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.
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... 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.
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.
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.
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.
So for each new street widening, new road, and piece of highway capacity, LA was increasing it's financial liability to revenue ratio.
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.
Unless things are really different in California from where I'm at, I find it unlikely that the city is responsible for maintaining state and federal highways.
At least in my state, state and federal highways are all the responsibility of the state DOT, which is massively subsidized out of general fund tax dollars and federal grants. There have been recent attempts to increase fuel taxes, but they get regularly shut down by the electorate. It's not looking good for highway maintenance, either.
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.
When I say "trivially fix" I mean that, if the City/State wanted to fix the problem, they could.
>Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land.
Developers very obviously 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 legalize redevelopment. They could actually incentivize it.
>For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move.
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 very dramatically or declare bankruptcy. That's the entire message from Strong Towns.
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.
That's not the case in many other cities.
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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_cri...
Every time I look at a city/county budget, the schools absolutely dwarf everything else (it's not quick to disentangle different levels of government, but roughly speaking, it seems like schools are usually roughly the same cost as all other services combined where I've looked), which makes it hard for me to take seriously the idea that it's infrastructure like roads and sewage specifically leading to unsustainable budgets. e.g. if I remember correctly, special ed programs cost more than roads when I looked at the previous metro I lived in's budget, and sewers were revenue neutral with a county sewer fee.
Strongtowns seems a bit motivated in their analysis, to put it mildly.
This looks at current costs. The school is a cost every year, so every year that cost shows up on the budget. The problem is that road/water/sewer maintenance often doesn't show up on these budgets because these systems are usually built all at once. Because of this they usually also need to be replaced all at once. To see those costs before they happen, you need to use accrual accounting:
The entire message from Strong Towns is exactly that because cities often use cash accounting instead of accrual accounting in their budgetary processes these lingering issues of deferred maintenance don't show up until they do, and when they do, those costs will simply be too large for the city to cover without very politically unpopular interventions.
Capital improvements don't need to be paid all at once; that's what financing is for. And debt service does appear on budgets. In any case, why are we to believe that e.g. $1B in maintenance that's been deferred for decades is "the" problem when the school budget is $500M/year?
You’re making an argument about school budgets being too high. That’s fine. I’m arguing that, our school budgets are set, in large part, by our available resources. Viewing our resources from a long run perspective helps us set our current budgets.
If we cut the school budget only when we need to repave roads, we are playing fast and loose with our children’s future. When we set our budgets to be sustainable, we don’t rug pull parents who are trying to build a life in our cities.
I'm not even saying school budgets are necessarily too high. I'm just saying that if someone is claiming that what amounts to 5-10% of the budget is why cities go bankrupt, and that's why they need to entirely reshape how they develop to fit some idyllic vision of a pedestrian city, then I'm going to go ahead and doubt their analysis.
Like I'm happy that my (suburban) city requires new developments to connect to a city-wide bike trail network. That's great. I just don't think Strong Towns/Not Just Bikes presents a realistic mental model of the world. They seem to clearly be pushing for a specific vision regardless of facts.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. You can defer maintenance but school, police, firefighter, etc spending is constant. If your infrastructure is in trouble and your budget can't pay for the maintenance, you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying.
Los Angeles has about 7500 miles of roads. At a reasonable cost of $5 million per mile that is 37.5 billion USD. Assuming a lifespan of 35 years, that is basically a billion USD per year spent on servicing road infrastructure costs. If they don't spend that billion every year or put it aside for future repairs, their road infrastructure is going to decay. It might not sound like much in comparison to the full budget, but since the road network is the largest man made structure in the city, it will affect everyone and be the most noticeable failure on part of the government. Lack of police or fire fighting can show up in the form of stochastic damage that doesn't necessarily impact every citizen directly.
Sure, if you treat all other things as impossible to tweak except the thing you want to argue is the problem, I guess. But taking a quick look at the city budget, I see they spent $200M on overtime for police. So there's a place where they could save like $70M with no change to service with correct staffing? I'm sure there are other places where they are not currently 100% efficient. Or, since they have ~4M residents in the city, they could raise taxes by $250/person-year. That doesn't sound unsustainable to me. Certainly not a "suburbs are a fundamentally broken model" level problem.
Lots of suburban cities in the US are really nice, well run places. LA even as an example of a poorly run area doesn't actually seem to be in much of a financial pickle.
The point is
> you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying
Is just confused. The $1B/year you came up with as sufficient is ~7% of the LA city budget (~$14B), and that's excluding major expenses like schools since that's the county budget. If you look more holistically at just "what's the local government spending", the amount you say is needed to properly maintain the roads is more like 3-4%. Roads are just not a financial problem. Strongtowns guy just doesn't like them.
Overtime for police can often be largely attributed to special events or occasions; for example, the city might have an entirely correct amount of officers for most of the year, but then during superbowl, presidential visits, Fourth of July parties, Pride, etc. They have a much higher need for patrol units, escorts, traffic management, etc. for those denser areas with more going on. They can't simply transfer officers around because that would leave other areas of the city under-patrolled, which runs the risk of unacceptably higher response times.
As a result, officers that worked Saturday through Thursday might also come in for a shift on Friday/Saturday, or might work a longer shift or split shift that day.
So the problem might not be that the police force needs 30% more staffing, but that the police force needs 80% more staffing on extremely rare occasions.
This is how lobby groups in general operate. They have settled on a solution and work backward from there to develop a problem that only their solution can fix and if other citizens and voters don't like it, they are the problem (NIMBY, greedy, selfish, populism, etc).
Just a note about police overtime: The correct amount of overtime for a union employee is not zero. Paying overtime for a few weeks each year to cover vacation can absolutely be cheaper than funding a pension and other benefits for several decades.
That’s absolutely untrue. The only reason companies track depreciation as they do is because it allows them to defer taxation. Public works projects are not paid out of current cash.
Strong Towns makes good arguments about certain things and are critical in a reasonable way of how civil engineering organizations rate the need for more civil engineering works. But the budget discussion makes zero sense.
The biggest expenses for county, city, town, village government are: schools, police & fire, Medicaid share in states that do that, and employee retirement and health. A small/midsize city spends 60% of its budget on police.
Capital projects are capitalized with bonds. Governments have the lowest bond expenses due to tax exemptions. Roadwork is not done in a cash basis. It’s bonded for 10-30 years depending on the job.
Yes, the problem is that our cities are already leveraged up to their eyeballs. At some point, the actual humans buying those bonds start becoming skeptical of the city’s ability to pay them back.
LA currently has about a billion dollars of outstanding general obligation bonds (edit: but that does not include all their future liabilities). They're still rated AA, but I presume that is because the credit writing agencies understand how many untapped revenue streams LA has, but again, those will require unpalatable political change. You can’t keep refinancing forever.
Philadelphia, Miami, and Chicago are getting close to junk bond status, and when that happens, the option to refinance starts evaporating very quickly.
I also think LA will be fine in the long run, I just think that their tax structure will force significant changes. The tax base is able to cover the cities liabilities, it's just that the residents don't want to pay those extra taxes, and don't want to change in ways that let other people pay them.
The city has a billion dollar deficit right now. Trivial for residents to afford ($83 per person), but difficult to actually implement politically.
Wikipedia says the GDP of the LA metro is ~1.5T. I think they could handle 1B in bonds. If they choose not to, it's not because it's some impossibility. Certainly not because roads are impossibly expensive.
I said general obligation bonds, not general liabilities. These technically are what makes this discussion so difficult.
My point is that much of what the city can tax has little to do with the city's GDP. Either the landscape of the city will have to change or the current taxation paradigm will have to change.
What they can tax does have to do with the GDP though. If they have a 1B deficit, they need to somehow tax <0.1% of activity (or cut services), whether through property tax, income tax, sales tax, corporate tax, or some other scheme. What they don't need to do is radically increase density, and since almost all of the costs scale with population, not area, density wouldn't even help that much (or might hurt if it leads to a lower percentage of net contributors).
Again, putting $1B in some perspective, the LA Unified School District budget (which is county-level, so not directly comparable to the city, but anyway) is just under $19B. Maybe someone else can ballpark how much of that is associated to the city. Or look the other things that scale with population: police, medical, waste, social programs, etc.
Again, they have $1B in the current deficit. The have $1B in outstanding bonds. They have myriad other outstanding obligations that won't show up on the balance sheet for 20+ years.
Okay, but relative to their resources, that's nothing. So they can just pay for those things. It's like worrying about a water heater replacement when you make well into six figures. At a macro level, it is obvious that the suburban model itself is not somehow financially unsustainable.
The city budget is $14B. So they need to make a ~7% adjustment somehow, which amounts to less than a 1% tweak to the local economy. That's not a broken system. It's not a ponzi scheme. It just means they should pay their bills and maybe reduce some waste. You yourself said it's trivial for residents to afford to just pay for the deficit.
So you get 40 years of "sewers cost us almost nothing to maintain woo" and then five years of "sewer maintenance is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars this year".
Take a look at LA’s budget then, it’s literally all police and police liability payouts which are already hundreds of millions of dollars over the budget for them.
> The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit.
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 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).
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.
I recently reviewed a bid from a not-particularly-fancy contractor for nearly $1M to build ~1200 sq ft in an empty lot in Los Angeles. This isn’t just a planning permit probem.
Even in cheaper areas without earthquake or hurricane construction codes, minimum $/ft is like $250 (for lowest quality components) and realistically more like $400.
Inflation for materials and labor makes any build incredibly expensive.
Plenty of labor and contractors other places in the US that could be brought in if someone was willing to offer stable work and pay. Even with the out-of-town bonus, many midwestern contractors and laborers would come out to near the same cost as locals because they were already making a fraction the wage out in the midwest.
But non-union construction is known to be unstable even outside construction's general boom-bust cycles and nobody is going to travel 1500 miles away without a contract guaranteeing they will have work/pay past the first 2 weeks. Too many workers have gotten burned being given great offers to travel for work only to get screwed over before they can recuperate their costs. Hell our own President is famous for screwing over construction companies and people just accept it as normal for the industry.
>The people living in SFH don't want to move exactly because they're not generating enough tax revenue to keep the city afloat
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?
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.
Zoning changes would generally make your property more value as a baseline. Then you could either stay put, or you could elect to move elsewhere while redeveloping your original place. This is common in Australia.
A common zoning change here is based on street frontage for semi-detached homes - the new ones are still 3-4BR, just attached at the garage and with smaller yards. If development required 15m frontage, but then that changed to 12-13m, that would mobilise a lot of owners to take advantage, though obviously others can just stay as is if they prefer.
It usually happens that an $800k lot value becomes $1m, regardless of the state of the house. The owner can then demolish a decades old house, build two places for $600k, sell one as a new home for $800k-1m to finance the build (and costs of moving out during that phase), and end up in a new house themselves. Often they've sacrificed yard that they found annoying to maintain anyway.
The above can be adjusted where it's possible to build 3-4 on a block, or a larger development of apartments.
Zone changes typically allow change, not force it, surely? An owner can just keep their SFH and large yard if they prefer. What they can't always control and often vote against is the composition of their neighbourhood.
>Can you really blame someone for not sacrificing his position under these circumstances?
What? There is a structural deficit problem. The ship is sinking. Complaining about how "we shouldn't have to change anything about the ship" isn't really a reasonable argument. We live on this ship... we have every incentive to make sure it stays above water.
I still don't get it though. Am I right that the proposition is: voluntarily accept a lower quality of life, or we'll either take your property or let it the neighborhood go to pot until you decide to give it up? People are not going to accept that. Look at the fiasco at defunding the fire department. I'll just patch my own sidewalk. I'm not vacating so that the next guy gets a deal. There's plenty of land. Develop there. Why not?
I'm not giving you a hard time. I'm saying that I made my choice. I'm going to stay in my home.
I don't really think those are the only three choices, though. The government can fail and be replaced with a new one that will shape things up. Then it'll be replaced by another that thinks it's too big and well off to fail, squander it, and fail. That's the typical cycle.
The problem is that you're camouflaging the implicit position of "I'm going to stay in my home, even if I have to see the world burn." as the seemingly reasonable position "I'm going to stay in my home", while being utterly ignorant to the consequences based on absurd levels of wishful thinking.
You're saying the government is going to fail, but actually it's not really going to fail. Someone is going to bail you out every single time. If the government failed, but I'm still in the house, it didn't fail hard enough. They should get better and more competent at failing. The failure needs to be more absolute and its consequences should be unavoidable. The bare minimum required is that they thoroughly crush my spirit and desire to keep living in this place.
People with a semblance of sanity left in their brain understand that getting the things they want, also means dealing with the associated costs and that if they insist on those things, they also implicitly insist on the costs associated with those things. When people refuse this cost benefit trade off, they will end up losing the things they want.
I'm trying to follow this but unclear of the root of the problem. Is it beacause building roads in L.A. is inherantly more expensive than elsewhere? I thought one of the selling points of cities was scale: costs are spread over more people. But, it sounds like road building is cheaper per resident in my small city. Sounds more like a corruption problem.
I'm suggesting that this isn't the actual answer. The thread started with the premise that the city doesn't have enough revenue, and that the way to increase that revenue is to bring in more people who pay more tax. Next, bringing in more people requires more housing, so that requires incentives for developers to displace people residing in SFH so that the can replace those with high density housing. There's a big problem: more people require more services beyond fancy curb cuts, like police, fire, water, electricity, schools, hospitals, etc. That cost that is spread also grows proportionally with the number of people, and you can't ignore that.
On the cost of building roads: there are cement and asphalt plants right in LA city proper, and also in weho and inglewood, among others in the county. LA has a price problem, not a cost problem.
There are more specters, too, which are bound to be political fights. For one, when you dig up a road, there are numerous places that will require displacing very large homeless camps. Now, credit where it's due, LA has shown that it is able to do that sometimes, like around Echo Park, which is the junction of several major thoroughfares like glendale blvd and the 101. Still, these are non-trivial projects that take years.
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.
If you change the zoning, people will build to take advantage of that more flexible zoning. I own land in the city, I'd absolutely pursue the financing and coordinate the redevelopment of that land if:
- I could make more money
- if the zoning allowed it.
As it is right now, it'd be profitable, but the zoning isn't there for it.
It's trivial in the sense that it's easier than not doing nothing, because rather than create problems what we've actually done is systematically installed impediments to solutions. We only need to remove impediments, and the solution finds itself.
Obviously that's very simplified, but the point is we've built this Tower of Babylon that exists around property value that is completely optional and just makes everything harder.
> 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.
The state of California already mandated certain density improvements:
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.
The more likely reasons is corruption and paying off rising CalPERS costs:
I live in CA. My state senator is Scott Wiener. We are making some progress.
Your argument might be plausible if it weren't for the fact that this issue is happening -- predictably -- 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I saw all of these things driving through Sacramento twice. I think you’re probably just being dishonest or maybe you are in an are in an area where undesirables are priced out and you don’t leave your house.
Sure, some cities are resisting or having trouble but even the state is overriding them with state policies.
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 both short and long term scales.
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 forced to allow density, instead of just coming to that conclusion because it's a responsible one.
They don't want it, even if they need 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.
Where this is not 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
And yes city politics is separately a major problem.
Not liking Chuck Marone is irrelevant. The question is whether or not the thesis is correct, and it seems correct.
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.
Personality is not relevant when determining if someone is correct or not, but it does empirically matter in terms of how likely someone is to get something done based on that. If you think being right is the only thing that should matter, you've achieved your goal already once you reach that step, so congrats! If you agree that it's not the success criteria, it makes sense to start paying attention to those other factors, or else you'll end up only being right and not successful.
I'd argue that if these issues are important to you, and you want to convince people, you'll be more effective if you find a more compelling argument than "you aren't allowed to care about what you just told me you care about".
Why is it that given the choice, many people with financial means move away from America’s cities?
This is actually generally the opposite of true. SFV is heavily Republican. Given the choice, self-made individuals prefer to live in or near blue cities despite the high taxes, because the lifestyle is objectively better than it is in the areas around red cities.
Indeed, a not-so-hidden secret of Fox News is that almost all of their anchors and personalities actually live in LA or NYC. (This is why Fox News personalities are so familiar with and obsessed with LA's problems. They're locals.) The Murdochs, for all their money prefer Los Angeles and NYC as their U.S. bases over no-tax states like Florida and Texas.
The engineers are a big part of the problem and drive regulations that featherbed themselves.
I got into a fight with my city over nonexistent crosswalks (the adhesive line strips wore off) near my home in an area where drivers have a hard time realizing where pedestrians cross due to a unique road setup.
You can’t just paint lines. The project ended up costing about $1.2M and required a traffic study, some stupid ADA assessment and accommodation that frankly any layperson could have figured out, and a complete streets assessment.
Basically, they sent out a few engineering technicians who make $20/hr, billed out 80 hours at $120 to count cars and people, and printed some boilerplate analysis (@$250/hr). The end result was they painted new crosswalks and added textured curb surfaces for ADA compliance, which allowed for the use of recovery act funds.
I love a good rant, but you just have no idea what you’re talking about. First, real engineers (the kind with, education and experience requirements and personal liability for their work) have labor markups that are maybe 2 to 3 times raw rate. I don’t know if 6X margins are normal for people who collect a check to “maintain” a finished product. Second, any civil engineer will tell you that complete streets compliance for federal funding is a waste of everyone’s time. Engineers didn’t come up with that, congressmen elected by people like you came up with that. Third, the only reason they did all of that study is because the people you voted for wanted to use money that was tax farmed from me instead of your city funds. They could have just sent out a road crew. You could also cut the check yourself. Finally marked crosswalks alter pedestrian behavior, but not driver behavior. Marking crosswalks where there is high traffic and no controls like a signal with a dedicated pedestrian phase are actually more dangerous than no markings at all. I don’t expect you to know that, but that’s why you should hire people like me and not try to do this yourself.
In fairness, I should have said "engineering companies" vs. engineers. Like any scenario, the engineers themselves have to work in the scope they are allowed to. Those firms absolutely lobbied our state legislature for all sorts of things that generate make-work revenue for them. Most of the proof of work is farmed off to low dollar employees.
In this particular scenario, it's an usual configuration that can't be changed for a bunch of reasons. There are functional, adequate controls that were added about 15 years ago and were not altered by the project I'm thinking about. The crosswalks and lane markings are essential because drivers tend to stop at the wrong place.
While we may have been getting rope-a-doped, our neighborhood association was willing to contribute a pretty significant amount of money to have the city do the work. Our position was that it was becoming a dangerous intersection with significant pedestrian traffic. We were told it was illegal for the city dpw to do so without the study work.
A late addition to your comment: the reason for all the "wasteful" red tape was that the right demanded all the documentation to prove that the underlying activity itself was not wasteful...thus imposing extra costs on everything that resulted in is several magnitudes more waste.
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?
This always grinds my gears (pun intended). Forcing everyone to live in a horribly dense, stifling, unhealthy situation isn't the issue. And the concept of saying LA isn't dense enough is beyond mind boggling, the number of people living there is beyond absurd. And yes, I know it's spread out, but the numbers don't lie, there's already more density than many places.
What this really is, is backdoor environmentalism. And I say that as someone that wants emissions down, reduced carbon, but a cat is a cat. And focusing on density to remove cars, because certain segments of the population rail against cars, isn't the problem people claim they are trying to solve.
For the roads? The easy way to pay for the roads, is to tax gas appropriately, and then ensure that tax only pays for roads. Nothing else, roads.
The second? Very clear end of year municipal budgets, showing how those funds were used.
Eventually, you'll reach a situation where the gas tax is the cost of road maintenance. And that's how it should be.
Back to the overall question? Well, I suppose you have quakes in LA, but outside of that concept, the US south is just about the easiest place to maintain roads.
In Canadaland, we have road damage due to freezing and thawing. Frost greaves for example, are where water gets under the pavement, freezes, and breaks it upward as the ice expands. No amount of drainage can fully protect from this, it just happens. And the cost for daily snow removal, ice mitigation(salt, etc), dirt being spread, the same for all the sidewalks isn't free.
LA has none of that. The US south doesn't, generally speaking.
LA doesn't have a road problem. It doesn't have a revenue problem. It has absurd infighting, like the entire rest of the US, with team politics and an inability to act as a result. It also has poor fiscal constraint.
Smaller LA side roads should last decades with proper maintenance.
But that's part of the problem too.
A tiny crack can be sealed, but leave it a year and it becomes a pothole.
LA is much less dense than Canadian cities. Taking the central municipalities which seem fairly comparable:
Toronto: 3.271M in 631 km2 = 5184/km2
Los Angeles: 3.879M in 1215 km2 = 3192/km2
Toronto's population is growing, up 17% 2021 to 2025, while Los Angeles is marginally down 0.5% 2020 to 2024.
Even smaller cities in Canada seem much more dense than their Californian equivalents, and they are more pleasant and walkable/cycleable because of that.
All true. There's also a perverse incentive in getting involved in LA. It's a major market where overly ambitious people go to make bigger names for themselves. Their goals are not aligned with operating the city; it's a stepping stone to CA and the national stage. Most major markets have this problem, of course, but LA is at the top.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density
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'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.
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.
For the first time in a long while we're looking at actual, real selection pressures on municiptalities.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Tax revenue per area is generally a good metric in terms of the sustainability of a municipal budget.
Very few suburbs in the world have enough people density to clear that bar, no matter how much they tax them. More people density lets you clear the bar so much easier even when the incomes are drastically lower.
Fundamentally the issue, aside from lack of density, is Prop 13. In LA, and every other part of California, your tax rate will get frozen (forever, essentially) at what you buy your home for. So you have some people who now have a $7m home paying taxes as if it were $300k, because they bought it in 1978.
With a setup like that, of course SFHs, no matter how high they’re valued, will not provide enough tax revenue on their own
And people expect trains and metros to pay for themselves. Car infrastructure maintenance is bankrupting the government. And on top of that you have the opportunity cost of all the road and parking space.
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.
I actually chose "socks for Christmas" as a metaphor because the types of people who like socks for Christmas are grown-ups, and grown-ups tend to actually view municipal finance as important and interesting.
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.
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?
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 the streets have to be repaved anyway and if the city can't afford to simply bring them up to code in the short run, then they can't afford to keep repaving them at all in the long run.
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 just the ramp sections.
"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.
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.
this is coming from someone who biked and bussed to work in LA for 10+ years.
It's reckless policy that will only undermine your efforts and never reach the desired outcome.
As someone who has biked and rode trains to work for the past 30 years and continues to do so, I think requiring bike lanes whenever streets are repaved is a pretty awesome idea. ADA ramps are pretty great too, they are not just for disabled people, though the ADA lawsuit regime where private companies get sued needs to stop.
Yes I understand there is a funding issue, it needs to be solved by making the design and approval process more flexible and efficient, not by perpetuating the insane car-only design that kills pedestrians and cyclists.
Oh it's quite practical, many cities have done it. It just requires standing up to a bunch of selfish assholes who would rather pave over every bit of available space so they can drive around really fast in their giant SUVs while pedestrians and cyclists scurry about on the broken pavement of the 5% of the street right of way given to them, and get run over when they don't get out of the way of the SUVs fast enough.
What attitude do you expect from marginalized groups? Suffragists, slaves? Ring a bell?
If you think I'm exaggerating or something, I'm really not. You were born into a world already bulldozed for cars so you literally can't imagine an alternative reality. You're broken — can't see the world for what it is objectively.
Are rollerbladers marginalized? Cross country skiers ? It’s a hobby. This isn’t a civil rights movement, and it’s insulting to call cyclists “marginalized” like blacks , women and gays were.
To be honest with you I really don't give a shit about my reputation when it comes to this, I care about me and my kids not getting splatted by a speeding SUV when we dare to use the street, because I face this situation daily.
Where I live, our work has definitely been successful. The cities I bike in have been steadily improving their bike lane and pedestrian networks, and increasingly prioritizing them in plans and projects - though there is a long way to go.
It's interesting that you frame building bike lanes and reducing car speeds as "punishing drivers", seemingly ignoring that such changes enable micro-mobility users to commute to work safely.
That’s what it is . Remove capacity, increase travel times , increase driver frustration and in theory increase cycling and public transit. But the second part never happens . Travel times have been increasing for 40 years and cycling is still a fringe hobby
Removing car capacity by 50% and adding 1000% bike capacity at 1% of the cost is good, actually. It's not really 1000% of course, it's infinity% — the average cyclist is not capable of cycling on the roadway, so a bike lane literally enables them to do the activity at all; the value is immeasurable.
That you think cycling is a hobby is exactly the issue. I don't get to work by bike as a hobby, I do it to get to work, and get all the benefits of cycling at the same time. Win-win.
It's also quite deluded to think the USA has been putting non-negligible effort towards improving cycling for the last 40 years, to the point that you'd notice any difference in car traffic. Hate to bring it to you, but the reason traffic's getting worse is there are more and more cars, but there's only so much space and cars scale horribly. Hence, bikes and public transportation. Those scale exceptionally well and are the perfect solution for 95% of all city trips.
The USA is in 99.9% designed for cars. You're essentially complaining that the most dominant mode of transport is getting mildly deprioritized and is on the path to being only 99% dominant. Cry me a river.
Oh, and the reason you drive a car and not say, use public transport, is that for the last 50+ years the USA has invested into car infrastructure instead of public transport. So the car is not a mode of transport that you have chosen, that you prefer, that you like, it's one that was forced upon you. That you can't see it is somewhat hilarious, but really — just sad.
Just ask yourself: Do you have any other real choice than to own a car and drive everywhere?
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.
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.
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.
this is coming from someone who lives in san francisco like you and has a 2 kid, 4 adult family with no car. it's been like 80 years of USA = cars. people seem to really like SFH + cars, they vote for it, they pay for it, and seem to accept even longer commutes than ever. consider why. it's not so simple.
> Strong Towns thesis is correct... slow moving crisis... The idea that LA literally can't afford to bring it's sidewalks up to ADA code is insane
see, this tells me you're not getting it at all. it is an insult to process, yes. But there's no crisis. Strong Towns is kind of obviously wrong.
i like their positions. but. i don't know what the point of strong towns is. people feel very strongly (haha) about it.
i can advocate for all sorts of stuff that is unpopular. it's meaningless. this is the hard thing about advocacy! strong towns spends a lot of words on stuff, but none of it on why someone who is happy with SFH cars lifestyle do, whatever it is they are asking that person to do.
> The entire point by Strong Towns is that people don't pay for it.
okay, people aren't paying for the ADA stuff. that's bad. but it's not a crisis. SFH cars people are living in that status quo every day. and it's not because they don't care and or because they are not disabled. i don't know how much the ramp codes really matter, i am not an expert, i understand that some experts in some narrow sense say they matter, but the real problem is a lack of leadership on holistic, bigger-picture issues like how to balance the costs and benefits of these sorts of requirements. we arrive at that cost-benefit organically right now, over and over again, in the absence of leadership, and most people seem pretty happy with it, which is a huge refutation of what strong towns is saying. do you get it?
strong towns says, "paying for this shit that doesn't matter does matter", which is wrong!
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.
The other key takeaway from the video is that carmakers are highly incentivized to sell SUVs because they're still classified as "non-passenger work vehicles", which have looser emission requirements making them cheaper to produce.
The bug in the law really seems to be that cars that really aren't intended as work vehicles are being treated like them.
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.
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.
No way does the Escalade exert less ground pressure!
Firstly, a Wagoneer is never on pizza cutters. You can't put a 4500lb car on pizza cutters even in 1990! It came with 235/75R15 tires. They are big sidewall donuts, but no pizza cutters.
The Escalade runs 285/40R24 tires, that's wide and low-profile.
Widening a tire increases ground pressure, because low-profile tires have massive amount of reinforcement to prevent that wheel from cracking. This stiffness adds to the pressure the road feels.
Tire contact patch is a function of weight and tire pressure. A 205mm width tire has the same contact patch as a 285mm tire, given same weight and pressure. The only thing that changes is the shape of the contact patch, which becomes wide and short instead of narrow and long.
The 6000lb Escalade runs its 285/40R24's on 35 psi, the Wagoneer runs its 235's at 30 psi.
So assuming even weight distribution, the contact patch per tire is 6000lbs/4/35psi=42.8in^2 inches for the Escalade, and 4500lbs/4/30psi=37.5in^2. So the contact patch is only 14% larger on the Escalade, yet it carries 33% more weight!
If you look at the road wear formula, it's entirely a function of weight. So the width of the tires only impacts surface-level abrasion. And with the power law, that's still 3.16x of Wagoneer's wear (or 216% increase).
So the wider tires do virtually nothing to protect the road from the extra 1500 lbs weight.
In fact, the dynamic load when hitting potholes is greatly exacerbated by the 285/40R24 low profile tires, because instead of of absorbing the bumps within the tire, the stiff sidewall low-profile tires absorb way less.
The spring rate of the Wagoneer tires is ~1200-1500 lbs/in, the spring rate of the Escalade tires is ~2500-3500 lbs/in, so that's a 2x stiffer tire! As a result, it transmits twice as much force when hitting the same bump.
So as a result, an Escalade accelerates road cracking considerably worse than the Wagoneer, not even in the same league.
Yes, the heavy trucks wear the road outsizely, incomparably to the SUVs we are discussing. However, we have roads that do not allow trucks (parkways) or see little heavy truck traffic.
The tire spring rate is not what is "felt" by the road every bump, there is forward motion and coilover suspensions in modern cars running low profile tires versus solid axles and leafs on the Wagoneer, but yes nearly every modern vehicle ships on low profile tires unfortunately.
We are talking a few hundred pounds of weight difference per tire, it simply doesn't matter in the real world. I maintain private roads and even if your parkway is placarded everything is subjected to vocational vehicles and HDTs whether signed or not, because work needs to be done and local deliveries are exempt from transit restrictions.
The road wear model is obviously simplified versus the real world, the power law accurately enough extrapolates to HDT axle loads. You can drive a vehicle above snow, or move million pound super loads without causing excessive wear by thinking in additional dimension.
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".
- collect garbage more frequently in smaller trucks
taiwan has very cute small garbage trucks and they have a ice-cream-truck like song signalling for people to bring whatever trashbags they have out to the truck, so you don't even have piles of garbage outside for days waiting for the weekly truck. quite nice.
Having less garbage is a whole other issue. Small utility vehicles makes a lot of sense but doesn't seem to be the way it's done in NA. Maybe it’s a labour cost thing. But even the long haul trucks are huge here compared to the rest of the world. They haul the same amount but the cab and engine are enormous. Maybe because the roads are wider they can just make everything bigger.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you. What about concrete pavements? I assume they can last longer, but I often see badly cracked concrete. Regular (expansion?) cracks also don't increase riding comfort.
Welcome! Concrete pavements should (but often don’t) last much longer. They are much thicker than asphalt pavements though. The asphalt section of flexible pavement on the street by your house might only be two or 3 inches thick. Plain concrete would be no less than 6. Cracking is inevitable because concrete is brittle andhas a surprising amount of thermal expansion. The longevity of the concrete can be improved with steel reinforcement, and that’s typical for interstate pavement design. One typical pattern in Texas is to have cement stabilized soil base and an asphalt bond breaker between it and the continuously reinforced concrete pavement you see on the surface.
Well there aren’t semis driving down your neighborhood cul de sac (at least I hope not). Heavy trucks cause more damage to interstates and warehouse districts, yes, but that is what those roads are designed for. Most city roads meanwhile were never built to accommodate 9000 lb hummer tanks.
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.
From what I can find, the standard weight limit for a truck in 20 tons per axle (less when multiple axles are close together).
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%
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.
Right. They do it at a rate approximately proportional to the fourth power of the per-axle weight of the vehicles driving by. So really only the heaviest vehicles matter much at all.
Even if it were caused by passenger cars, the skyrocketing brightness of lights at sedan height probably push more people to buy large cars than this. In a just world, cars with ridiculously bright lights would be crushed in a monster car rally. Alas the cops don't even pull them over.
This is the sole reason I've always hated Teslas. Didn't care that they're EV and new and have stereotypes about the drivers, just that the lights are way brighter. Or sometimes pointed further up out of the factory for some reason.
Last time I bought a car, I was replacing my 2010 CRV. If I wanted to purchase a subcompact SUV or hatchback sedan that was smaller and more fuel efficient I would have needed to wait at least six months.
Was this that one year when the whole auto market was completely screwed up? This is normally not an issue. Also why do you need a hatchback instead of just a regular car?
That's not the full story. I presume it was some Toyota, which are in high demand. Plenty of small size alternatives are available from other brands with 0 wait time.
This was spread across multiple makes and models. The car I wound up with is larger than I would like, but you're right, it was in stock. Because the dealers stock what people want and lead times (at the time) were atrocious.
I could walk in to any number of dealers and purchase what you are describing tonight. I have an excellent electric SUV that I walked into a dealer an purchased.
The one thing I noticed in NA is that it takes ages to rebuild a road. I have close to zero experience in road construction, but a bit weird to see how they can repave a km stretch of a road here in Tokyo within a week or two, but it took months in other cities i've lived in.
Maybe they do a lot of extra work over night over here in Tokyo, and it just goes faster? Or it's a very systematic thing and part of the maintenance schedules, so it doesn't really go that bad?
Hmmm probably the only thing I’ve consistently noticed around the US is they can pave highways and roads very quickly. That’s the American skill: tons of sprawl and highways. You may have been confusing road repaving with gas or water pipe replacement
I think another factor of road wear is better handling cars. People are able to drive more aggressively and accelerate more efficiently then ever before. Taking tight turns at high speeds or accelerating from dead stop does wear out roads more due to higher traction from driving behavior and characteristics…
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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure)
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.
(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 a large amount of money is not widely known)
> Maybe roads would last longer if we weren't all being forced to buy super heavy SUVs
Maybe not.
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 safety. Who's gonna survive in an incident of road rage gone bad, a Ford Explorer or a Fiat 500?
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?
>it takes less power to move a lighter and smaller car
A smaller car has less space for battery than an SUV. Because batteries are extremely heavy, that smaller car needs to be overbuilt compared to its gasoline counterpart, which further reduces room for battery. Then, because safety standards are harder to meet with small cars, the smaller car needs to be overbuilt even more.
This means that you get cars that only have half the range a gasoline-powered car does, and the gas powered car recharges an order of magnitude faster than the EV does. Oh yeah, and the people who buy smaller cars like this tend to live in places where there's no charging other than going to a gas station anyway.
It wouldn't sell on the US market because better alternatives exist. It could sell on the Chinese market because there are no better alternatives.
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.
Heavy trucks aren't required for the vast majority of residential deliveries.
If you order anything in Bangkok, even say a refrigerator or a king size mattress, it will almost always be delivered by a modestly sized pickup truck (with a high roof covering the bed).
Instead of assuming bad faith and resorting to insults, simply make the point. EVs can cause road damage too, yes.
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.
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.
What people want are Inexpensive vehicles, not necessarily larger ones. American car manufacturers have been actively suppressing cheaper smaller vehicles for their own benefit.
This is definitely true. I do not currently know a single woman who DOESN'T drive an SUV and the answer I've heard more than once is just that they feel safer. The problem is, they're not wrong. But it's a spiraling problem - more big cars make the roads less safe which prompts more people to buy big cars...
Yet per capita, US vehicle occupants are more likely to be injured in general while on the road than Europeans. Perhaps the driving standards are just far too different.
Because US roads traffic control systems suck ALSO licenses are much easier to get, there is more of a tacit tolerance of drunk driving, and the lower rate of public transport makes more people forced to drive despite preferring not to, leading to less of a selective effect of drivers.
We've consequentially paved over the issues (no pun intended) via creating a socioeconomic hierarchy of insulation from traffic injuries. Giant SUV's have become the mainstay of the upwardly mobile 30s suburbanite, who is immunized from the road hazards, collisions and dangers that would cripple sedans.
Two people crashing in big SUVs/trucks aren't really safer than two people crashing in smaller cars. As for the difference, my guess is the driving standards.
I'm not sure it is so simple. Some states have death rates in line with western/northern Europe (eg massachusetts has 4 deaths per billion km, similar to Germany), but road design and cars driven in massachusetts are highly similar to states with a larger death rate(south carolina, looking at you).
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.
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.
Its becoming a place to actively leave, if you haven't already.
… and don’t forget about the new law they’re rolling out to lure the Bears from Chicago. Read the actual drafts so far… Absolutely nothing about the Bears being required to pay a dime for the stadium, but a whole bunch of new taxes for which the revenue is “redirected” into making the Bears’ lease payments. LOL, it’s such a huge money giveaway the Bears would be crazy not to take it.
Honestly the roads in Carmel and Fishers are not significantly better. They do have a shit-ton of roundabouts though. More roundabouts than a Yes song.
Read Copaganda. The footnotes with references is very long and detailed for those inclined to read the sources, it reminds me of the MLA stuff we had to write in high school. There are many references to LAPD and LA county sheriffs with overlapping jurisdiction.
I would like to see the relation between competence and strength of political alignment (as in, deviation from 50/50 red/blue vote for local government).
I naively expect that less strongly aligned cities are run more competently, because the concept of "consequences" can exist. Where I am, there's a very strong political alignment, so no consequences at all. The same group of people will be voted for, no matter what they do.
> The same group of people will be voted for, no matter what they do.
This is more true than people realize. Basically, they choose each other in rotation who will be elected. Who will be the city manager and who will be the Mayor. They are all cronies and know how the system works.
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.
Big city government is almost entirely Democrat run. The primaries are everything. The voters in primaries are city union workers. The way to win in city primaries is to promise more money for less effort to them. That is the central issue of big city American politics - it’s just poorly run, very expensive, and operated to extract money from taxpayers to hand over to the unions
Basically, every city hall is like the show Parks and Recreation from a competency situation. Then it’s about rubbing each other’s back and staying in power.
You have to jump through hurdles to get hired into a real position, or know someone that can sidestep those hurdles to get you hired, then once you’re in, it’s about staying there. This combination means you never do anything really useful, at least not quickly. The citizens take a backseat while the clowns in power perform in the circus.
> Basically, every city hall is like the show Parks and Recreation from a competency situation. Then it’s about rubbing each other’s back and staying in power.
Fun side note: the outdoor establishing shots for Pawnee city hall used Pasadena’s City Hall which is right next to LA. It always threw me off when watching Parks and Rec, especially since they never had a shot of it snowing.
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.
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.
I don't think there's a way to do this without casting something to connect the pre-fab to the surrounding concrete sidewalk. Like how do you precisely cut out the existing curb so the prefab just 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.
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.
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 https://www.curbmachines.com
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
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
"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.
Ok, but curb cuts also positively impact wheelchair users, people with canes or walkers, people with injuries that require crutches or a knee scooter, parents with strollers, people with rolling bags, cyclists, delivery workers and more. They are widely understood to benefit many many people beyond just people with disabilities (so much so that their benefit has given a name to the "curb cut effect").
Also, $60k/year is a) not nearly enough to pay a contractor full time living wage and b) not enough to cover the greater than full time necessary to assist someone. Blind people need to navigate the world at all hours on all days...
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.
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.
It is a nice theory but then they bring out the same rhetoric when seeking re-election. So yeah, corruption may be abound.
Controversial opinion: City roads shouldn't be for fast driving, they should be cobblestone. Safer for predestrians, easier to maintain, not rough on cars. It encourages pedestrian friendly city planning.
You can somewhat walk in LA but it's damn shame how unfriendly it can be for pedestrians at times. I say shame because of the pristine weather, and people roll around sealed in aluminum boxes instead. trams and bicycles are ideal for it instead of cars. The bus system is ok by US standards too.
Cut the LAPD and the LA sheriff dept's budget, demilitarize them and fund infrastructure with it instead.
Here is their budget chart, there are about 15 countries in the world with lesser budget and GDP. The LASD has a budget of about $4B, more than the budget of 30 countries. Even that comparison aside, look at how they keep increasing their budget. In the LAPD chart above, it is "field forces" (+$200M over 10 years) that keep increasing their budgets, so it isn't "just inflation", and the crime rates don't justify it either. But that said, I get it, LA has bigger problems.
this is one of the core conceits behind why Strong Towns / Not Just Bikes / urbanism discourse in general makes the disctinction between a "street", which is meant for people to walk along, go to stores/restaurants/etc, and "roads", which are meant to efficiently move traffic from one part of the city to another.
Combining them degrades the ability to address either point: efficiently moving traffic is inherently in conflict with being able to access businesses or having pedestrians nearby.
public transport is more efficient at transporting people than cars, public transport makes roads more walkable. If you have subways, trams and buses, you can have narrower and slower roads friendly to pedestrians.
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.
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.
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 https://youtu.be/JTEJH-tKv9Q?t=910
They retrofit Yorktown in 3 days instead of 3 months. The Japanese thought Yorktown was a different aircraft carrier-they could not imagine such a fast retrofit.
Your own citation says that the original estimate was at least 2 weeks, and further looks found that important components were undamaged, and most of the damage was easily patchable, like the flight deck and hull. Her damaged boilers were not fully repaired and she was not able to make full speed.
This isn't that abnormal for 20th century warships. They were designed to be mostly flooded and still floating, had significant redundancy, and especially in the USA, massive efforts and training and resources were spent on damage control and management.
The USS New Orleans Cruiser in WW2 had 150ft of it's front entirely blown off by an ammo detonation. One quarter of the ship just gone.
The spent about 11 days on a crippled boat, patching things up and putting out fires, and then she sailed backwards to a friendly port, and was eventually fully refurbished and refit.
This wasn't some era of magical American super productivity. It's what these ships were designed to do in some way. They were built to be hit by rather large weapons after all, and attempt to survive. Look at what efforts it took to finally sink the Bismarck and the Japanese super battleships.
It was 2 days, and they thought it was a different ship because they thought the Yorktown was sunk in the previous battle, not because they didn't think it could be repaired that fast (although that's probably also true).
Its easy to build when your goal is just to build the thing. But theres so much code and regulation crap (like ADA). I know someone building a small residential home, they have literally 1000s of pages of documents to be submitted for every tiny thing you can imagine. Regulations have completely spiraled out of control in this country. Nobody is keeping any of them in check.
> 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.”
Why don't they asphalt curb to curb for a mile and then come back and do the ramps one at a time?
> Why don't they asphalt curb to curb for a mile and then come back and do the ramps one at a time?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 will 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.
> EDIT: I'm assuming the difficulty here is the pedestrian ramps at intersections. NOT the curb that spans the entirety of a road section.
The curb elements are made offsite. All you do onsite is to cut the stones to length if need be.
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.
You can see a few pictures and diagrams on how we do it in Germany here [1].
I don't know what you mean, but I belive we're talking about "wheelchair ramps" at street corners
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"
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.
Around here real estate listings are starting to not do interior pictures because the towns are known to predate on them for "hey you didn't get a permit for that bathroom reno" type crap.
It's a make work scheme. They don't give a crap. They'll rubber stamp just about anything. It's like $50. They just want to force you to use a licensed trade if applicable.
The trades themselves don't pull permits because it's not about the permissionn, it's about using them. The towns don't care unless you've cut them out so much that they feel slighted in which case they'll send you angry letters about violations, demand a million bucks and you'll hire a $10k lawyer (another licensed trade, lol) who'll get you off for $1k.
Needless to say compliance is pretty low outside of the rich neighborhoods because normal people can't afford to tack $4k of engineering onto a "repave my shitty 2-car driveway" project or a $3k panel upgrade onto a "renovate my 50yo bathroom and add a couple outlets".
It's all shit and should be replaced with a much lower touch system that's cheap enough people can afford to comply with it. But there's so many parties in on the racket that it'll come crashing down before that happens.
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.
I read this section and, along with the surrounding context, it seems like the issue is less having-money-for-materials and more having-money-to-hire-enough-skilled-workers-to-work-on-multiple-ramps-in-parallel. Different budgets, perhaps?
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...
...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.
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".
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.
All of this seems like an entirely predictable outcome when a law is passed that requires more work but doesn't pay for it. And in this case you can't blame a short-sighted legislature or a corrupt process -- it was a citizens' initiative. That promised voters they could have something for free, which isn't free. See this key quote:
> 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.”
So what exactly did people expect?
I'm all for accessibility, but demanding it without paying for it is not the way.
This makes no sense. What you call "curb ramps" is a part of standard road infrastructure in Germany. They're basically everywhere in Germany. If the Los Angeles government can't figure out how to implement a practice that has been legislated for 36 years, then they deserve a kick in the balls that forces them to wake up.
The fact that 36 years of neglect coincide in 2026 isn't the result of a law that happened to pass 2025. That law was passed because of the 36 years of neglect. The asphalt patching strategy is just one more last ditch attempt at ignoring the 36 year old ADA law.
I could just as easily say that your comment makes no sense.
Curb ramps are all over the place in the US too. And I don't know what on earth Germany has to do with anything.
But the point is, if you force them to be constructed, then you need to pay for them. Maybe it's a "kick in the balls" as you put it, but without funding what exactly do you expect the city to do here? It can't conjure extra money out of thin air. LA isn't ideologically opposed to the ADA or anything. But it needs a whole bunch of money to be able to follow it. Money which hasn't been raised for it.
Regardless of the past history, passing a law forcing the city to do something without giving it the necessary money to do so is not a strategy that works.
I've been reading comments feeling like I'm going bonkers. We don't have 'curb ramps' here in Australia (like external ramps from the curb to the road? I can't find pictures of them), but the curbs have downward slopes at intersections to meet the road at road level, like a driveway. And that's pretty standard everywhere.
This is very well thought out comment and that’s probably why there’s poor engagement with it. This is exactly the problem. The city has an unfunded mandate. The street department is triaging. The problem is best they can. I wouldn’t be shocked if city council members were directing this workaround so their voters would actually see some work getting done in their neighborhood.
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
hard to believe it's a problem for LA in 2026... 3 months to build 12 ramps?
I was going to say, how on earth does it take 3 months to build 12 ramps. Seems like there’s a much deeper dysfunction. Ramps should genuinely be able to be stamped out at scale. This is the type of thing China would do in a few hours
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
So yeah, it's either potholes or road closure for a year++.
Nope, thats the cheap way to save money in the short term. But it makes the roads much worse quality for a lot longer. The surface dressing rips and pulls up very quickly, and so the road is rough and full of holes for a longer period.
We need to tax personal vehicals by the ton. And I mean like, punitively. Pickup trucks should cost $500K if they're not registered to licensed business.
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.
> Hadar noted the shift appeared to primarily be to avoid triggering adding missing curb ramps (for wheelchair access),
Products from the disability industry are incredibly expensive. In London someone worked out it would have been cheaper to hire a full time human attendant for every person in a wheelchair than to pay for the city’s existing scant coverage ramps. Of you’re in tech , think of the overpriced web browsers supposedly aimed at disabled people from years ago and their “first boil the ocean” approach for web accessibility.
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.
"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 something 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: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cddn0n3p2ppo
It's very strange to look at how the world's richest country just can't do basics. I live in a country with way, way, way, way, way less money (any way you want to measure it from natural resources to gdp percent capital to average income etc) and things are far from perfect here but we get the basics right.
You guys have so. Much. Money. How can you not pave a road properly?
The last time this topic was posted, it was pointed out that LA specifically says it'll cost $50k+ to do one ADA complaint corner of a sidewalk. $50k - that's during the repaving... Not come back and do it. Explain it however you want but a cutout on a corner of a sidewalk doesn't cost $50k unless you got something fishy going on...
There's very blatant corruption within LA's government and no accountability. Your average American (which LA is full of) is too stupid to do anything about these issues.
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.
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.
Now that the California refineries are shutting down, where does LA get asphalt to do the paving? Has the price gone up due to having to import it from the Gulf Coast?
The city of LA runs its own asphalt plants, and there's a bunch of other companies selling it in LA County. A lot of the raw material is recycled from roads that are being torn up, AsphaltPro had an interesting article about it recently
Well you are the only person in this entire thread that even mentioned anything that would even be remotely threatening to people in power: Reducing funding to police who's only role it is to hold together society breaking apart on the seams by a structure that everybody internalized is as naturally true as gravity.
The part about bike lanes is annoying. Whenever some city or district goes all in on bike lanes, the end result is almost nobody using those, and more congestion. It makes sense in like Manhattan.
IMO it’s like that Reddit post from a while back with the subway to nowhere in china. You need the infrastructure to encourage usage and buildout. It’s a chicken and egg problem. I personally don’t bike at my uni bc the state DOT decided it’s fine to have a bike lane between a right turn lane/bus lane and 3/4 lanes of traffic. On a state highway (truck route). Safe to say I don’t feel safe biking there, despite it being at the heart of the university. Plenty of people bike on the other side, where there’s a protected separated bike lane going the other direction.
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.
My experience is that once you get north of the city limits of San Diego, into either neighboring cities or unincorporated areas, the roads get a lot better.
I'm in north county, and it's very OK! we've had a good resurfacing pushing on quite a few of the roads around me. But they're ripping a lot of it up to lay (much needed) fiber.
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.
That's not too 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, lot less for that money than you do in California.
Whoops. If we're just comparing state sales tax, CA does seem to be the highest. However it's not dramatically higher than many other states, and when you throw in local taxes the combined rate seems to be just in the top ten or so.
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.
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.
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.
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 and half-assed repairs.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Towns
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... 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.
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.
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.
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.
So for each new street widening, new road, and piece of highway capacity, LA was increasing it's financial liability to revenue ratio.
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.
Strong Towns has already done the financial analysis for Los Angeles. It's not looking very good: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025-10-27-ground-zero-l...
Unless things are really different in California from where I'm at, I find it unlikely that the city is responsible for maintaining state and federal highways.
At least in my state, state and federal highways are all the responsibility of the state DOT, which is massively subsidized out of general fund tax dollars and federal grants. There have been recent attempts to increase fuel taxes, but they get regularly shut down by the electorate. It's not looking good for highway maintenance, either.
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.
When I say "trivially fix" I mean that, if the City/State wanted to fix the problem, they could.
>Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land.
Developers very obviously 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 legalize redevelopment. They could actually incentivize it.
>For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move.
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 very dramatically or declare bankruptcy. That's the entire message from Strong Towns.
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.
That's not the case in many other cities.
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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_cri...
Every time I look at a city/county budget, the schools absolutely dwarf everything else (it's not quick to disentangle different levels of government, but roughly speaking, it seems like schools are usually roughly the same cost as all other services combined where I've looked), which makes it hard for me to take seriously the idea that it's infrastructure like roads and sewage specifically leading to unsustainable budgets. e.g. if I remember correctly, special ed programs cost more than roads when I looked at the previous metro I lived in's budget, and sewers were revenue neutral with a county sewer fee.
Strongtowns seems a bit motivated in their analysis, to put it mildly.
When you are looking at your city budget... you're probably looking at cash-based accounting:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashaccounting.asp
This looks at current costs. The school is a cost every year, so every year that cost shows up on the budget. The problem is that road/water/sewer maintenance often doesn't show up on these budgets because these systems are usually built all at once. Because of this they usually also need to be replaced all at once. To see those costs before they happen, you need to use accrual accounting:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accrualaccounting.asp
The entire message from Strong Towns is exactly that because cities often use cash accounting instead of accrual accounting in their budgetary processes these lingering issues of deferred maintenance don't show up until they do, and when they do, those costs will simply be too large for the city to cover without very politically unpopular interventions.
Capital improvements don't need to be paid all at once; that's what financing is for. And debt service does appear on budgets. In any case, why are we to believe that e.g. $1B in maintenance that's been deferred for decades is "the" problem when the school budget is $500M/year?
You’re making an argument about school budgets being too high. That’s fine. I’m arguing that, our school budgets are set, in large part, by our available resources. Viewing our resources from a long run perspective helps us set our current budgets.
If we cut the school budget only when we need to repave roads, we are playing fast and loose with our children’s future. When we set our budgets to be sustainable, we don’t rug pull parents who are trying to build a life in our cities.
I'm not even saying school budgets are necessarily too high. I'm just saying that if someone is claiming that what amounts to 5-10% of the budget is why cities go bankrupt, and that's why they need to entirely reshape how they develop to fit some idyllic vision of a pedestrian city, then I'm going to go ahead and doubt their analysis.
Like I'm happy that my (suburban) city requires new developments to connect to a city-wide bike trail network. That's great. I just don't think Strong Towns/Not Just Bikes presents a realistic mental model of the world. They seem to clearly be pushing for a specific vision regardless of facts.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. You can defer maintenance but school, police, firefighter, etc spending is constant. If your infrastructure is in trouble and your budget can't pay for the maintenance, you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying.
Los Angeles has about 7500 miles of roads. At a reasonable cost of $5 million per mile that is 37.5 billion USD. Assuming a lifespan of 35 years, that is basically a billion USD per year spent on servicing road infrastructure costs. If they don't spend that billion every year or put it aside for future repairs, their road infrastructure is going to decay. It might not sound like much in comparison to the full budget, but since the road network is the largest man made structure in the city, it will affect everyone and be the most noticeable failure on part of the government. Lack of police or fire fighting can show up in the form of stochastic damage that doesn't necessarily impact every citizen directly.
Sure, if you treat all other things as impossible to tweak except the thing you want to argue is the problem, I guess. But taking a quick look at the city budget, I see they spent $200M on overtime for police. So there's a place where they could save like $70M with no change to service with correct staffing? I'm sure there are other places where they are not currently 100% efficient. Or, since they have ~4M residents in the city, they could raise taxes by $250/person-year. That doesn't sound unsustainable to me. Certainly not a "suburbs are a fundamentally broken model" level problem.
Lots of suburban cities in the US are really nice, well run places. LA even as an example of a poorly run area doesn't actually seem to be in much of a financial pickle.
The point is
> you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying
Is just confused. The $1B/year you came up with as sufficient is ~7% of the LA city budget (~$14B), and that's excluding major expenses like schools since that's the county budget. If you look more holistically at just "what's the local government spending", the amount you say is needed to properly maintain the roads is more like 3-4%. Roads are just not a financial problem. Strongtowns guy just doesn't like them.
Overtime for police can often be largely attributed to special events or occasions; for example, the city might have an entirely correct amount of officers for most of the year, but then during superbowl, presidential visits, Fourth of July parties, Pride, etc. They have a much higher need for patrol units, escorts, traffic management, etc. for those denser areas with more going on. They can't simply transfer officers around because that would leave other areas of the city under-patrolled, which runs the risk of unacceptably higher response times.
As a result, officers that worked Saturday through Thursday might also come in for a shift on Friday/Saturday, or might work a longer shift or split shift that day.
So the problem might not be that the police force needs 30% more staffing, but that the police force needs 80% more staffing on extremely rare occasions.
This is how lobby groups in general operate. They have settled on a solution and work backward from there to develop a problem that only their solution can fix and if other citizens and voters don't like it, they are the problem (NIMBY, greedy, selfish, populism, etc).
Just a note about police overtime: The correct amount of overtime for a union employee is not zero. Paying overtime for a few weeks each year to cover vacation can absolutely be cheaper than funding a pension and other benefits for several decades.
That’s absolutely untrue. The only reason companies track depreciation as they do is because it allows them to defer taxation. Public works projects are not paid out of current cash.
Strong Towns makes good arguments about certain things and are critical in a reasonable way of how civil engineering organizations rate the need for more civil engineering works. But the budget discussion makes zero sense.
The biggest expenses for county, city, town, village government are: schools, police & fire, Medicaid share in states that do that, and employee retirement and health. A small/midsize city spends 60% of its budget on police.
Capital projects are capitalized with bonds. Governments have the lowest bond expenses due to tax exemptions. Roadwork is not done in a cash basis. It’s bonded for 10-30 years depending on the job.
Yes, the problem is that our cities are already leveraged up to their eyeballs. At some point, the actual humans buying those bonds start becoming skeptical of the city’s ability to pay them back.
LA currently has about a billion dollars of outstanding general obligation bonds (edit: but that does not include all their future liabilities). They're still rated AA, but I presume that is because the credit writing agencies understand how many untapped revenue streams LA has, but again, those will require unpalatable political change. You can’t keep refinancing forever.
Philadelphia, Miami, and Chicago are getting close to junk bond status, and when that happens, the option to refinance starts evaporating very quickly.
LA County has a bigger economy than many European countries, and would displace Illinois by GDP if it were a state.
LA is fine.
I also think LA will be fine in the long run, I just think that their tax structure will force significant changes. The tax base is able to cover the cities liabilities, it's just that the residents don't want to pay those extra taxes, and don't want to change in ways that let other people pay them.
The city has a billion dollar deficit right now. Trivial for residents to afford ($83 per person), but difficult to actually implement politically.
Wikipedia says the GDP of the LA metro is ~1.5T. I think they could handle 1B in bonds. If they choose not to, it's not because it's some impossibility. Certainly not because roads are impossibly expensive.
I said general obligation bonds, not general liabilities. These technically are what makes this discussion so difficult.
My point is that much of what the city can tax has little to do with the city's GDP. Either the landscape of the city will have to change or the current taxation paradigm will have to change.
What they can tax does have to do with the GDP though. If they have a 1B deficit, they need to somehow tax <0.1% of activity (or cut services), whether through property tax, income tax, sales tax, corporate tax, or some other scheme. What they don't need to do is radically increase density, and since almost all of the costs scale with population, not area, density wouldn't even help that much (or might hurt if it leads to a lower percentage of net contributors).
Again, putting $1B in some perspective, the LA Unified School District budget (which is county-level, so not directly comparable to the city, but anyway) is just under $19B. Maybe someone else can ballpark how much of that is associated to the city. Or look the other things that scale with population: police, medical, waste, social programs, etc.
Again, they have $1B in the current deficit. The have $1B in outstanding bonds. They have myriad other outstanding obligations that won't show up on the balance sheet for 20+ years.
Strong Towns wrote an entire piece on this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025-10-27-ground-zero-l...
Okay, but relative to their resources, that's nothing. So they can just pay for those things. It's like worrying about a water heater replacement when you make well into six figures. At a macro level, it is obvious that the suburban model itself is not somehow financially unsustainable.
The city budget is $14B. So they need to make a ~7% adjustment somehow, which amounts to less than a 1% tweak to the local economy. That's not a broken system. It's not a ponzi scheme. It just means they should pay their bills and maybe reduce some waste. You yourself said it's trivial for residents to afford to just pay for the deficit.
So you get 40 years of "sewers cost us almost nothing to maintain woo" and then five years of "sewer maintenance is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars this year".
Take a look at LA’s budget then, it’s literally all police and police liability payouts which are already hundreds of millions of dollars over the budget for them.
> The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit.
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: https://la.urbanize.city/post/plan-skyline-altering-tower-ab...
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).
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.
I recently reviewed a bid from a not-particularly-fancy contractor for nearly $1M to build ~1200 sq ft in an empty lot in Los Angeles. This isn’t just a planning permit probem.
Even in cheaper areas without earthquake or hurricane construction codes, minimum $/ft is like $250 (for lowest quality components) and realistically more like $400.
Inflation for materials and labor makes any build incredibly expensive.
Did you pay it?
Plenty of labor and contractors other places in the US that could be brought in if someone was willing to offer stable work and pay. Even with the out-of-town bonus, many midwestern contractors and laborers would come out to near the same cost as locals because they were already making a fraction the wage out in the midwest.
But non-union construction is known to be unstable even outside construction's general boom-bust cycles and nobody is going to travel 1500 miles away without a contract guaranteeing they will have work/pay past the first 2 weeks. Too many workers have gotten burned being given great offers to travel for work only to get screwed over before they can recuperate their costs. Hell our own President is famous for screwing over construction companies and people just accept it as normal for the industry.
>The people living in SFH don't want to move exactly because they're not generating enough tax revenue to keep the city afloat
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?
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.
Zoning changes would generally make your property more value as a baseline. Then you could either stay put, or you could elect to move elsewhere while redeveloping your original place. This is common in Australia.
A common zoning change here is based on street frontage for semi-detached homes - the new ones are still 3-4BR, just attached at the garage and with smaller yards. If development required 15m frontage, but then that changed to 12-13m, that would mobilise a lot of owners to take advantage, though obviously others can just stay as is if they prefer.
It usually happens that an $800k lot value becomes $1m, regardless of the state of the house. The owner can then demolish a decades old house, build two places for $600k, sell one as a new home for $800k-1m to finance the build (and costs of moving out during that phase), and end up in a new house themselves. Often they've sacrificed yard that they found annoying to maintain anyway.
The above can be adjusted where it's possible to build 3-4 on a block, or a larger development of apartments.
Zone changes typically allow change, not force it, surely? An owner can just keep their SFH and large yard if they prefer. What they can't always control and often vote against is the composition of their neighbourhood.
>Can you really blame someone for not sacrificing his position under these circumstances?
What? There is a structural deficit problem. The ship is sinking. Complaining about how "we shouldn't have to change anything about the ship" isn't really a reasonable argument. We live on this ship... we have every incentive to make sure it stays above water.
I still don't get it though. Am I right that the proposition is: voluntarily accept a lower quality of life, or we'll either take your property or let it the neighborhood go to pot until you decide to give it up? People are not going to accept that. Look at the fiasco at defunding the fire department. I'll just patch my own sidewalk. I'm not vacating so that the next guy gets a deal. There's plenty of land. Develop there. Why not?
The three options you presented are the three available options. There is no fourth. Make a choice.
You might think there is option 4--municipal bankruptcy--but that is just option 2 and 3 combined.
Building buildings somewhere else will not fix your neighborhood.
I'm not giving you a hard time. I'm saying that I made my choice. I'm going to stay in my home.
I don't really think those are the only three choices, though. The government can fail and be replaced with a new one that will shape things up. Then it'll be replaced by another that thinks it's too big and well off to fail, squander it, and fail. That's the typical cycle.
The problem is that you're camouflaging the implicit position of "I'm going to stay in my home, even if I have to see the world burn." as the seemingly reasonable position "I'm going to stay in my home", while being utterly ignorant to the consequences based on absurd levels of wishful thinking.
You're saying the government is going to fail, but actually it's not really going to fail. Someone is going to bail you out every single time. If the government failed, but I'm still in the house, it didn't fail hard enough. They should get better and more competent at failing. The failure needs to be more absolute and its consequences should be unavoidable. The bare minimum required is that they thoroughly crush my spirit and desire to keep living in this place.
People with a semblance of sanity left in their brain understand that getting the things they want, also means dealing with the associated costs and that if they insist on those things, they also implicitly insist on the costs associated with those things. When people refuse this cost benefit trade off, they will end up losing the things they want.
I'm trying to follow this but unclear of the root of the problem. Is it beacause building roads in L.A. is inherantly more expensive than elsewhere? I thought one of the selling points of cities was scale: costs are spread over more people. But, it sounds like road building is cheaper per resident in my small city. Sounds more like a corruption problem.
>costs are spread over more people
I'm suggesting that this isn't the actual answer. The thread started with the premise that the city doesn't have enough revenue, and that the way to increase that revenue is to bring in more people who pay more tax. Next, bringing in more people requires more housing, so that requires incentives for developers to displace people residing in SFH so that the can replace those with high density housing. There's a big problem: more people require more services beyond fancy curb cuts, like police, fire, water, electricity, schools, hospitals, etc. That cost that is spread also grows proportionally with the number of people, and you can't ignore that.
On the cost of building roads: there are cement and asphalt plants right in LA city proper, and also in weho and inglewood, among others in the county. LA has a price problem, not a cost problem.
There are more specters, too, which are bound to be political fights. For one, when you dig up a road, there are numerous places that will require displacing very large homeless camps. Now, credit where it's due, LA has shown that it is able to do that sometimes, like around Echo Park, which is the junction of several major thoroughfares like glendale blvd and the 101. Still, these are non-trivial projects that take years.
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.
If you change the zoning, people will build to take advantage of that more flexible zoning. I own land in the city, I'd absolutely pursue the financing and coordinate the redevelopment of that land if:
- I could make more money
- if the zoning allowed it.
As it is right now, it'd be profitable, but the zoning isn't there for it.
>For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move.
This is closely coupled to the whole 'grandfathered in to very low property taxes from 50 years ago' problem.
It's trivial in the sense that it's easier than not doing nothing, because rather than create problems what we've actually done is systematically installed impediments to solutions. We only need to remove impediments, and the solution finds itself.
Obviously that's very simplified, but the point is we've built this Tower of Babylon that exists around property value that is completely optional and just makes everything harder.
> 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.
The state of California already mandated certain density improvements:
https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/10/newsom-signs-massive-...
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.
The more likely reasons is corruption and paying off rising CalPERS costs:
https://californiapolicycenter.org/repeat-pension-history/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/public-pensions-in-californ...
I live in CA. My state senator is Scott Wiener. We are making some progress.
Your argument might be plausible if it weren't for the fact that this issue is happening -- predictably -- 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.
https://www.strongtowns.org/decoder
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.
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.
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.
Any examples of the Strong Towns finance decoder already filled in for major cities?
edit: nevermind, found lots of example here! https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1iV3NEJqsY0y8N1...
sadly lots of the big cities I was interested not included. Guessing with these it's more difficult to get the input numbers.
[flagged]
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.
I saw all of these things driving through Sacramento twice. I think you’re probably just being dishonest or maybe you are in an are in an area where undesirables are priced out and you don’t leave your house.
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).
Not true.
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: https://cayimby.org/legislation/?_filter_by_status=signed
Sure, some cities are resisting or having trouble but even the state is overriding them with state policies.
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 both short and long term scales.
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 forced to allow density, instead of just coming to that conclusion because it's a responsible one.
They don't want it, even if they need 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.
Where this is not 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is the problem with outsourcing everything in the name of "efficiency".
If you don't actually do things in house, you don't know how to do them.
Everybody wants the US to manufacturer and build more until they have to cut a check.
Not liking Chuck Marone is irrelevant. The question is whether or not the thesis is correct, and it seems correct.
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.
Personality is not relevant when determining if someone is correct or not, but it does empirically matter in terms of how likely someone is to get something done based on that. If you think being right is the only thing that should matter, you've achieved your goal already once you reach that step, so congrats! If you agree that it's not the success criteria, it makes sense to start paying attention to those other factors, or else you'll end up only being right and not successful.
I'd argue that if these issues are important to you, and you want to convince people, you'll be more effective if you find a more compelling argument than "you aren't allowed to care about what you just told me you care about".
Why is it that given the choice, many people with financial means move away from America’s cities?
This is actually generally the opposite of true. SFV is heavily Republican. Given the choice, self-made individuals prefer to live in or near blue cities despite the high taxes, because the lifestyle is objectively better than it is in the areas around red cities.
Indeed, a not-so-hidden secret of Fox News is that almost all of their anchors and personalities actually live in LA or NYC. (This is why Fox News personalities are so familiar with and obsessed with LA's problems. They're locals.) The Murdochs, for all their money prefer Los Angeles and NYC as their U.S. bases over no-tax states like Florida and Texas.
>I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning.
I am willing to guess they probably did, even if it doesn't seem directly related.
The engineers are a big part of the problem and drive regulations that featherbed themselves.
I got into a fight with my city over nonexistent crosswalks (the adhesive line strips wore off) near my home in an area where drivers have a hard time realizing where pedestrians cross due to a unique road setup.
You can’t just paint lines. The project ended up costing about $1.2M and required a traffic study, some stupid ADA assessment and accommodation that frankly any layperson could have figured out, and a complete streets assessment.
Basically, they sent out a few engineering technicians who make $20/hr, billed out 80 hours at $120 to count cars and people, and printed some boilerplate analysis (@$250/hr). The end result was they painted new crosswalks and added textured curb surfaces for ADA compliance, which allowed for the use of recovery act funds.
I love a good rant, but you just have no idea what you’re talking about. First, real engineers (the kind with, education and experience requirements and personal liability for their work) have labor markups that are maybe 2 to 3 times raw rate. I don’t know if 6X margins are normal for people who collect a check to “maintain” a finished product. Second, any civil engineer will tell you that complete streets compliance for federal funding is a waste of everyone’s time. Engineers didn’t come up with that, congressmen elected by people like you came up with that. Third, the only reason they did all of that study is because the people you voted for wanted to use money that was tax farmed from me instead of your city funds. They could have just sent out a road crew. You could also cut the check yourself. Finally marked crosswalks alter pedestrian behavior, but not driver behavior. Marking crosswalks where there is high traffic and no controls like a signal with a dedicated pedestrian phase are actually more dangerous than no markings at all. I don’t expect you to know that, but that’s why you should hire people like me and not try to do this yourself.
In fairness, I should have said "engineering companies" vs. engineers. Like any scenario, the engineers themselves have to work in the scope they are allowed to. Those firms absolutely lobbied our state legislature for all sorts of things that generate make-work revenue for them. Most of the proof of work is farmed off to low dollar employees.
In this particular scenario, it's an usual configuration that can't be changed for a bunch of reasons. There are functional, adequate controls that were added about 15 years ago and were not altered by the project I'm thinking about. The crosswalks and lane markings are essential because drivers tend to stop at the wrong place.
While we may have been getting rope-a-doped, our neighborhood association was willing to contribute a pretty significant amount of money to have the city do the work. Our position was that it was becoming a dangerous intersection with significant pedestrian traffic. We were told it was illegal for the city dpw to do so without the study work.
A late addition to your comment: the reason for all the "wasteful" red tape was that the right demanded all the documentation to prove that the underlying activity itself was not wasteful...thus imposing extra costs on everything that resulted in is several magnitudes more waste.
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?
Ironically, "how to stack dwelling units vertically in high-demand areas" is one of those things we seem to not be so good at _making_ these days.
This always grinds my gears (pun intended). Forcing everyone to live in a horribly dense, stifling, unhealthy situation isn't the issue. And the concept of saying LA isn't dense enough is beyond mind boggling, the number of people living there is beyond absurd. And yes, I know it's spread out, but the numbers don't lie, there's already more density than many places.
What this really is, is backdoor environmentalism. And I say that as someone that wants emissions down, reduced carbon, but a cat is a cat. And focusing on density to remove cars, because certain segments of the population rail against cars, isn't the problem people claim they are trying to solve.
For the roads? The easy way to pay for the roads, is to tax gas appropriately, and then ensure that tax only pays for roads. Nothing else, roads.
The second? Very clear end of year municipal budgets, showing how those funds were used.
Eventually, you'll reach a situation where the gas tax is the cost of road maintenance. And that's how it should be.
Back to the overall question? Well, I suppose you have quakes in LA, but outside of that concept, the US south is just about the easiest place to maintain roads.
In Canadaland, we have road damage due to freezing and thawing. Frost greaves for example, are where water gets under the pavement, freezes, and breaks it upward as the ice expands. No amount of drainage can fully protect from this, it just happens. And the cost for daily snow removal, ice mitigation(salt, etc), dirt being spread, the same for all the sidewalks isn't free.
LA has none of that. The US south doesn't, generally speaking.
LA doesn't have a road problem. It doesn't have a revenue problem. It has absurd infighting, like the entire rest of the US, with team politics and an inability to act as a result. It also has poor fiscal constraint.
Smaller LA side roads should last decades with proper maintenance.
But that's part of the problem too.
A tiny crack can be sealed, but leave it a year and it becomes a pothole.
LA is much less dense than Canadian cities. Taking the central municipalities which seem fairly comparable:
Toronto: 3.271M in 631 km2 = 5184/km2
Los Angeles: 3.879M in 1215 km2 = 3192/km2
Toronto's population is growing, up 17% 2021 to 2025, while Los Angeles is marginally down 0.5% 2020 to 2024.
Even smaller cities in Canada seem much more dense than their Californian equivalents, and they are more pleasant and walkable/cycleable because of that.
Isn't half of LA mountains, beach, and water?
All true. There's also a perverse incentive in getting involved in LA. It's a major market where overly ambitious people go to make bigger names for themselves. Their goals are not aligned with operating the city; it's a stepping stone to CA and the national stage. Most major markets have this problem, of course, but LA is at the top.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density
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'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.
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.
For the first time in a long while we're looking at actual, real selection pressures on municiptalities.
> lack of density
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?
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.
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.
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.
Tax revenue per area is generally a good metric in terms of the sustainability of a municipal budget. Very few suburbs in the world have enough people density to clear that bar, no matter how much they tax them. More people density lets you clear the bar so much easier even when the incomes are drastically lower.
Fundamentally the issue, aside from lack of density, is Prop 13. In LA, and every other part of California, your tax rate will get frozen (forever, essentially) at what you buy your home for. So you have some people who now have a $7m home paying taxes as if it were $300k, because they bought it in 1978.
With a setup like that, of course SFHs, no matter how high they’re valued, will not provide enough tax revenue on their own
The city of Los Angeles is pretty dense.
Also, in 2025 they spent 3 times as much dealing with legal fallout from police misconduct compared to street maintenance.
And people expect trains and metros to pay for themselves. Car infrastructure maintenance is bankrupting the government. And on top of that you have the opportunity cost of all the road and parking space.
> California cities could trivially fix their budget problems by satisfying the demand for housing by adding density
I just wonder if that isn’t a totally naive, laughably unthinking remark to be making?
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.
I actually chose "socks for Christmas" as a metaphor because the types of people who like socks for Christmas are grown-ups, and grown-ups tend to actually view municipal finance as important and interesting.
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.
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?
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 the streets have to be repaved anyway and if the city can't afford to simply bring them up to code in the short run, then they can't afford to keep repaving them at all in the long run.
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 just the ramp sections.
"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.
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.
this is coming from someone who biked and bussed to work in LA for 10+ years.
It's reckless policy that will only undermine your efforts and never reach the desired outcome.
As someone who has biked and rode trains to work for the past 30 years and continues to do so, I think requiring bike lanes whenever streets are repaved is a pretty awesome idea. ADA ramps are pretty great too, they are not just for disabled people, though the ADA lawsuit regime where private companies get sued needs to stop.
Yes I understand there is a funding issue, it needs to be solved by making the design and approval process more flexible and efficient, not by perpetuating the insane car-only design that kills pedestrians and cyclists.
Awesome ideas are not often practical
Oh it's quite practical, many cities have done it. It just requires standing up to a bunch of selfish assholes who would rather pave over every bit of available space so they can drive around really fast in their giant SUVs while pedestrians and cyclists scurry about on the broken pavement of the 5% of the street right of way given to them, and get run over when they don't get out of the way of the SUVs fast enough.
this attitude really helps improve cyclists' reputation.
What attitude do you expect from marginalized groups? Suffragists, slaves? Ring a bell?
If you think I'm exaggerating or something, I'm really not. You were born into a world already bulldozed for cars so you literally can't imagine an alternative reality. You're broken — can't see the world for what it is objectively.
Are rollerbladers marginalized? Cross country skiers ? It’s a hobby. This isn’t a civil rights movement, and it’s insulting to call cyclists “marginalized” like blacks , women and gays were.
To be honest with you I really don't give a shit about my reputation when it comes to this, I care about me and my kids not getting splatted by a speeding SUV when we dare to use the street, because I face this situation daily.
You'll never succeed with this attitude.
No worries, it's already happening and your resistance to the status quo changing is expected and accounted for.
Try to bike to work sometime — it's good for the soul. And your health of course.
How smug of you.
Where I live, our work has definitely been successful. The cities I bike in have been steadily improving their bike lane and pedestrian networks, and increasingly prioritizing them in plans and projects - though there is a long way to go.
It's interesting that you frame building bike lanes and reducing car speeds as "punishing drivers", seemingly ignoring that such changes enable micro-mobility users to commute to work safely.
That’s what it is . Remove capacity, increase travel times , increase driver frustration and in theory increase cycling and public transit. But the second part never happens . Travel times have been increasing for 40 years and cycling is still a fringe hobby
Removing car capacity by 50% and adding 1000% bike capacity at 1% of the cost is good, actually. It's not really 1000% of course, it's infinity% — the average cyclist is not capable of cycling on the roadway, so a bike lane literally enables them to do the activity at all; the value is immeasurable.
That you think cycling is a hobby is exactly the issue. I don't get to work by bike as a hobby, I do it to get to work, and get all the benefits of cycling at the same time. Win-win.
It's also quite deluded to think the USA has been putting non-negligible effort towards improving cycling for the last 40 years, to the point that you'd notice any difference in car traffic. Hate to bring it to you, but the reason traffic's getting worse is there are more and more cars, but there's only so much space and cars scale horribly. Hence, bikes and public transportation. Those scale exceptionally well and are the perfect solution for 95% of all city trips.
The USA is in 99.9% designed for cars. You're essentially complaining that the most dominant mode of transport is getting mildly deprioritized and is on the path to being only 99% dominant. Cry me a river.
Oh, and the reason you drive a car and not say, use public transport, is that for the last 50+ years the USA has invested into car infrastructure instead of public transport. So the car is not a mode of transport that you have chosen, that you prefer, that you like, it's one that was forced upon you. That you can't see it is somewhat hilarious, but really — just sad.
Just ask yourself: Do you have any other real choice than to own a car and drive everywhere?
Why does it cost so much?
all the typical reasons, largesse, govt contractors, consultants, insurance , regulations, inflation etc etc.
Unions too
We just need one more bike lane bro, then people will start using them for sure.
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.
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.
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.
In one word:
Neoliberalism.
(and too much cars, of course)
[dead]
this is coming from someone who lives in san francisco like you and has a 2 kid, 4 adult family with no car. it's been like 80 years of USA = cars. people seem to really like SFH + cars, they vote for it, they pay for it, and seem to accept even longer commutes than ever. consider why. it's not so simple.
> Strong Towns thesis is correct... slow moving crisis... The idea that LA literally can't afford to bring it's sidewalks up to ADA code is insane
see, this tells me you're not getting it at all. it is an insult to process, yes. But there's no crisis. Strong Towns is kind of obviously wrong.
The entire point by Strong Towns is that people don't pay for it.
i like their positions. but. i don't know what the point of strong towns is. people feel very strongly (haha) about it.
i can advocate for all sorts of stuff that is unpopular. it's meaningless. this is the hard thing about advocacy! strong towns spends a lot of words on stuff, but none of it on why someone who is happy with SFH cars lifestyle do, whatever it is they are asking that person to do.
> The entire point by Strong Towns is that people don't pay for it.
okay, people aren't paying for the ADA stuff. that's bad. but it's not a crisis. SFH cars people are living in that status quo every day. and it's not because they don't care and or because they are not disabled. i don't know how much the ramp codes really matter, i am not an expert, i understand that some experts in some narrow sense say they matter, but the real problem is a lack of leadership on holistic, bigger-picture issues like how to balance the costs and benefits of these sorts of requirements. we arrive at that cost-benefit organically right now, over and over again, in the absence of leadership, and most people seem pretty happy with it, which is a huge refutation of what strong towns is saying. do you get it?
strong towns says, "paying for this shit that doesn't matter does matter", which is wrong!
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPm4de6-eTg
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 to the fourth power. [0]
That means a 6,000lb escalade creates 3x the road wear than a 4,500 wagoneer from 1990.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
The other key takeaway from the video is that carmakers are highly incentivized to sell SUVs because they're still classified as "non-passenger work vehicles", which have looser emission requirements making them cheaper to produce.
The bug in the law really seems to be that cars that really aren't intended as work vehicles are being treated like them.
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.
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.
No way does the Escalade exert less ground pressure!
Firstly, a Wagoneer is never on pizza cutters. You can't put a 4500lb car on pizza cutters even in 1990! It came with 235/75R15 tires. They are big sidewall donuts, but no pizza cutters.
The Escalade runs 285/40R24 tires, that's wide and low-profile.
Widening a tire increases ground pressure, because low-profile tires have massive amount of reinforcement to prevent that wheel from cracking. This stiffness adds to the pressure the road feels.
Tire contact patch is a function of weight and tire pressure. A 205mm width tire has the same contact patch as a 285mm tire, given same weight and pressure. The only thing that changes is the shape of the contact patch, which becomes wide and short instead of narrow and long.
The 6000lb Escalade runs its 285/40R24's on 35 psi, the Wagoneer runs its 235's at 30 psi.
So assuming even weight distribution, the contact patch per tire is 6000lbs/4/35psi=42.8in^2 inches for the Escalade, and 4500lbs/4/30psi=37.5in^2. So the contact patch is only 14% larger on the Escalade, yet it carries 33% more weight!
If you look at the road wear formula, it's entirely a function of weight. So the width of the tires only impacts surface-level abrasion. And with the power law, that's still 3.16x of Wagoneer's wear (or 216% increase).
So the wider tires do virtually nothing to protect the road from the extra 1500 lbs weight.
In fact, the dynamic load when hitting potholes is greatly exacerbated by the 285/40R24 low profile tires, because instead of of absorbing the bumps within the tire, the stiff sidewall low-profile tires absorb way less.
The spring rate of the Wagoneer tires is ~1200-1500 lbs/in, the spring rate of the Escalade tires is ~2500-3500 lbs/in, so that's a 2x stiffer tire! As a result, it transmits twice as much force when hitting the same bump.
So as a result, an Escalade accelerates road cracking considerably worse than the Wagoneer, not even in the same league.
Yes, the heavy trucks wear the road outsizely, incomparably to the SUVs we are discussing. However, we have roads that do not allow trucks (parkways) or see little heavy truck traffic.
The tire spring rate is not what is "felt" by the road every bump, there is forward motion and coilover suspensions in modern cars running low profile tires versus solid axles and leafs on the Wagoneer, but yes nearly every modern vehicle ships on low profile tires unfortunately.
We are talking a few hundred pounds of weight difference per tire, it simply doesn't matter in the real world. I maintain private roads and even if your parkway is placarded everything is subjected to vocational vehicles and HDTs whether signed or not, because work needs to be done and local deliveries are exempt from transit restrictions.
The road wear model is obviously simplified versus the real world, the power law accurately enough extrapolates to HDT axle loads. You can drive a vehicle above snow, or move million pound super loads without causing excessive wear by thinking in additional dimension.
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.
We can't do without garbage trucks though
- have less garbage
- collect garbage more frequently in smaller trucks
taiwan has very cute small garbage trucks and they have a ice-cream-truck like song signalling for people to bring whatever trashbags they have out to the truck, so you don't even have piles of garbage outside for days waiting for the weekly truck. quite nice.
Having less garbage is a whole other issue. Small utility vehicles makes a lot of sense but doesn't seem to be the way it's done in NA. Maybe it’s a labour cost thing. But even the long haul trucks are huge here compared to the rest of the world. They haul the same amount but the cab and engine are enormous. Maybe because the roads are wider they can just make everything bigger.
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.
I've heard that cars have negligible impact on roads. 99% damage comes from heavy haul trucks, especially those who violate weight restrictions.
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.
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.
Thank you. What about concrete pavements? I assume they can last longer, but I often see badly cracked concrete. Regular (expansion?) cracks also don't increase riding comfort.
Welcome! Concrete pavements should (but often don’t) last much longer. They are much thicker than asphalt pavements though. The asphalt section of flexible pavement on the street by your house might only be two or 3 inches thick. Plain concrete would be no less than 6. Cracking is inevitable because concrete is brittle andhas a surprising amount of thermal expansion. The longevity of the concrete can be improved with steel reinforcement, and that’s typical for interstate pavement design. One typical pattern in Texas is to have cement stabilized soil base and an asphalt bond breaker between it and the continuously reinforced concrete pavement you see on the surface.
Well there aren’t semis driving down your neighborhood cul de sac (at least I hope not). Heavy trucks cause more damage to interstates and warehouse districts, yes, but that is what those roads are designed for. Most city roads meanwhile were never built to accommodate 9000 lb hummer tanks.
Most road damage here appears after events of the form "it rained and then the temperature crossed freezing twice a day for a week".
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.
From what I can find, the standard weight limit for a truck in 20 tons per axle (less when multiple axles are close together).
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%
https://www.autoinsurance.com/guide/average-car-weight/
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.
Roads don’t get worn all at once.
Right. They do it at a rate approximately proportional to the fourth power of the per-axle weight of the vehicles driving by. So really only the heaviest vehicles matter much at all.
They all matter, above the weight of a Smart car.
Even if it were caused by passenger cars, the skyrocketing brightness of lights at sedan height probably push more people to buy large cars than this. In a just world, cars with ridiculously bright lights would be crushed in a monster car rally. Alas the cops don't even pull them over.
This is the sole reason I've always hated Teslas. Didn't care that they're EV and new and have stereotypes about the drivers, just that the lights are way brighter. Or sometimes pointed further up out of the factory for some reason.
The cops are some of the worst offenders. Drive past an accident and the blue lights are so bright you'll have after images for hours
No one is "forcing" anyone to buy a "super heavy SUV. Make a better argument.
Last time I bought a car, I was replacing my 2010 CRV. If I wanted to purchase a subcompact SUV or hatchback sedan that was smaller and more fuel efficient I would have needed to wait at least six months.
Economic realities do force decision making.
Was this that one year when the whole auto market was completely screwed up? This is normally not an issue. Also why do you need a hatchback instead of just a regular car?
They’re the only cars with cargo space, vs shiny dick with chairs in it, if you’ll excuse the reference.
Because I wanted one? Purchasing decisions are multi axis
That's not the full story. I presume it was some Toyota, which are in high demand. Plenty of small size alternatives are available from other brands with 0 wait time.
So buy an SUV, or accept a huge hit in reliability driving a different brand?
Now who’s leaving out part of the story?! :]
This was spread across multiple makes and models. The car I wound up with is larger than I would like, but you're right, it was in stock. Because the dealers stock what people want and lead times (at the time) were atrocious.
I could walk in to any number of dealers and purchase what you are describing tonight. I have an excellent electric SUV that I walked into a dealer an purchased.
Good for you!
I hate this trend on Hacker News where you share an anecdote and get replies calling you a liar. Cool?
The one thing I noticed in NA is that it takes ages to rebuild a road. I have close to zero experience in road construction, but a bit weird to see how they can repave a km stretch of a road here in Tokyo within a week or two, but it took months in other cities i've lived in.
Maybe they do a lot of extra work over night over here in Tokyo, and it just goes faster? Or it's a very systematic thing and part of the maintenance schedules, so it doesn't really go that bad?
Hmmm probably the only thing I’ve consistently noticed around the US is they can pave highways and roads very quickly. That’s the American skill: tons of sprawl and highways. You may have been confusing road repaving with gas or water pipe replacement
Are you really forced to buy super heavy suv? Why can't you buy a Corolla? Or even a Mini Cooper?
I think another factor of road wear is better handling cars. People are able to drive more aggressively and accelerate more efficiently then ever before. Taking tight turns at high speeds or accelerating from dead stop does wear out roads more due to higher traction from driving behavior and characteristics…
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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure)
Road wear is a power law, and heavy trucks cause the wear https://blog.ucs.org/dave-cooke/trucks-cause-the-lions-share...
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.
(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 a large amount of money is not widely known)
> Maybe roads would last longer if we weren't all being forced to buy super heavy SUVs
Maybe not.
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 safety. Who's gonna survive in an incident of road rage gone bad, a Ford Explorer or a Fiat 500?
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?
>it takes less power to move a lighter and smaller car
A smaller car has less space for battery than an SUV. Because batteries are extremely heavy, that smaller car needs to be overbuilt compared to its gasoline counterpart, which further reduces room for battery. Then, because safety standards are harder to meet with small cars, the smaller car needs to be overbuilt even more.
This means that you get cars that only have half the range a gasoline-powered car does, and the gas powered car recharges an order of magnitude faster than the EV does. Oh yeah, and the people who buy smaller cars like this tend to live in places where there's no charging other than going to a gas station anyway.
It wouldn't sell on the US market because better alternatives exist. It could sell on the Chinese market because there are no better alternatives.
It takes less power to accelerate a lighter car, but about the same to keep it moving. And some of the energy is recouped during gen-braking.
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.
People in cities generally want deliveries of goods, which requires heavy trucks.
Heavy trucks aren't required for the vast majority of residential deliveries.
If you order anything in Bangkok, even say a refrigerator or a king size mattress, it will almost always be delivered by a modestly sized pickup truck (with a high roof covering the bed).
A lot of EVs are heavier than SUVs... but don't let facts get in the way of your crusade.
Instead of assuming bad faith and resorting to insults, simply make the point. EVs can cause road damage too, yes.
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.
EVs tend to be about 10% heavier, like for like.
Most EVs are SUVs
How are we being forced to buy SUVs? There are plenty of regular cars for sale.
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.
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?
Surely, if buyers didn't want these vehicles, makers couldn't sell them at high prices, right?
That's where advertising comes in..
The data is all around you. Look around. The revealed preference is big dumb expensive utes.
> This is not supported by good data
It's supported by sales data.
"Forced"???
People buy SUV's because they want to avoid being injured in crashes (at the detriment of the other driver)
This is definitely true. I do not currently know a single woman who DOESN'T drive an SUV and the answer I've heard more than once is just that they feel safer. The problem is, they're not wrong. But it's a spiraling problem - more big cars make the roads less safe which prompts more people to buy big cars...
In Canada people also buy SUVs and trucks because they handle the bad winter weathers better.
Yet per capita, US vehicle occupants are more likely to be injured in general while on the road than Europeans. Perhaps the driving standards are just far too different.
Because US roads traffic control systems suck ALSO licenses are much easier to get, there is more of a tacit tolerance of drunk driving, and the lower rate of public transport makes more people forced to drive despite preferring not to, leading to less of a selective effect of drivers.
We've consequentially paved over the issues (no pun intended) via creating a socioeconomic hierarchy of insulation from traffic injuries. Giant SUV's have become the mainstay of the upwardly mobile 30s suburbanite, who is immunized from the road hazards, collisions and dangers that would cripple sedans.
Per capita isn’t meaningful, try per mile.
In a discussion about city design, per capita matters.
That being said, EU is generally safer per km too.
Two people crashing in big SUVs/trucks aren't really safer than two people crashing in smaller cars. As for the difference, my guess is the driving standards.
Is that just because Americans spend a lot more time in their cars than Europeans do?
No, per km Europeans are safer. Road design is safer, cars are safer.
I'm not sure it is so simple. Some states have death rates in line with western/northern Europe (eg massachusetts has 4 deaths per billion km, similar to Germany), but road design and cars driven in massachusetts are highly similar to states with a larger death rate(south carolina, looking at you).
They also travel twice as much.
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.
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.
Its becoming a place to actively leave, if you haven't already.
These are all factual things that Indiana state government has actually done over the past 10-15 years.
Not to mention the crippling higher education reforms and the state seizing control over tenure review.
… and don’t forget about the new law they’re rolling out to lure the Bears from Chicago. Read the actual drafts so far… Absolutely nothing about the Bears being required to pay a dime for the stadium, but a whole bunch of new taxes for which the revenue is “redirected” into making the Bears’ lease payments. LOL, it’s such a huge money giveaway the Bears would be crazy not to take it.
You should see my blue state! Endless tax increases, public unions striking for more pay to do less work, corruption endemic!
This means that the divisions of administration are too small. Perhaps it should just a be county level or even state level concern
Indianapolis and Marion County are basically the same thing, interestingly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unigov
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.
Honestly the roads in Carmel and Fishers are not significantly better. They do have a shit-ton of roundabouts though. More roundabouts than a Yes song.
The amount we pay just to settle the liability claims for police misconduct is almost as much as our entire street services budget.
LA government is an enormous corrupt police department with a few measly services slowly decaying as their funding gets cut.
References?
Read Copaganda. The footnotes with references is very long and detailed for those inclined to read the sources, it reminds me of the MLA stuff we had to write in high school. There are many references to LAPD and LA county sheriffs with overlapping jurisdiction.
US cities over the past decade seem to be in a competition to see who can be the least competently run.
I would like to see the relation between competence and strength of political alignment (as in, deviation from 50/50 red/blue vote for local government).
I naively expect that less strongly aligned cities are run more competently, because the concept of "consequences" can exist. Where I am, there's a very strong political alignment, so no consequences at all. The same group of people will be voted for, no matter what they do.
> The same group of people will be voted for, no matter what they do.
This is more true than people realize. Basically, they choose each other in rotation who will be elected. Who will be the city manager and who will be the Mayor. They are all cronies and know how the system works.
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.
Big city government is almost entirely Democrat run. The primaries are everything. The voters in primaries are city union workers. The way to win in city primaries is to promise more money for less effort to them. That is the central issue of big city American politics - it’s just poorly run, very expensive, and operated to extract money from taxpayers to hand over to the unions
Basically, every city hall is like the show Parks and Recreation from a competency situation. Then it’s about rubbing each other’s back and staying in power.
You have to jump through hurdles to get hired into a real position, or know someone that can sidestep those hurdles to get you hired, then once you’re in, it’s about staying there. This combination means you never do anything really useful, at least not quickly. The citizens take a backseat while the clowns in power perform in the circus.
> Basically, every city hall is like the show Parks and Recreation from a competency situation. Then it’s about rubbing each other’s back and staying in power.
Fun side note: the outdoor establishing shots for Pawnee city hall used Pasadena’s City Hall which is right next to LA. It always threw me off when watching Parks and Rec, especially since they never had a shot of it snowing.
Isn't this just the end result of larger and larger portions of budgets going to interest payments?
Governments at all levels have accreted increasingly ravenous parasites who are on the verge of killing any effective functions of the host.
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.
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.
One wonders if you could prefabricate kerb ramps and drop them in, rather than (I assume) casting them in place.
Maybe they'd settle badly if vehicles drive over them, kick up in the opposite corners and become a trip hazard.
The UK mostly skirts this by using tarmac and paving slabs instead of concrete.
I don't think there's a way to do this without casting something to connect the pre-fab to the surrounding concrete sidewalk. Like how do you precisely cut out the existing curb so the prefab just 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.
Or make the asphalt "ride up" onto the sidewalk itself, so the complicated part is made of asphalt.
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.
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.
I wonder if you could just ignore ignore settlement by provisioning for hydraulic slab jacking instead?
Include a built channel for injecting hydraulic grout a few months later once the settlements happened to correct it out.
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 https://www.curbmachines.com
Very few sites are going to be flat or square. I suspect prefabbed parts mostly wouldn't fit without custom adapters around the edges.
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
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
"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.
According to the cdc 1 million.people are blind and 7 million people have serious vision impairment.
It would be cheaper to pay 60k a year per blind person to hire them a full time guid for waling outside.
Ok, but curb cuts also positively impact wheelchair users, people with canes or walkers, people with injuries that require crutches or a knee scooter, parents with strollers, people with rolling bags, cyclists, delivery workers and more. They are widely understood to benefit many many people beyond just people with disabilities (so much so that their benefit has given a name to the "curb cut effect").
Also, $60k/year is a) not nearly enough to pay a contractor full time living wage and b) not enough to cover the greater than full time necessary to assist someone. Blind people need to navigate the world at all hours on all days...
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.
Because after the home is built, city starts getting tax revenue from its occupants
It can easily afford it.
What the city can't seem to do is rid itself of corrupt employees and corrupt practices.
These people talk a big game, but when it comes to basic office management, they're less than worthless.
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.
It is a nice theory but then they bring out the same rhetoric when seeking re-election. So yeah, corruption may be abound.
Controversial opinion: City roads shouldn't be for fast driving, they should be cobblestone. Safer for predestrians, easier to maintain, not rough on cars. It encourages pedestrian friendly city planning.
You can somewhat walk in LA but it's damn shame how unfriendly it can be for pedestrians at times. I say shame because of the pristine weather, and people roll around sealed in aluminum boxes instead. trams and bicycles are ideal for it instead of cars. The bus system is ok by US standards too.
Cut the LAPD and the LA sheriff dept's budget, demilitarize them and fund infrastructure with it instead.
https://openbudget.lacity.org/#!/year/2025/operating/0/depar...
Here is their budget chart, there are about 15 countries in the world with lesser budget and GDP. The LASD has a budget of about $4B, more than the budget of 30 countries. Even that comparison aside, look at how they keep increasing their budget. In the LAPD chart above, it is "field forces" (+$200M over 10 years) that keep increasing their budgets, so it isn't "just inflation", and the crime rates don't justify it either. But that said, I get it, LA has bigger problems.
this is one of the core conceits behind why Strong Towns / Not Just Bikes / urbanism discourse in general makes the disctinction between a "street", which is meant for people to walk along, go to stores/restaurants/etc, and "roads", which are meant to efficiently move traffic from one part of the city to another.
Combining them degrades the ability to address either point: efficiently moving traffic is inherently in conflict with being able to access businesses or having pedestrians nearby.
public transport is more efficient at transporting people than cars, public transport makes roads more walkable. If you have subways, trams and buses, you can have narrower and slower roads friendly to pedestrians.
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.
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.
People just need to accept paying more taxes in order for their society to flourish.
If you look at the budgets, there's also a severe spending and mismanagement problem.
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 https://youtu.be/JTEJH-tKv9Q?t=910
They retrofit Yorktown in 3 days instead of 3 months. The Japanese thought Yorktown was a different aircraft carrier-they could not imagine such a fast retrofit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CV-5)#Battle_of_...
Your own citation says that the original estimate was at least 2 weeks, and further looks found that important components were undamaged, and most of the damage was easily patchable, like the flight deck and hull. Her damaged boilers were not fully repaired and she was not able to make full speed.
This isn't that abnormal for 20th century warships. They were designed to be mostly flooded and still floating, had significant redundancy, and especially in the USA, massive efforts and training and resources were spent on damage control and management.
The USS New Orleans Cruiser in WW2 had 150ft of it's front entirely blown off by an ammo detonation. One quarter of the ship just gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_New_Orleans_(CA-32)#Battle... (look at those pictures!)
The spent about 11 days on a crippled boat, patching things up and putting out fires, and then she sailed backwards to a friendly port, and was eventually fully refurbished and refit.
This wasn't some era of magical American super productivity. It's what these ships were designed to do in some way. They were built to be hit by rather large weapons after all, and attempt to survive. Look at what efforts it took to finally sink the Bismarck and the Japanese super battleships.
It was 2 days, and they thought it was a different ship because they thought the Yorktown was sunk in the previous battle, not because they didn't think it could be repaired that fast (although that's probably also true).
People do impressive things when the enemy is literally bearing down on them.
Its easy to build when your goal is just to build the thing. But theres so much code and regulation crap (like ADA). I know someone building a small residential home, they have literally 1000s of pages of documents to be submitted for every tiny thing you can imagine. Regulations have completely spiraled out of control in this country. Nobody is keeping any of them in check.
> 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.”
Why don't they asphalt curb to curb for a mile and then come back and do the ramps one at a time?
> Why don't they asphalt curb to curb for a mile and then come back and do the ramps one at a time?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 will 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.
LA uses asphalt overlays on top of concrete. These have adhesion problems compared to monolithic asphalt over gravel.
Interesting! Is it possible to make the ramps offsite and then fit into place?
EDIT: I'm assuming the difficulty here is the pedestrian ramps at intersections. NOT the curb that spans the entirety of a road section.
> EDIT: I'm assuming the difficulty here is the pedestrian ramps at intersections. NOT the curb that spans the entirety of a road section.
The curb elements are made offsite. All you do onsite is to cut the stones to length if need be.
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.
You can see a few pictures and diagrams on how we do it in Germany here [1].
[1] https://www.beton-info.de/randsteine-setzen/
Ah, that's not how they do it in Chicago.
In Chicago, they concrete form the curb on site.
https://blackhawkpaving.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Concr...
Oh good god. I can see that cracking all the way to Germany. Concrete surfaces need stress relief.
They put expansion gaps at regular intervals.
I don't know what you mean, but I belive we're talking about "wheelchair ramps" at street corners
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"
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.
Around here real estate listings are starting to not do interior pictures because the towns are known to predate on them for "hey you didn't get a permit for that bathroom reno" type crap.
Y'all need permits for non-structural (i.e. layout/framing stays the same) bathroom renovations? Holy shit.
It's a make work scheme. They don't give a crap. They'll rubber stamp just about anything. It's like $50. They just want to force you to use a licensed trade if applicable.
The trades themselves don't pull permits because it's not about the permissionn, it's about using them. The towns don't care unless you've cut them out so much that they feel slighted in which case they'll send you angry letters about violations, demand a million bucks and you'll hire a $10k lawyer (another licensed trade, lol) who'll get you off for $1k.
Needless to say compliance is pretty low outside of the rich neighborhoods because normal people can't afford to tack $4k of engineering onto a "repave my shitty 2-car driveway" project or a $3k panel upgrade onto a "renovate my 50yo bathroom and add a couple outlets".
It's all shit and should be replaced with a much lower touch system that's cheap enough people can afford to comply with it. But there's so many parties in on the racket that it'll come crashing down before that happens.
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.
I read this section and, along with the surrounding context, it seems like the issue is less having-money-for-materials and more having-money-to-hire-enough-skilled-workers-to-work-on-multiple-ramps-in-parallel. Different budgets, perhaps?
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...
...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.
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".
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.
All of this seems like an entirely predictable outcome when a law is passed that requires more work but doesn't pay for it. And in this case you can't blame a short-sighted legislature or a corrupt process -- it was a citizens' initiative. That promised voters they could have something for free, which isn't free. See this key quote:
> 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.”
So what exactly did people expect?
I'm all for accessibility, but demanding it without paying for it is not the way.
[1] https://yesonhla.com/
This makes no sense. What you call "curb ramps" is a part of standard road infrastructure in Germany. They're basically everywhere in Germany. If the Los Angeles government can't figure out how to implement a practice that has been legislated for 36 years, then they deserve a kick in the balls that forces them to wake up.
The fact that 36 years of neglect coincide in 2026 isn't the result of a law that happened to pass 2025. That law was passed because of the 36 years of neglect. The asphalt patching strategy is just one more last ditch attempt at ignoring the 36 year old ADA law.
I could just as easily say that your comment makes no sense.
Curb ramps are all over the place in the US too. And I don't know what on earth Germany has to do with anything.
But the point is, if you force them to be constructed, then you need to pay for them. Maybe it's a "kick in the balls" as you put it, but without funding what exactly do you expect the city to do here? It can't conjure extra money out of thin air. LA isn't ideologically opposed to the ADA or anything. But it needs a whole bunch of money to be able to follow it. Money which hasn't been raised for it.
Regardless of the past history, passing a law forcing the city to do something without giving it the necessary money to do so is not a strategy that works.
I've been reading comments feeling like I'm going bonkers. We don't have 'curb ramps' here in Australia (like external ramps from the curb to the road? I can't find pictures of them), but the curbs have downward slopes at intersections to meet the road at road level, like a driveway. And that's pretty standard everywhere.
This is very well thought out comment and that’s probably why there’s poor engagement with it. This is exactly the problem. The city has an unfunded mandate. The street department is triaging. The problem is best they can. I wouldn’t be shocked if city council members were directing this workaround so their voters would actually see some work getting done in their neighborhood.
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
hard to believe it's a problem for LA in 2026... 3 months to build 12 ramps?
I was going to say, how on earth does it take 3 months to build 12 ramps. Seems like there’s a much deeper dysfunction. Ramps should genuinely be able to be stamped out at scale. This is the type of thing China would do in a few hours
Perhaps it has to do with public-private partnership shenanigans or subcontractor incompetence?
> 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.
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.
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.
https://www.somerset.gov.uk/roads-travel-and-parking/surface...
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...
So yeah, it's either potholes or road closure for a year++.
The point is for the road to be better to use.
If it's cheap and fast, then there's no reason to wait to do it "properly" later. Do the quick fix first.
Nope, thats the cheap way to save money in the short term. But it makes the roads much worse quality for a lot longer. The surface dressing rips and pulls up very quickly, and so the road is rough and full of holes for a longer period.
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.
3 things: Prop 13, Suburban Sprawl, and Bigger/Heavier Vehicles
We need to tax personal vehicals by the ton. And I mean like, punitively. Pickup trucks should cost $500K if they're not registered to licensed business.
Proportionally to road wear
There was a great article a few years back that said the following:
- rank cities by size
- go down around the 150th on the list
- that's cities like Knoxville, TN
- in the 1950s/1960s they received tons of federal funding to build infrastructure
- now that infra is falling apart but the cities themselves don't have the money to fix it and the government is going to bail them out
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.
fwiw, works fine in my Firefox in reader mode
It works correctly in Safari's reader mode
> Hadar noted the shift appeared to primarily be to avoid triggering adding missing curb ramps (for wheelchair access),
Products from the disability industry are incredibly expensive. In London someone worked out it would have been cheaper to hire a full time human attendant for every person in a wheelchair than to pay for the city’s existing scant coverage ramps. Of you’re in tech , think of the overpriced web browsers supposedly aimed at disabled people from years ago and their “first boil the ocean” approach for web accessibility.
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.
Every city seems to have budget issues. Municipal politics is such a mess, it never attracts any talent.
Because they're waiting for Arnie to do it for them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPqUtKQaJFk
"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 something 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: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cddn0n3p2ppo
It's very strange to look at how the world's richest country just can't do basics. I live in a country with way, way, way, way, way less money (any way you want to measure it from natural resources to gdp percent capital to average income etc) and things are far from perfect here but we get the basics right.
You guys have so. Much. Money. How can you not pave a road properly?
The last time this topic was posted, it was pointed out that LA specifically says it'll cost $50k+ to do one ADA complaint corner of a sidewalk. $50k - that's during the repaving... Not come back and do it. Explain it however you want but a cutout on a corner of a sidewalk doesn't cost $50k unless you got something fishy going on...
There's very blatant corruption within LA's government and no accountability. Your average American (which LA is full of) is too stupid to do anything about these issues.
Shifty bureaucrats moving goalposts: not breaking out lane miles into patched fractional mile and full-width lane miles.
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.
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.
Now that the California refineries are shutting down, where does LA get asphalt to do the paving? Has the price gone up due to having to import it from the Gulf Coast?
The city of LA runs its own asphalt plants, and there's a bunch of other companies selling it in LA County. A lot of the raw material is recycled from roads that are being torn up, AsphaltPro had an interesting article about it recently
Sorry, how on earth does it take 3 months to make curb cuts
[flagged]
[flagged]
We’re too busy paying billions of dollars to LAPD to do jack shit but cost the city tens of millions in liability payouts.
Downvoted for the truth but it’s ok, I actually live in LA unlike most of the LLMs here.
Well you are the only person in this entire thread that even mentioned anything that would even be remotely threatening to people in power: Reducing funding to police who's only role it is to hold together society breaking apart on the seams by a structure that everybody internalized is as naturally true as gravity.
The part about bike lanes is annoying. Whenever some city or district goes all in on bike lanes, the end result is almost nobody using those, and more congestion. It makes sense in like Manhattan.
IMO it’s like that Reddit post from a while back with the subway to nowhere in china. You need the infrastructure to encourage usage and buildout. It’s a chicken and egg problem. I personally don’t bike at my uni bc the state DOT decided it’s fine to have a bike lane between a right turn lane/bus lane and 3/4 lanes of traffic. On a state highway (truck route). Safe to say I don’t feel safe biking there, despite it being at the heart of the university. Plenty of people bike on the other side, where there’s a protected separated bike lane going the other direction.
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.
My experience is that once you get north of the city limits of San Diego, into either neighboring cities or unincorporated areas, the roads get a lot better.
I'm in north county, and it's very OK! we've had a good resurfacing pushing on quite a few of the roads around me. But they're ripping a lot of it up to lay (much needed) fiber.
Good infrastructure costs money. Citizens don't want to pay for it. The city workers have to figure out how to solve problems.
Another fun one is talking about how much was accomplished decades ago when the streets were...decades newer.
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.
> ...adding up to 10.75% total.
That's not too 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, lot less for that money than you do in California.
[0] <https://www.revenue.alabama.gov/sales-use/tax-rates/?_ador-s...>
California doesn't have the highest sales tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat...
You seem to be confused. Your own link shows that California state sales tax is the highest in the country. Look at the blue bars.
Whoops. If we're just comparing state sales tax, CA does seem to be the highest. However it's not dramatically higher than many other states, and when you throw in local taxes the combined rate seems to be just in the top ten or so.
None of the top ten states of the richest country in the world should have bad roads.
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.
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.
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.
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 and half-assed repairs.
The budget is public, it's all going to police and police liability payouts
> Citizens don't want to pay for it.
Yes. We do. We're literally screaming for it.
Sorry, gotta go to companies pocketing the money while pretending they are building homeless shelters.
There’s a lot of money to be had in not building things.