Today in Urban Lunacy
[guest post by JVW]
Just when you thought that urban policy could not get any more convoluted or stupid comes this amazing piece from City Journal regarding a city near and dear to my heart [links are replicated from original]:
Los Angeles’s streets are in notoriously bad shape. Fewer than two-thirds are considered in good repair, according to the city’s Department of Public Works. Broken sidewalks have spawned years of costly litigation, and Los Angeles pays out millions of dollars each year to drivers whose cars get damaged by potholes.
Many cities would see this situation as a mandate for change. And Los Angeles has indeed made a change: last summer, the city quietly stopped repaving its streets. Not slowed. Not fell behind. Stopped completely.
It seems that modern big cities are where efficiency and good governance goes to die. It’s been seven months since the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services has repaved a street. They are still filling potholes, but the egregious number of cracks, seams, splits, and other hazards go un-repaired. “Why?” you might well ask. Because repaving introduces the problem of federal accessibility rules:
The city appears to have invented a new category of street work designed to avoid triggering costly federal accessibility mandates. Instead of repaving streets, StreetsLA now performs what it calls “large asphalt repairs.” As [transportation advocate Oren] Hadar explains, this work addresses localized damage—areas larger than a pothole but smaller than full resurfacing. In effect, the city repaves only part of a street rather than its full width.
But, as Hadar notes, “the thing about large asphalt repair is that it’s . . . not a real thing. It appears to be a term made up by the city sometime in the last year.”
The reason for the invention lies in federal disability law. Under regulations implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act, when a city alters a street, it must also bring adjacent pedestrian infrastructure into compliance—meaning the installation of ADA-compliant curb ramps at every affected intersection.
Repaving is considered an alteration that triggers these requirements. Maintenance activities, such as filling potholes or making minor repairs, are not. The city claims that large asphalt repairs are “pavement maintenance activity” and therefore do not require ADA upgrades.
There you have it. Not only is the road to hell paved with good intentions, but so too are apparently the streets of Los Angeles, as mandated by the federal government. Ironically, these mandates started being enforced right as the Biden Administration was giving way to the second Trump Administration, but I would bet this initiative was implemented by the permanent bureaucracy and little or none of this had to do with who was in the Oval Office.
So, you might be tempted to say, isn’t the problem here really federal bureaucrats who implement these sorts of requirements without really thinking through the ramifications? Well of course it is. But which party runs the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County? Isn’t it the very same party which creates, nurtures, and protects these bureaucrats who then turn around and make living in these cities more and more difficult and cumbersome? Mayor Karen Bass and the Los Angeles City Council could certainly apply for some kind of waiver or some other abeyance so that a badly-needed repaving job doesn’t require the reconfiguration of an entire city block, but of course they certainly don’t want the sort of blowback from disability advocates that they would likely receive. So yet another urban responsibility gets half-assed, and nothing is ever improved.
Read the original piece for more exasperating news about the mismanagement at 200 N. Spring Street. In 2016 the city settled a class-action lawsuit by agreeing to spend $1.4 billion over 30 years to make city streets more accessible to people with disabilities, but a 2021 audit found that the city had repaired less than one percent of its sidewalks over the first five years. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the city spends about $50,000 on each curb ramp. Yet come November the city and county will continue to elect the same cast of characters, and sit around wondering why nothing ever gets better.
– JVW
Anyway the upshot is that “enforcing the law” is not a sound reason for doing something.
Often it takes enforcement for people to see what is wrong with the law.
Is asking Congress to change the law the only appropriate response, like JD Vance claims about immigration law?
Sammy Finkelman (e4ef09) — 1/28/2026 @ 12:26 pmI noticed that they are only enforcing the law – the same argument that is used for ICE.
I wonder if people can say that if California is not enforcing federal immigration law, at least they are enforcing federal disability law (maybe motivated by fear of lawsuits)
The ADA is a problem that also comes up with building public bathrooms also. They maybe cannot charge money or make too many inaccessible to wheelchair users. So they don’t build any at all.
But here, anyway, they found a loophole:
What’s the problem with this solution except that maybe they are not using the loophole enough, or that the loophole isn’t big enough?
Or is it that the project would be substantially bigger?
Is the problem only curb ramps?
What’s the big problem with creating curb ramps?
(Maybe people don’t like the type of ramps they build – do they have bumps on them like so many new ones in New York City do?)
Sammy Finkelman (e4ef09) — 1/28/2026 @ 12:47 pmI have this weird fascination with Los Angeles. I love so many things about it. Alas, the city government is broken.
It’s nice to see you make an appearance, JVW.
norcal (7d96aa) — 1/28/2026 @ 1:58 pmThe ADA and regulations requiring curb ramps to be added when a street is repaved have been in place since 1991.
While the ADA itself did not mandate the curb ramp thing, it explicitly imposed very similar requirements on private construction and modifications, and publicly operated transportation services.
This seems to me a case of a law being democratically enacted, and the regulations respecting the spirit and intent of the law pretty closely.
Another thing is that the curb ramps are a one-time cost. Once installed, you don’t have re-install them the next time you repave the street.
For the city, it sounds like there is a complex balancing between trying to fix more street damage with partial repairs, at the expense of installing fewer ramps. Given that road repairs probably do more, dollar per dollar, to sustain the city’s economy than improving handicapped pedestrian access, maybe they are making the right choice among imperfect alternatives.
Dave (fa0824) — 1/28/2026 @ 2:32 pmIf only this country had a limitless source of cheap, unskilled labor to perform menial construction work and maintenance like this more affordably, just think of how the lives of its citizens could be improved!
/wink
Dave (fa0824) — 1/28/2026 @ 3:01 pm4, An out of touch escargot-eating DC bureaucrat enabled this silly rule for the ADA. Probably because he/she was some eastern parochial who always lived in NYC or DC.
First, its a stupid eastern-based rule that should be waived for LA, because it csts too much.
$200,000 to install ramps at just one intersection. LA has over 61,000 intersections
So 12 billion or more.
How can LA pay for LAUSD staff increases as enrollment decreases if we fix things?
Who will pay for the crack fire department?
Second, its unrealistic for LA
NY has 9 million cars and CA has 31 million.
CA does not use subways like NYC and DC do.
Crumbling streets in NYC may go unnoticed, as evidenced by the seemingly missing suspensions in any NYC cab.
But in car-dependent lA, they’re noticed.
LA Drivers are being forced to subsidize suspension repairs and tire shops because some “Buy the world a Coke” pencil pusher thinks that wagon trains of wheelchairs cross 6 lane LA streets during rush hour.
Harcourt Fenton Mudd (0c349e) — 1/28/2026 @ 3:20 pmThe ADA and regulations requiring curb ramps to be added when a street is repaved have been in place since 1991.
While the ADA itself did not mandate the curb ramp thing, it explicitly imposed very similar requirements on private construction and modifications, and publicly operated transportation services.
“While the ADA itself did not mandate the curb ramp thing. . . .”
As I said, bureaucratic overreach. I would think that requiring a city to spend $200k (the cost of a ramp at each section of a cross-street in Los Angeles; no doubt it’s cheaper to do in other cities) grossly exceeds the cost of repaving the streets for one city block. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but it seems logical that it costs less. This is exactly the sort of decision that unelected bureaucrats, largely unaccountable to anyone, should not be foisting upon local governments and taxpayers.
JVW (12e92a) — 1/28/2026 @ 5:34 pmIf only this country had a limitless source of cheap, unskilled labor to perform menial construction work and maintenance like this more affordably, just think of how the lives of its citizens could be improved!
There is a really interesting comment at the City Journal piece which provides some perspective on why it costs so much. I’ll copy it here:
So I’m not sure that cheap imported labor is the solution, unless we can be very sure of the quality of their work.
JVW (f47379) — 1/28/2026 @ 5:38 pmWhat’s the problem with this solution except that maybe they are not using the loophole enough, or that the loophole isn’t big enough?
The problem, Sammy, is that filling potholes and such is a short-term solution which ensures that you will have to do it again and again. Whereas repaving the entire street should at least give you a longer respite from having to deal with potholes. It’s like spending $100 every year for five years rather than spending $350 one-time.
JVW (ff0eb1) — 1/28/2026 @ 5:54 pmJVW,
thank you to the link to this fascinating post about how completing evsn simple projects becomes impossible due to government regulations.
This is the type of post that this site used to focus on and I miss so much.
NJRob (eb56c3) — 1/28/2026 @ 6:31 pmThe ADA did not explicitly mandate the curb ramp thing, but it contained very clear directives about establishing regulations that would fill in the details.
The ADA begins with a sweeping insistence that persons with disabilities may not be excluded from the benefit of a government-provided service:
That last passage, in itself, would seem to me to require that sidewalks, if provided by a local goverment, must be accessible.
It then goes on to quite specific guidelines for regulations:
And further below:
The Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board is an independent agency created by Congress and pre-dates the ADA.
According to the Federal Register:
Congress made a very specific delegation of the detailed regulations to this body, and the regulations have been in place without any substantive modification for 35 years.
Dave (fa0824) — 1/29/2026 @ 2:22 am“Repaving is considered an alteration that triggers these requirements.”
And that’s the crux of the problem right there.
Look, it makes perfect sense that if the city is replacing one of the curbs of its 61,000 intersections, that the new curb be ADA compliant. However, it doesn’t make sense that a re-pave requires a new curb. This is bureaucratic overreach, and an egregious unfunded mandate.
norcal (9d1ab1) — 1/29/2026 @ 3:29 pmMore LA area urban lunacy:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/la-city-boss-gave-herself-sweet-150k-raise-in-secret-backroom-deal-whistleblower/ar-AA1Vd4WT?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=697b132346124a1094b8adeee2449efd&ei=103
I love the little detail that she was busted by a Mormon bishop.
norcal (9d1ab1) — 1/29/2026 @ 3:32 pmBack to the new curb issue, there is this contribution from Kevin Williamson:
https://thedispatch.com/article/yuppies-up-for-grabs/
norcal (9d1ab1) — 1/29/2026 @ 3:39 pmIf you read the background info I posted, I don’t think the facts support this charge.
This (black-letter law in the ADA) says sidewalks and pedestrian crossings must be accessible:
The regulations regarding repaving could be viewed as providing a limited waiver to the law’s requirements, by allowing non-compliant (illegal) curbs to remain in service for some time and be replaced gradually.
But it has been 35 years now…
Dave (751db2) — 1/29/2026 @ 6:30 pmWho determined that a re-pave required a new intersection curb?
I understand the part of the ADA that says if something is being torn down, or built new, that it has to be ADA compliant. But a re-pave requires a new curb and sidewalk? That, to me, is bureaucratic overreach, especially when the federal government expects the city to pay for it.
I’m not generally in favor of unfunded mandates.
This workaround by the city just means less respect for federal regulations.
norcal (9d1ab1) — 1/29/2026 @ 6:40 pm