Why LA is letting its streets crumble

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. 

In Los Angeles, the problem is that the roads aren’t getting paved at all.

Last summer, the city essentially stopped repaving its streets. 

In the past nine months, Los Angeles has resurfaced just 9 miles of roadway — in a city with more than 7,500 miles of streets, many of them cracked, potholed, and crumbling.

Why would a city in such obvious need of repair stop fixing its roads?

Because in Los Angeles, basic roadwork has become too complicated, too expensive, and too legally treacherous. 

Mandates meant to improve streets have instead made the work harder to carry out. So officials have found the path of least resistance: avoid repaving altogether.

It’s a master class in perverse incentives — and now it’s ending up in court. 

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A lawsuit filed this month accuses the city of deliberately redefining and downsizing projects to avoid triggering its legal obligations.

At the center of the dispute is Measure HLA — the Healthy Streets LA initiative approved by voters in 2024. 

The law requires the city to implement its long-standing mobility plan — adding bike lanes, bus lanes, crosswalks, and other safety features — whenever it repaves a street.

It sounds reasonable: If crews are already tearing up asphalt, why not make the streets more accessible at the same time?

What the initiative’s supporters didn’t reckon with was how this requirement would reshape the city’s incentives. 

Those add-ons — curb reconstruction, protected bike lanes, new signal timing — can turn a routine resurfacing job into a multimillion-dollar project on a single corridor. 

Faced with that reality, the city’s Bureau of Street Services landed on a simpler solution: Don’t repave the streets.

The results speak for themselves. In the two years since voters approved Measure HLA, the city has implemented just 300 feet of the improvements the law requires — roughly one city block.

Yet a city transportation official recently described this “progress” as “a very large sweeping effort that requires coordination across our departments.”

Measure HLA isn’t the only mandate making repaving more difficult. Federal accessibility rules — specifically the Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines, known as PROWAG — require cities to upgrade curb ramps and other pedestrian infrastructure whenever streets are “altered.” 

In LA, that can mean tens of thousands of dollars per corner just to bring a single intersection into compliance.

Repaving counts as an “alteration” — which gives the city a strong incentive to avoid it.

City officials have acknowledged as much. As one transportation official recently put it, Measure HLA “does limit our ability to resurface streets,” citing the city’s inability to build enough accessible curb ramps. 

Crews that can repave a mile of roadway in days would take months to complete the required accessibility upgrades.

So the city found a workaround.

Instead of fully repaving streets, LA now relies on what it calls “large asphalt repairs” — a bureaucratic invention the city created to get around its own legal minefield.

Under this approach, crews patch small sections of roadway — larger than a pothole but short of curb-to-curb resurfacing — while leaving strips of deteriorating pavement untouched. 

The city claims this isn’t “repaving,” and therefore doesn’t trigger HLA’s requirements or PROWAGs. 

LA has done more than 700 of these “large asphalt repairs” since July. Conveniently, these repairs are typically kept just under HLA’s 660-foot threshold, the point at which the mandate kicks in.

The lawsuit filed this month argues that the city is deliberately using these tactics to sidestep voter-approved requirements. Whether the courts agree or not, the broader reality is hard to ignore.

Drivers are left navigating potholes. Pavement is patched but never truly fixed. 

Those temporary fixes don’t address the underlying damage. They simply defer it, ensuring that the eventual repairs will be far more costly. The city is spending money — just not actually solving anything.

Instead of improving mobility and accessibility, Los Angeles has managed to stall both.

As long as fixing a street means triggering a cascade of costly mandates, fewer streets will get fixed — and everyone, no matter how they get around, is left worse off.

In LA, the road to hell, it turns out, doesn’t even need to be paved.

Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.