could pave that same mile in a weekend or one week, at most.”<p>Why don't they asphalt curb to curb for a mile and then come back and do the ramps one at a time?
Because you need to build a form for concrete, and to build the form after paving means you'd have to cut then patch that new asphalt, which will just end up forming potholes.
> Why don't they asphalt curb to curb for a mile and then come back and do the ramps one at a time?<p>As someone who did a stint in this kind of construction: not possible, you'd still need to re-pave about 30-50cm worth of road, because curbstones are (usually) suspended in a bunch of concrete to avoid them getting dislocated by cars hitting or driving over them. The result will be a faultline from which you will get potholes in freeze cycles.<p>The proper way is to do everything at once, leaving one slab of contiguous asphalt without faultlines.
LA is fortunate in that it doesn't suffer from freeze/thaw cycles and can put down a lot more concrete without worrying about expansion/contraction and water ingress.<p>I've noticed that a fair amount of concrete sidewalk in Los Angeles appears to have been poured when the neighborhoods were first developed (as in post-WW2) and haven't been removed or updated since then (at least based on the date/contractor stamps). Again, the lack of freezing weather, wide streets that don't necessitate parking/loading on the sidewalk, and fewer tree roots to uproot/disturb the gutters and sidewalks means that the original infrastructure is still in use.<p>More to the point - creating curb cuts is more than just customizing concrete forms. Oftentimes you'll need to regrade the surrounding area to reduce slope, move any in-ground utilities, and revisit any other updates to building codes (such as the bike lane stuff mentioned in the article). Not everything in/under the streets is owned by the same city/county/state/federal department/private org so that further complicates the work.<p>If only the real estate speculators that settled this swampy valley had considered this stuff in the early 20th century...
> LA is fortunate in that it doesn't suffer from freeze/thaw cycles and can put down a lot more concrete without worrying about expansion/contraction and water ingress.<p>The freeze thaw cycles more impact the asphalt. Basically, wherever there is a joint that has been improperly sealed with tar, or the asphalt cracks due to overload - e.g. from heavy vehicles in general or especially surrounding bus stops due to the force of buses accelerating in the summer, when the asphalt is softer, you get water seeping through into the asphalt... and when it then freezes, it expands, making the pothole worse with every cycle of thawing and freezing.<p>That is why it is so important to properly repair potholes. Some youtubers have made themselves infamous by fixing potholes themselves, but they use non-melting ready mix... that works in a pinch to make sure that vehicles don't get damaged, but you <i>will</i> need to rip that out to the foundation, fix the holes with gravels, compact that, place proper hot molten asphalt, compact that, fill again and compact, and then seal the edges with tar. Otherwise the ready-mix will disintegrate over time and you'll end up with the original pothole, or with an even worse one if you have freeze and thaw cycles.
Worth noting that LA does not have freeze cycles. I wonder what the pothole formation likelihood is as a result.
Interesting! Is it possible to make the ramps offsite and then fit into place?<p>EDIT: I'm assuming the difficulty here is the pedestrian ramps at intersections. NOT the curb that spans the entirety of a road section.
I don't know what you mean, but I belive we're talking about "wheelchair ramps" at street corners<p>some of the laws mandating that type of thing specify "if/when you renovate something, you need to bring it up to code, otherwise you can skate on the code"<p>this affects a lot of the little tiny shops in NYC. if you change your facade or bathrooms, they need to be made accessible. however, it's not the cost of renovation, it's that accessibility can entail many many square feet of space that is now inaccessible-to-make-any-money-from, making the rent much more unaffordable. so, renovations are still done, but meticulously match what any previous plans on file would look like.
> EDIT: I'm assuming the difficulty here is the pedestrian ramps at intersections. NOT the curb that spans the entirety of a road section.<p>The curb elements are made offsite. All you do onsite is to cut the stones to length if need be.<p>The challenge is properly anchoring them into the surrounding soil, and for that you need a concrete foundation. Basically, you make a gravel (or concrete) foundation, then you put down the curb element onto a few small pieces of wood, then you make a sort of mold cavity, and then you pour that mold full of concrete. Once that has cured, you put gravel to have an equal height with the road's gravel foundation on the road side and either soil or gravel on the pedestrian side to grade height - gravel if you want to place paving stones for pedestrians, or straight out soil if you want a grass siding.<p>You can see a few pictures and diagrams on how we do it in Germany here [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.beton-info.de/randsteine-setzen/" rel="nofollow">https://www.beton-info.de/randsteine-setzen/</a>
Ah, that's not how they do it in Chicago.<p>In Chicago, they concrete form the curb on site.<p><a href="https://blackhawkpaving.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Concrete-Curbing-1.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https://blackhawkpaving.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Concr...</a>
3 things: Prop 13, Suburban Sprawl, and Bigger/Heavier Vehicles
The vast majority of the comments here seem to be completely missing the actual reason. I see people claiming this is about heavier SUV's, about people moving to the suburbs, governmental incompetence, that we "can't figure out how to pave roads", that this is corruption...<p>...just no. What this is, is that the federal ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) has required wheelchair access (curb ramps) along roads since 1990. To comply, "Measure HLA" is a citizen initiative passed in 2025, which forces the city to build curb ramps WHENEVER it resurfaces a road.<p>But here's the kicker -- as the "Measure HLA" site explains [1], it promises "No New Taxes or Fees", claiming "improvements would be made during routine street maintenance".<p>But because it DIDN'T raise additional funds, but is a much more expensive process, and the city doesn't have the money, the city is getting around it by doing "large asphalt repair" which is lower-quality but avoids having to spend the extra money and time (which they don't have) to implement the curb ramps and other requirements.<p>All of this seems like an entirely predictable outcome when a law is passed that requires more work but <i>doesn't pay for it</i>. And in this case you can't blame a short-sighted legislature or a corrupt process -- it was a <i>citizens' initiative</i>. That promised voters they could have something for free, which isn't free. See this key quote:<p>> <i>Per Mozee, “there’s approximately 14 ramps in a mile.” So for “one crew to build out those 14 ramps will take approximately three months.” In contrast, he said, “a paving crew on a good day … could pave that same mile in a weekend or one week, at most.”</i><p>So what exactly did people expect?<p>I'm all for accessibility, but demanding it without paying for it is not the way.<p>[1] <a href="https://yesonhla.com/" rel="nofollow">https://yesonhla.com/</a>
In the UK we call this 'Surface Dressing' and is a typical money saving meaasure to avoid the full cost of paving the road properly. It looks terrible and doenst last very long, so peronsally I dont see the point.<p><a href="https://www.somerset.gov.uk/roads-travel-and-parking/surface-dressing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.somerset.gov.uk/roads-travel-and-parking/surface...</a>
I would prefer that over here in slovenia.... instead, we can't repave a street without digging a few meters deep, finding ancient roman remains, and delaying the repair for many months... heck, even without finding roman stuff, we had an 800m long road closed for 2 years...<p>So yeah, it's either potholes or road closure for a year++.
The point is for the road to be better to use.<p>If it's cheap and fast, then there's no reason to wait to do it "properly" later. Do the quick fix first.
This is interesting for a completely different reason. It's the first time I see a web page disabling reader mode on my browser. When I enter reader mode, the page seems to recognize this and instantly reload, booting me back to the original page, which by the way seems unaffected by Dark Reader as well.
"large pothole" .. Oh sweet summer child, I can think of at least ten bigger than that in my small British town. It seems they're doing <i>something</i> in LA, even if asphalting over half the width of a road isn't ideal. Over here, we packing the potholes with loose material, only for it to all come out again within a few weeks. We've gone through several tyres (including one total blowout, cords and all) in the past couple of years, and pothole related callouts are up 18% in the past year apparently: <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cddn0n3p2ppo" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cddn0n3p2ppo</a>
Because they're waiting for Arnie to do it for them: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPqUtKQaJFk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPqUtKQaJFk</a>
Ramps were kinda normal even in deep Russia 20+ years ago, I mean I wouldn't call them fancy and some were steeper than others but they were ramps, great when riding around on a bicycle<p>hard to believe it's a problem for LA in 2026... 3 months to build 12 ramps?
Shifty bureaucrats moving goalposts: not breaking out lane miles into patched fractional mile and full-width lane miles.<p>You will see that patching is more labor intensive per asphalt wear time, thus incurring greater city budget expenditure on average basis.
We actually finally have a great city controller in LA, Kenneth Mejia, who has been working his but off (and literally getting sued by the city) for trying to un-screw the complete lack of accounting that has taken place in LA's budget.<p>He's active on socials and would definitely be interested in a concept like this to correctly attribute and predict costs if you reach out.
Most places in LA you could completely rip out the road and the surroundings would improve 10x I say expand the potholes from curb to grimy curb.
> In a presentation at the Jan. 28 City Council Public Works Committee (audio, slides), General Manager Keith Mozee attributed the shift to large asphalt repair to cuts to StreetsLA workforce. In the current and past year, StreetsLA’s staffing budget was cut 26 percent.<p>At least they're admitting to the general public that the cause for the dysfunctionality is budget cuts. People can then vote accordingly for someone who campaigns on increasing the tax base.
Because they elected bass instead of caruso and it's mostly dei voting at this point.
Because it'll rain out next week and they'll fall apart again. Same problem in San Diego. Southern CA didn't really choose a great aggregate mixture for the winder rain we've gotten the past few years.
We’re too busy paying billions of dollars to LAPD to do jack shit but cost the city tens of millions in liability payouts.
Good infrastructure costs money. Citizens don't want to pay for it. The city workers have to figure out how to solve problems.<p>Another fun one is talking about how much was accomplished decades ago when the streets were...decades newer.<p>Go ahead and say it's mismanagement.
We pay 7.25% sales tax in California, the highest in the country. Plus, county taxes can go up to 3.5%, adding up to 10.75% total. It's not too much to ask for basic stuff like maintaining the streets when paying this kind of money. The roads in Orange County, where I live, are great though.
California doesn't have the highest sales tax: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_States#/media/File:State_Sales_Taxes.webp" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat...</a>
> ...adding up to 10.75% total.<p>That's not <i>too</i> far off from the total sales tax in -say- one of the largest metros in Alabama; Birmingham. Total sales tax in that city is 8.0%. [0] I can tell you from personal experience, that you get a lot, <i>lot</i> less for that money than you do in California.<p>[0] <<a href="https://www.revenue.alabama.gov/sales-use/tax-rates/?_ador-sales-selected%5B%5D=9137&ador-sales-view-history=false&_ador-sales-view=submit" rel="nofollow">https://www.revenue.alabama.gov/sales-use/tax-rates/?_ador-s...</a>>
I’m pretty sure Los Angeles is a city in which residents would _gladly_ vote to tax themselves for better streets if they’d actually get done, like Orange County has.<p>In 2024, when Measure HLA passed via ballot measure (basically, legally requiring that the city must adhere to its own already decade-old repaving and mobility plan that had only been 3% implemented), the city tried to spook the public by saying it could ultimately increase taxes and cost $2bn over 10 years. That only increased support, with almost 66% of the city voting for it in the end. It’s worthwhile to note, measure HLA did not actually mandate anything new, just saying that the city must follow its own street plan, because for a decade the city has been pulling stuff like this rather than actually building ADA ramps or repaving.<p>People want their sidewalks and streets and will gladly pay for them, not to mention the city already lost a Federal ADA lawsuit requiring this too. The city just won’t do it. I’m hoping this is the year the city finally gets sued under HLA (which carries a bounty award for any litigant who lives on a street ignored by the mobility plan if they do a faux repaving and don’t adhere to the law), now that the 2-year grace period is up.
Streets were only decades newer if they haven't been re-built since then. But when streets were new, they were built recently. That still provides evidence that is somehow possible to build streets. Did people want to pay for streets the first time they were constructed? Go ahead and say it's not mismanagement.
The budget is public, it's all going to police and police liability payouts
> Citizens don't want to pay for it.<p>Yes. We do. We're literally screaming for it.
Yeah this seems like a failure at the federal level. There should be incentives for city street departments to implement the newest standards, not "follow these rules, or else" type of thinking. LA residents now to have to deal with outdated ADA standards <i>and</i> half-assed repairs.