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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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…
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).
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
> 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?
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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].
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 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.
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.
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++.
This is interesting for a completely different reason. It's the first time I see a web page disabling reader mode on my browser. When I enter reader mode, the page seems to recognize this and instantly reload, booting me back to the original page, which by the way seems unaffected by Dark Reader as well.
"large pothole" .. Oh sweet summer child, I can think of at least ten bigger than that in my small British town. It seems they're doing 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?
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How are we being forced to buy SUVs? There are plenty of regular cars for sale.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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…
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).
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?
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.
> 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 accelerate a lighter car, but about the same to keep it moving. And some of the energy is recouped during gen-braking.
>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.
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)
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..
> 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)
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.
They also travel twice as much.
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).
A lot of EVs are heavier than SUVs... but don't let facts get in the way of your crusade.
EVs tend to be about 10% heavier, like for like.
Instead of assuming bad faith and resorting to insults, simply make the point. EVs can cause road damage too, yes.
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.
We do the same here in Indianapolis and my read is that it's about cost containment. Our tax base here really doesn't fully support city services. And then more people move to the high-tax-base suburbs for better services, and the cycle repeats and gets worse.
This means that the divisions of administration are too small. Perhaps it should just a be county level or even state level concern
Indianapolis and Marion County are basically the same thing, interestingly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unigov
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!
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.
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
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.
Very few sites are going to be flat or square. I suspect prefabbed parts mostly wouldn't fit without custom adapters around the edges.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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
> 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?
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
3 things: Prop 13, Suburban Sprawl, and Bigger/Heavier Vehicles
Every city seems to have budget issues. Municipal politics is such a mess, it never attracts any talent.
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.
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.
It works correctly in Safari's reader mode
fwiw, works fine in my Firefox in reader mode
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
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sorry, how on earth does it take 3 months to make curb cuts
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.
Because they elected bass instead of caruso and it's mostly dei voting at this point.
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.
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.
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.
> ...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...>
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.
The budget is public, it's all going to police and police liability payouts
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.
> 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.
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.
Don't vote for far left activists that funnel state funds to DEI departments and their friends NGOs instead of paving roads.
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.