Hollywood Boulevard might be Los Angeles’ most famous street. The name conjures so many iconic images: stars on the Walk of Fame, celebrities on the red carpet at the Oscars, sidewalk handprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and, if you’ve visited in the last two years, bollards and green paint in bike lanes.

In the summer of 2024, the city installed over two miles of protected bike lanes on the boulevard, starting just east of the Walk of Fame and stretching to Fountain Ave. The project was especially notable because it opened just a few months after voters passed Measure HLA, which directs the city to implement its long-neglected Mobility Plan. Adopted in 2015, the plan lays out a transformative, city-wide network of bike lanes, bus lanes, and other safety improvements. HLA says the city is legally obligated to install those improvements whenever it repaves a section of road in LA.

After a decade of no action, it seemed like Measure HLA had jump-started the city’s mobility makeover, starting with Hollywood. Fresh streets, bike and bus lanes – it was all finally happening.

This turned out to be wishful thinking. The city insisted the Hollywood bike lanes were not an HLA project, and they were not implementing the Mobility Plan. Fast forward 2½ years, and the picture has gotten even bleaker. The city has almost completely stopped repaving streets. HLA never gets triggered. The pace of bike lane installation has plummeted. The city is still occasionally installing bike and bus lanes, but almost every time they do, they strenuously claim the work is not an HLA project, just like Hollywood Blvd. Exactly one HLA-compliant project has been installed in 2½ years - 350 feet of unprotected bike lanes on Reseda Blvd. in suburban Tarzana.

Repaving is stalled. Bike lanes are stalled. Mobility projects avoid HLA. It’s a stalemate.

How do we start repaving again? How do we get the Mobility Plan implemented? I asked multiple people involved, on both the city and advocacy sides. But before I tell you what they said, I need to tell you why we can’t do one thing without doing a bunch of other things, all of which cost a lot of money.

Bike lanes generally require repaving: In the 2010s, bike lanes were so politically toxic in LA that city councilmembers routinely vetoed them for wins in their districts. Gil Cedillo killed bike lanes on Figueroa. David Ryu killed them on 6th St. Paul Krekorian killed them on Lankershim. The ultimate insult: in 2017, anti-bike councilmembers passed a rule making it a lot more expensive to install bike lanes. Ostensibly to head off lawsuits, City Council required bike lanes to only be installed on fresh pavement.¹ Bike lanes cost $250,000/mile. Repaving adds another $1 million/mile.

Repaving generally requires new curb ramps: According to the federal government, when a street is repaved, any aging adjacent curb ramps have to be rebuilt to current ADA standards. LA ignored this rule for decades until last year, when the feds adopted new Public Right of Way Accessibility Guidelines, or PROWAG. When the city finally admitted it had to follow the law, it also realized it couldn’t afford to. The average LA street has 14 out-of-date curb ramps per mile. That makes repaving much more expensive - a single curb ramp averages $45,000, so fixing all 14 increases the cost by over $600,000/mile.

The result of all these added costs? Last summer, the city threw up its hands and stopped repaving. That’s bad news for everybody who drives, bikes, rides the bus, or crosses the street. And it’s worse news for the Mobility Plan, since HLA is only triggered when repaving.

But the city figured out a workaround. It looks like this:

This is the now-infamous “large asphalt repair,” or LAR. It’s a long patch, usually around a block long and one or two lanes wide. The city landed on this kludge because they can claim LAR is maintenance and not resurfacing. By pretending it’s just a patch, they don’t have to update the curb ramps.

When I first wrote about LAR last December, I was outraged. But I’ve come to realize that it’s an important tool. Take the Hollywood Blvd. bike lanes. The city was required to install them on fresh asphalt. But instead of repaving the entire street, they laid down long LARs that covered the bike lanes - the darker bands along the edges of the street below.

The reason the city used large asphalt repairs to install bike lanes on Hollywood is circled at the right edge of the photo above. That curb ramp is out of date - it doesn’t have a yellow bumpy rectangle. If the street was fully repaved, the ADA would have been triggered, and the city would be on the hook for rebuilding that curb ramp and dozens more like it. That would have busted the project’s budget. Without LAR, bike lanes on Hollywood Blvd. wouldn’t have happened.²

The city needs to figure out how to restart full repaving. It’s scandalous that they’re failing to maintain our basic infrastructure. But they also deserve praise for figuring out how to install bike lanes in the meantime. Unfortunately, HLA says: not so fast.

The Mobility Plan consists of several networks - bike lanes, bus lanes, goods movement routes, etc. - and streets are often part of more than one. Hollywood Blvd. is on three maps: the Bicycle Enhanced Network, the Transit Enhanced Network, and a Pedestrian Enhanced District. That’s great - the plan envisions Hollywood as a truly complete street that supports all the people who use it.

Measure HLA says that when a street is repaved, all the street’s required elements from all Mobility Plan maps must be installed. The complete street and sidewalk, all at once. And the most expensive map by far is the Pedestrian Enhanced Districts, because they require updated curb ramps. Just like the ADA.

For Hollywood Blvd., complying with HLA would mean fixing all the curb ramps when installing the bike lanes.⁴ But wait, didn’t the city avoid HLA by avoiding full repaving?

This is what surprised me. It turns out that HLA isn’t only tied to repaving. The text of the measure says it’s triggered by “any paving project or other modification” ⅛ mile long. A bike lane sure seems like a modification. Installing the bike lanes themselves probably should have triggered HLA on Hollywood - all of it, including the curb ramps.

To state this plainly: If the city installs bike lanes on a street in a pedestrian district, HLA says it also has to fix the curb ramps even if the street isn’t repaved.

If you’re wondering, the Mobility Plan has a ton of overlap between planned bike lanes and pedestrian districts. In Central LA, the part of the city with the highest amount of cycling, two-thirds of main streets tapped for bike lanes are also in a pedestrian district.⁵ Installing a bike lane there means fixing curb ramps. Here are all the bike lanes proposed by Mobility Plan in Central LA. Orange lines are also in a pedestrian district. Blue ones are not.

LA has essentially lost the ability to install bike lanes inexpensively on streets in Pedestrian Enhanced Districts. Not surprisingly, the city is trying to wiggle out of the broad interpretation of “modification.” City Council passed HLA implementation procedures stating that just installing a bike or bus lane is not a modification. But that seems to contradict the text of the ballot measure that voters approved. This question is being litigated right now, and if the court rules against the city, LA will lose even more flexibility in how it installs bike lanes.

It’s tempting to say bike lanes have become the everything bagel of LA infrastructure. Install one, and you have to install fresh asphalt thanks to the 2017 City Council, plus the complete street and sidewalk thanks to the 2024 HLA.

But a more apt metaphor for HLA is a restaurant set menu. It’s nice for a special occasion. But if every time I took my family to Olive Garden, I was forced to order an appetizer and dessert along with my entree, we’d go to Olive Garden a lot less often.

LA’s decades-long neglect of its pedestrian infrastructure has come home to roost. The story went that nobody walks in LA, so we didn’t bother to make our sidewalks accessible. What we didn’t realize is that neglect made our entire street network vulnerable to regulatory change. A couple of well-intentioned policy changes rendered the city unable to repave streets or implement the Mobility Plan.

The ADA and HLA are here to stay. One is federal law, and the other is a voter-passed initiative. We have to adapt to this new reality.

Here is what the people I talked to said we can do to get both repaving and HLA moving again.

First: We need to think much more strategically about curb ramps. They are the key that unlocks everything else. They are the biggest cost and time driver for street projects and the biggest obstacle to getting them done. The city has started budgeting for more curb ramps, yet it doesn't have the tools it needs to plan them properly. What we need:

We also need to think about how to drive down curb ramp costs. Other cities do them more cheaply. Caltrans does them more cheaply. Our ramps are often over-engineered. Given how reliant we are on curb ramps to get everything else on our streets fixed, building them for less would provide a big return on investment.

Second: In November, voters have to pass the city charter reforms on the ballot. These include two transformative infrastructure-related items: creating a Capital Infrastructure Program (CIP) and establishing a new Director of Public Works. LA is just about the last American city that doesn’t have a CIP. It would serve as the master planning document for all infrastructure projects in the next five years, including mobility projects such as bike and bus lanes.

A five-year roadmap for mobility projects would help departments decide where to prioritize repaving streets and rebuilding curb ramps. The Director of Public Works would manage the CIP and have the power to direct city departments to coordinate implementation.

Third: City Council should repeal the 2017 requirement to only install bike lanes on good pavement. The requirement was passed in response to a series of lawsuits by cyclists who hit potholes. But it has also slowed down bike lane installation, so it’s hard to argue that on the whole it has made cycling safer here.

Repealing the repaving requirement would reintroduce some flexibility into the system. For example, LADOT could install smaller, gap closure-type projects quickly, without having to coordinate with StreetsLA for resurfacing or large asphalt repair. If you’re worried about the city abusing this idea to install big bike lane projects on perilously potholed streets, remember the city operates with a deep-seated fear of liability, which City Council can’t repeal. The city could reassure cyclists by prioritizing repairs of potholes reported in bike lanes. Put an “In bike lane” checkbox on the My311LA app’s pothole page.

Fourth: We sure could use more funding. The ADA and HLA have made mobility projects in the city more expensive. Streets For All tried and failed to get a dedicated funding stream for mobility written into the charter reforms. Funding is the thorniest question, and it has bedeviled every effort to improve the city since Proposition 13 was passed almost 50 years ago. But there are options, including perhaps a new ballot measure. LA voters have passed seven bond measures in the last 30 years to build and renovate LAUSD schools. Perhaps they would have the stomach for a similar measure for infrastructure in 2028.

HLA is a great idea for a well-funded city. Well-funded cities pull off complete streets projects all the time. But LA hasn’t been well-funded for decades. A broke city is constantly negotiating tradeoffs, and HLA doesn’t allow tradeoffs. But it’s here to stay, and the only way forward is to adapt to it.