Why Los Angeles Stopped Repaving Its Streets

> The Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA) has not repaved a street since last June, and the city’s latest budget practically zeros out repaving for next fiscal year. StreetsLA crews are still doing some road repairs, fixing potholes and patching problem areas. But the most basic form of urban maintenance—full street resurfacing—has all but disappeared in America’s second-largest city.

Anecdotally, a residential street (four blocks long) was freshly paved two days ago in my neighborhood here in Los Angeles. A full resurfacing. I'm not even sure it needed to be resurfaced, but they did it anyway. It's not even in a "nice" neighborhood where you might expect more attentiveness to the roads.

I wonder what to make of the contradiction here.

To save everyone a click, it’s because they are required now to update the roads to ADA standards if they repave.

So now more than 30% of the roads are in poor condition.

ADA went into force in 1992. It’s been 34 years and LA governments have never seen the need to even have a long term plan around updating infrastructure.

That is ridiculous. Most of the roads are inaccessible because the city has refused for 30+ years to even try.

So our civilization seems to lack the technological sophistication to build a ramp for less than $50k a pop and the fix is a baroque legal and organizational workaround.

I live in LA. It's a sensitive subject. My district concilwoman sends out mailings that extoll her ability to get repavements done. To me, it's absurd to claim credit for merely doing her job. Maybe she does perform miracles, but the situation described in the article is not accurate.

The article is dated Jan 27 2026. The following claim is not true, "The Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA) has not repaved a street since last June." That would be June 2025. There have been repavements in my neighborhood since June 2025, and before Jan 27 2026. At least one other repavement was completed nearby in the last month.

To me this is another article in a right-wing publication promoting the right wing view that blue states don't work, and only fascists will repave streets and make the trains run on time.

I agree that city funds are not managed efficiently, but as are as I'm aware, it's no different from any other large city in the US. I believe the culture that mismanages government funding can be improved through citizen advocacy, supported by proactive, accurate journalism.

Accurate financial information, such as has been published by LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia, is essential as well. See his report on LAPD Helicopter use, for example. https://controller.lacity.gov/landings/lapd-helicopters

The most insane thing is 9-12 months to design and construct a curb ramp. There MUST be a standard template they can just stamp out as often as needed. This sounds like some kind of corruption going on, where they're probably paying consultants stupid amounts of money to sign off on something standard.

TL;DR version so I can save you the mental expense of sifting through several paragraph of AI slop:

If LA repairs a whole street, they also need to add wheelchair ramps because of ADA. This is expensive for them and they don't want to do that, so they do not do any repair or circumvent it.