LA Public Press's article 'Why isn't LA repaving streets?' advocates for free expression and democratic participation through investigative journalism examining municipal governance failures. The site structure actively enables public voice and information access through free content distribution, a tip submission mechanism, and multi-platform social engagement, though on-domain privacy and tracking transparency are limited. Content demonstrates commitment to civic journalism with clear attribution and public accountability framing.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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++.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Article exemplifies investigative journalism examining municipal policy failures affecting public infrastructure. Title and framing encourage reader inquiry into government decision-making. Presents factual analysis of budget constraints and street repair practices.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
Article authored by named journalist (Joe Linton) with full byline.
Content investigates and questions municipal policy ('Why isn't LA repaving streets?').
Site includes 'Send us a Tip' mechanism enabling public information contribution.
Social media links enable content amplification and public discussion.
RSS feed available for broad distribution.
Author credited in metadata (twitter:data1, article:author tags).
Inferences
Investigative framing of municipal failure supports freedom to seek and impart information.
Tip mechanism and attribution structure enable diverse voices to contribute to public discourse.
Multiple distribution pathways support broad dissemination of information.
Article implicily supports assembly and association by reporting on issues affecting community infrastructure and public space quality. Content enables collective awareness of shared problems.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Site includes links to six social media platforms enabling community organization.
Article investigates freedom of movement and public space quality through reporting on street conditions and municipal resource allocation. Implicitly addresses access to public infrastructure.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article examines street conditions affecting public movement and infrastructure accessibility.
Content invitation for reader tips ('Send us a Tip') enables information mobility.
Inferences
Coverage of street maintenance directly impacts freedom of movement and public access.
Tip mechanism invites participation from diverse geographic locations in LA.
Article addresses political participation by examining municipal decision-making and budget allocation—core functions of democratic governance. Reporting enables informed participation in local politics.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article examines municipal budget decisions affecting public welfare.
Content is freely accessible to all LA residents.
Investigative framing encourages civic awareness and participation.
Inferences
Reporting on municipal finance enables informed political participation.
Free access supports equal civic engagement regardless of economic status.
Article frames street maintenance failures as a governance/budgeting problem affecting public welfare and community wellbeing, relevant to human dignity and quality of life.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article discusses municipal budget issues affecting street repair capacity.
Content is freely accessible without subscription requirement.
Publication identifies itself as 'News for LA people, by LA people'.
Inferences
The framing of budget problems as systemic policy issues suggests commitment to explaining governance failures affecting public welfare.
Free access model supports broad civic participation in understanding local governance.
Article supports education by providing civic information enabling informed understanding of municipal governance, budgeting, and policy decisions. Reporting educates public on infrastructure challenges.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article explains municipal budget constraints and street repair practices.
Estimated reading time (9 minutes) provided for reader planning.
Structured content with clear headline and metadata supports learning.
Inferences
Investigative reporting provides civic education on municipal governance.
Free access removes educational barriers based on economic status.
Article addresses public infrastructure quality as an element of standard of living, examining municipal capacity to maintain streets as public health and safety issue.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article examines municipal street maintenance as infrastructure issue affecting public welfare.
Content accessible without cost to all residents.
Inferences
Street maintenance reporting relates to public health and safety standards.
Free access enables broad population awareness of infrastructure deficits.
Article does not address social security or cultural participation directly, but reporting on municipal budget constraints implies reduced public services capacity.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article reports on municipal service degradation due to budget constraints.
Site includes community engagement features (tip line, social integration).
Inferences
Budget crisis reporting may reinforce narrative of social service limitation rather than expansion.
Tracking infrastructure may deter vulnerable users from participation.
Content does not address life, liberty, or personal security; street infrastructure issues relate peripherally to safety but are not framed in these terms.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
Page includes Google Analytics tag (G-SGMRMMSR2N).
Google reCAPTCHA API is loaded (render=6LfW2HAjAAAAAOwHIfwBjzZYsKGwQ0Ji6A5SbgfX).
Site architecture actively promotes free expression: 'Send us a Tip' mechanism, public comment participation encouraged, multiple republishing paths, social media distribution, RSS feed. No editorial censorship visible. Author byline (Joe Linton) credited clearly.
Site facilitates association through social media integration (X, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube), comment systems, and community-facing content. 'By LA people, for LA people' tagline emphasizes collective identity.
Public access model and investigation journalism support democratic participation. No subscription barrier prevents civic access. Site design supports accessibility for diverse participants.
Tracking systems (Google Analytics, Sparkloop, reCAPTCHA) collect user browsing data, location signals, and behavioral patterns without visible privacy safeguards or user control.
Multiple tracking systems (Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Sparkloop, reCAPTCHA) present without visible consent mechanisms or privacy disclosures, potentially compromising user security and autonomy.
Title 'Why isn't LA repaving streets?' uses rhetorical question framing that presumes failure; repeated reference to 'potholes and cracks' and problems 'only expected to worsen' use emotionally valenced language.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 11:31:12 UTC
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