After three years of stalling by Heather Hutt, tonight Metro is finally starting outreach for bus lanes on La Brea from Olympic south to Coliseum. Bus lanes were installed on La Brea north of Olympic (Katy Yaroslavsky's district) in 2023. Meeting tonight 7pm on Zoom. Register at bit.ly/4qUBCk2

Has anyone done a moving chain study for new affordable homes? Folks have estimated the number of naturally occurring affordable homes kept that way by market rate apts. What about for below market rate apts? Would help quantify cost/benefit of IZ. @cselmendorf.bsky.social @michaelwiebe.bsky.social

Tokyo is a city that makes the argument that architecture is irrelevant. What matters more is urbanism: The street network The density The freedom of uses The clustering around rail

Protip: park your Cybertruck in a compact spot to make it look even bigger!

Thread about a damaging pothole on La Brea that developed last night after the latest rainstorm. This stretch hasn't been repaved since 2000! Instead of repaving it, the city did a "large asphalt repair" - a patch - a couple months ago, stopping 100 yards before the spot where the pothole formed.

"The slowdown has meant some landlords and property managers are struggling to find renters — something hard to image just a few years ago."

The "impact" of more housing is a better city.

"Instead of full resurfacing, StreetsLA has shifted most of its street maintenance budget to what it calls 'large asphalt repair' ...'It literally doesn’t exist,' said Oren Hadar. 'If you Google it, you get no results. It’s a thing they made up.'"

Incredible thread about the details of curb ramp design. The institutional culture favors designing for wheelchair users only, at the expense of other pedestrians.

“What is the city thinking? These half-baked solutions are going to end up costing taxpayers millions in legal settlements, and those settlements will probably force the city to put in the infrastructure they tried to avoid installing anyway.” futureis.la/p/breaking-t...

Well it's hard to keep up the streets given LA's brutal freeze/thaw cycles.

Car-centric development is unsustainable with a local tax model. It creates maximum infrastructure to maintain with minimal residents to support it. San Diego’s unfunded infrastructure repair/replacement needs are continuing to grow well into the billions of dollars.

More dispatches from L.A.'s war on ADA & HLA laws. Kudos to @futureis.la for exposing this crap. futureis.la/p/breaking-t...

This is, sincerely, grotesque. Forget all the other transit and mobility issues, you have no idea how important curb cuts are until you see somebody with mobility aids dealing with a curb.

Angelenos need to demand the firing of the people responsible for this shit

Here are some of the over-engineered curb ramps the city installed in 2020 as part of the Destination: Pico project, including two with railings! The corner store owner was particularly upset that the direct route to her front entrance was now blocked.

I wanted to show the human cost of the city stopping repaving. Here are two LA streets that show how far the city will go to avoid keeping us safe, one by negligence and one by careful planning.

Yes, the city needs to actually repave streets. Yes, the city needs to repair sidewalks. Yes, the city needs to install curb ramps. But the bigger problem is that when LA decides to do anything at all to "help" pedestrians, the result looks like this complete and utter bullshit

LA desperately needs structure reform to Public Works. siloed departments, obfuscated leadership, and oscillating budgets are eroding our largest public assets this wont be fixed without a charter reform, CIP implementation, and probably a new dedicated infrastructure fund

LA has surrendered to the potholes: @michaelschneider.com and I have a piece in the LA Times today about how the city has stopped repaving our streets. (Also thank god for great headline writers at actual newspapers!)

Why has the City stopped repaving streets? Oren Hadar tells me it’s to avoid complying with HLA and Federal law.

Reminder that developer interests ≠ YIMBY interests.

LA City Bureau of Street Services stopped doing actual full street resurfacing, shifting to only “large asphalt repair”. The city is trying to avoid adding wheelchair access required during resurfacing. It’s ridiculous, counterproductive, and expensive!

Allen was on a scooter on his way to volunteer at the Streets For All holiday party when he hit a pothole in the middle of a "large asphalt repair" done in April. Instead of properly repaving our streets, the city is doing these half-assed patches that don't even hold up for a few months.

Austin Beutner interviewed me about the city not repaving our streets.

I went with Joe to check out large asphalt repairs on Eagle Rock Blvd today. Seems like they're, uh, missing spots?

Mar Vista Voice on "large asphalt repair" and other anti-HLA crap: "[L.A. City appears to be] steering around its legal responsibilities rather than confronting them" marvistavoice.org/los-angeles-...

SBLA's @lintonjoe.bsky.social shares recent reporting on L.A. City's #LargeAsphaltRepair - see photos in the post if you're unfamiliar with "LAR" la.streetsblog.org/2025/12/11/w...

i'm literally having to fight my city at this very moment about them repairing sidewalks but refusing to install curb ramps at the same time bc "under fed regs, it's not req'd for maintenance, only repaving" on a street where I regularly see moms pushing strollers & ppl on wheelchairs in the street

This reflects deep dysfunction with how LA manages public infrastructure. We need for real reform through the Charter reform process to develop multi-year capital infrastructure plans, with appropriate community and council input, but then giving departments a mandate to deliver.

ADA compliance in municipalities is a huge expense! But you can't not do it. Your old streets are not magically grandfathered in. Like yes you have to comply with ADA when you redo a street, but that doesn't eliminate having to update other infrastructure. It costs a lot but you will get fined

Another wretched thing about the #LargeAsphaltRepair scandal (other being anti-ADA & anti-HLA) is that the Bureau of Street Services is leaving heavily damaged areas where people bike, while resurfacing areas where people drive…https://futureis.la/p/la-has-stopped-repaving-our-streets

ED 1 is now permanent law in LA, not just an emergency declaration. While it has largely been eclipsed by its successor, AHIP, ED 1 is still alive and kicking. It's still useful for getting around certain zoning rules. Projects are still being proposed using it - the last one two weeks ago.

Something similar happened in Oakland year ago, when the city opted to not pave OR update curb ramps at some intersections in W Oakland, because they could’ve afford to remove abandoned train tracks but they couldn’t make the crossings ADA compliant w the tracks in place.

Sorry Mom, we can't go out, Karen Bass doesn't want you to go around in your wheelchair.

To be fair to the city when the curb ramps cost more than the repaving you can understand the logic. It feels like a regulatory and engineering failure if each ramp really does cost $50k.

How do you make a decision like this and not live the rest of your life with tremendous shame?

It seems Not Great that the bureaucracies in charge of California’s streets at ~every level of government are lawless rogue agencies that are not subject to any real public oversight.

We are in the early innings of people coming to grips with the real cost of building our cities almost exclusively for automobility

Please read and share this @futureis.la exposé on the L.A. City #LargeAsphaltRepair scandal futureis.la/p/la-has-sto...

When you see L.A. City reps announcing "Large Asphalt Repair" it's basically the city giving the middle finger to folks in wheelchairs, on bike, on foot, on the bus

This is a great post from Oren, and I hope our local news media take notice.

LA quietly stopped repaving all streets last July to avoid fulfilling its ADA obligations. The federal govt says when you repave a street, you have to update all the curb ramps. LA has tons of out of date curb ramps, so the rule makes repaving much more expensive. The city's solution: stop repaving!

Feel like this should be big news? StreetsLA is proposing to basically stop repaving our streets next year and instead do 1000 "large asphalt repairs", a term that sounds like it was made up by lawyers to get around ADA requirements. See p.154 here:

LA just released a pretty fishy report on the first 6 months of CHIP. They take credit for 16k+ units proposed, but 9k are density bonus, which is a state program! Another 5k are ED 1 (now called AHIP) that would have been proposed without CHIP. The truly new stuff: 2300 units proposed in 6 months.

Is it a metaphor when someone throws an unlit firecracker away and the garbage truck catches fire for the second time in two weeks and they have to dump all the trash into the street to put it out?

Did you know over a million new homes are at stake in the SB 79 implementation fight in LA over the next few months? I talked to two of the main players and wrote up a rundown of the abundant opportunities for City Councilmembers to play games and exempt favored neighborhoods.

A big fight is brewing over SB 79 implementation in LA, where the law allows the city to delay up to 2/3 of the eligible areas for the first 5 years. Low-income areas, historic districts, fire zones, and even some wealthy single family neighborhoods. The city only has about 4 months to decide!

Counties that seriously under-reported to the state how much housing got built last year (compared to census data): Riverside - 12k units missed (55% undercount) San Joaquin - 10k units (92%!) San Diego - 8k units (44%) San Bernardino - 6k units (52%) Placer - 6k units (65%) Orange - 5k units (46%)

Is it possible more housing is being built in CA than reported? This new Census Bureau tool, which tracks changes in the number of residential addresses the Postal Service has in its database, says CA gained 184k new homes last year - HCD reports only 110k. In LA County, Census says 39K, HCD 28k.