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.
If the Strong Towns thesis is correct, we've basically got ourselves a slow moving crisis, where city budgets start very slowly become unsustainable, and by the time anyone notices, it's mostly too late to do anything about it.
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 inherently broken.
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.
jlhawn 6 minutes ago [-]
3 things: Prop 13, Suburban Sprawl, and Bigger/Heavier Vehicles
mobilene 2 hours ago [-]
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.
boredatoms 10 minutes ago [-]
This means that the divisions of administration are too small. Perhaps it should just a be county level or even state level concern
Maybe roads would last longer if we weren't all being forced to buy super heavy SUVs just so automakers can skirt emissions and fuel economy requirements.
I'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.
dralley 5 minutes ago [-]
The damage scales with weight. Cars cause less damage because they are lighter. Heavier cars still cause greater impact.
tjwebbnorfolk 14 minutes ago [-]
A lot of EVs are heavier than SUVs... but don't let facts get in the way of your crusade.
bigbadfeline 16 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
deepsun 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
thfuran 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t think SUV vs car makes a meaningful difference when e.g. delivery vans and garbage trucks exist.
atleastoptimal 57 minutes ago [-]
People buy SUV's because they want to avoid being injured in crashes (at the detriment of the other driver)
Freedom2 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
csto12 2 hours ago [-]
The average American wants a big SUV/Truck
kev009 2 hours ago [-]
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)
IAmBroom 51 minutes ago [-]
"Forced"???
atleastoptimal 3 hours ago [-]
US cities over the past decade seem to be in a competition to see who can be the least competently run.
beezlebroxxxxxx 2 hours ago [-]
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.
t1234s 19 minutes ago [-]
I think they built the majority of the Eisenhower Interstate System in 15 years. Now we cant figure out how to pave roads.
smetj 3 minutes ago [-]
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
tjwebbnorfolk 3 hours ago [-]
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.
streptomycin 3 hours ago [-]
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.
georgefrowny 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
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.
georgefrowny 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
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
XorNot 2 hours ago [-]
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.
AlexandrB 2 hours ago [-]
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.
lstodd 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
nonameiguess 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cucumber3732842 1 hours ago [-]
>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.
downrightmike 1 hours ago [-]
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.
antonkochubey 6 minutes ago [-]
Because after the home is built, city starts getting tax revenue from its occupants
themafia 2 hours ago [-]
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.
HerbManic 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mjamesaustin 2 hours ago [-]
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.
egberts1 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
djoldman 3 hours ago [-]
> 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?
creaturemachine 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mschuster91 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
linkjuice4all 3 hours ago [-]
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...
mdorazio 3 hours ago [-]
Worth noting that LA does not have freeze cycles. I wonder what the pothole formation likelihood is as a result.
kevin_thibedeau 1 hours ago [-]
LA uses asphalt overlays on top of concrete. These have adhesion problems compared to monolithic asphalt over gravel.
djoldman 2 hours ago [-]
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.
fsckboy 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cucumber3732842 1 hours ago [-]
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.
alt227 3 hours ago [-]
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++.
carlosjobim 2 hours ago [-]
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.
magic_hamster 3 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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.
casey2 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kylehotchkiss 2 hours ago [-]
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.
everybodyknows 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kylehotchkiss 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
bahmboo 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bradchris 4 minutes ago [-]
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, now that the 2-year grace period is up. Tax us, just do it!
herdcall 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
jerlam 2 hours ago [-]
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.
simoncion 2 hours ago [-]
> ...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.
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.
hypeatei 3 hours ago [-]
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.
themafia 2 hours ago [-]
> Citizens don't want to pay for it.
Yes. We do. We're literally screaming for it.
johnnyanmac 2 hours ago [-]
Sorry, gotta go to companies pocketing the money while pretending they are building homeless shelters.
Rendered at 21:46:16 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Towns
If the Strong Towns thesis is correct, we've basically got ourselves a slow moving crisis, where city budgets start very slowly become unsustainable, and by the time anyone notices, it's mostly too late to do anything about it.
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 inherently broken.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPm4de6-eTg
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
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.
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.
Road wear is a power law, and heavy trucks cause the wear https://blog.ucs.org/dave-cooke/trucks-cause-the-lions-share...
(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)
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.
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.
Likely this won't be terribly faster, and I did see the company near us using a machine that was building curb cuts directly.
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.
Include a built channel for injecting hydraulic grout a few months later once the settlements happened to correct it out.
"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.
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.
It is a nice theory but then they bring out the same rhetoric when seeking re-election. So yeah, corruption may be abound.
LA government is an enormous corrupt police department with a few measly services slowly decaying as their funding gets cut.
You will see that patching is more labor intensive per asphalt wear time, thus incurring greater city budget expenditure on average basis.
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.
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...
EDIT: I'm assuming the difficulty here is the pedestrian ramps at intersections. NOT the curb that spans the entirety of a road section.
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.
https://www.somerset.gov.uk/roads-travel-and-parking/surface...
So yeah, it's either potholes or road closure for a year++.
If it's cheap and fast, then there's no reason to wait to do it "properly" later. Do the quick fix first.
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.
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.
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, now that the 2-year grace period is up. Tax us, just do it!
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...>
Yes. We do. We're literally screaming for it.