Los Angeles city streets will worsen and repairing them will become more expensive unless the city overhauls its approach to maintenance, according to a report from transportation advocacy group Streets For All.
Or, hear me out, what if you also had fewer square miles of roads to maintain? Maybe, just maybe, if you didn’t have as many lanes and narrower lanes you’d have a whole lots less to maintain the first place! I think it’s a crazy idea, but if the sarcasm hasn’t set in yet, here’s your final clue: holy fuck stop having so much asphalt you idiots!
My old US city only has about 180k population and it’s a usual US design. It has over 8 square miles of road to maintain! It’s crazy what we keep doing.
They could attempt a public transit system comparable to every comparable sized city in the country.
It’s rated as one of the best (sometimes the best) public transit system for a small->medium sized US city. That doesn’t stop the city council from continuing to annex every stupid exurb they can be bribed into taking on.
One of the exurbs they pulled in recently has 10m (32ft) wide roads! That’s in a neighborhood of houses. It’s not some freeway. In fact, it’s around a 3 lane freeway wide. Roads designed for people to drive 60mph, three semi trucks wide are about how wide the residential streets are. The sheer amount of pavement that introduces to take care of for a handful of houses is crazy.
A quick measurement that it has a total of 1.6km of linear road. That’s just over 4 acres of asphalt to maintain. All of that for a mere 76 houses. That’s 1/10 of an acre per house. The road maintenance alone will eat up about 30% of the property tax revenue from these homes. There’s no way the neighborhood will be a net zero on revenue for the city. It’ll be a huge revenue sink for now and forever more.
I find this article confusing, as it’s missing essential details. So: L.A. is using piecemeal pavement surface maintenance techniques, and deferring ADA upgrades.
Why?
If it’s anything like my city, it’s because proper maintenance is extremely expensive. So this report comes out and says, “Solve this problem by spending a lot more money.” Is Streets For All another of these astroturf groups funded by auto industry money?
The answer is spend a lot of money, on adding bike lanes and sidewalks and making sure no street is more than 2 lanes wide
