Los Angeles is not exactly famous for its pristine asphalt. 7,500 miles of streets are a lot to maintain, and StreetsLA, the department in charge of doing the maintenance, has been understaffed for years. As a result, only 60% of our streets are in a state of good repair (see p. 510 here), and the city pays millions of dollars a year to compensate drivers whose cars are damaged by potholes.

It’s such a cliche that LA’s streets are in bad shape that a couple years ago, Arnold Schwarznegger thought he could score some publicity by playing Good Samaritan and filling in a pothole in his neighborhood himself - except it turned out to be a trench cut by SoCalGas as part of an active project.

Well, we might all need to become better versions of Arnold, because the city has quietly stopped repaving our streets altogether. Here’s LA’s StreetStat Dashboard:

StreetsLA has resurfaced exactly zero miles since July 1st. And they stopped pretty abruptly - their list of resurfacing work completed has lots of projects leading right up to June 30th, and then nothing. Notice the list is updated as of last week.

And this is not some kind of temporary delay. In their budget proposal for next fiscal year, starting July 2026, StreetsLA is proposing to practically zero out resurfacing next year as well. In a bit of hiding the football, the budget calls for 560 lane miles of “resurfacing and slurry seal” (p. 156), and then later mentions that 500 miles of that are slurry seal (p. 501). Slurry seal is a temporary coating applied to streets in already pretty good condition to extend their lifetime a few years before they need repaving. That leaves funding for a whole 60 lane miles of actual resurfacing (out of 7,500!) if these numbers are accurate.

Last year, the city resurfaced 312 lane miles and slurry sealed 761 lane miles. What are they going to do next year with all the money they save from doing way less? StreetsLA is proposing instead to do 1,000 “large asphalt repairs.” StreetsLA defines large asphalt repair as “a pavement maintenance activity that addresses localized but significant damage to asphalt streets, typically larger than a standard pothole repair, but smaller than full resurfacing or reconstruction.” Basically, it involves repaving only part of a street, not the entire width. Here is an example of a large asphalt repair the city did on Spring St. in September:

The thing about large asphalt repair is that it’s…not a real thing. It appears to be a term made up by the city some time in the last year. Googling “large asphalt repair” pretty much only returns results from LA city government. Googling “slurry seal”, on the other hand, leads to explanatory pages on all kinds of cities’ websites.

Why did the city suddenly stop repaving streets and shift instead to repaving only parts of them? Why is it using a made up phrase to describe its work?

PROWAG the dog

In 1994, the federal government made a rule that when a street is repaved, the curb ramps on the sidewalk next to the street must be brought up to the latest ADA standards. LA’s own Bureau of Engineering published a memo in 2020 spelling out how to comply with the requirement. But nobody in LA actually complied. Until this past July, the city routinely ignored ADA requirements when repaving its streets, and the curb ramps didn’t get updated.

Updating a curb ramp takes a big chunk of time and money. Each ramp costs about $50,000 - that’s $200,000 per intersection. At an average of 10 blocks per mile, updating all the curb ramps adds around $2 million/mile to the cost of repaving the street, whereas the asphalt costs only around $1 million/mile (at $3.79/square foot, according to the City Administrative Officer). And StreetsLA says curb ramps “typically take 9-12 months from design to construction” (see p. 413 here). The feds require the ramps be done by the time the road is repaved, so the city has to find the time and funding for the ramps before they can put down new asphalt. The city saw all this added complexity and decided to simply ignore the issue for decades.

What changed this year? In January, the feds adopted updated guidelines for the public right of way called PROWAG. The new guidelines basically repeat the same old requirement about updating curb ramps when repaving the street. Regardless, a city staffer told me PROWAG’s release is what finally made LA decide it had to start following the law.

It’s great news that the city has finally acknowledged its obligation to follow ADA law after all these years. The result, in a not upside-down world, would be a surge in installation of much needed curb ramps, making it easier to walk in LA for disabled folks, parents pushing strollers, and all kinds of other Angelenos. Or…

Large asphalt repair - the legal workaround

This is where someone in the city decided to get cute with the legal stuff. The feds say curb ramps have to be updated when a street is “altered” - repaving is considered an alteration - but not when doing maintenance, like filling potholes, patching pavement, or filling cracks. The city looked at these definitions and decided that from now on it would call all the repaving it did maintenance. Thus was born the city’s savior: “large asphalt repair”.

Here’s a large asphalt repair the city did on Century Blvd. in October:

Fixing 1½ lanes’ width of one block is basically patching. I’m not opposed in principle to StreetsLA devoting more resources to patching. I could see how they could use it strategically to fix bad pavement on more streets around the city than they could with full resurfacing. The problem is that the city isn’t doing large asphalt repairs because it discovered an innovative way to fix a larger number of streets. It’s doing them because it discovered an innovative way to wriggle out of its ADA obligations.

If you don’t believe this is about the ADA, behold the one repaving-adjacent activity that StreetsLA continues to do without interruption: slurry sealing. 240 lane miles since July. Slurry sealing can look like repaving but really just covers the asphalt with a layer of bitumen to put off repaving for a few years. The city continues to do it because the federal government has explicitly said that slurry sealing is maintenance, which means - ding ding! - it doesn’t trigger ADA compliance.

I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t imagine these shenanigans are going to hold up in court. As North Westwood Neighborhood Council boardmember Connor Webb pointed out on Bluesky, the Dept. of Justice already threw down the gauntlet in 2015:

A history of failure

The sad truth is that none of our curb ramps would have to be updated during repaving if the city had already been keeping up with its overall ADA obligations over the years. LA has about 80,000 curb ramps, many of them outdated, plus over 12,000 corners with no ramp at all, but we budget for building only 200 ramps a year. At that rate, it would take 60 years just to cut curb ramps on the corners that don’t have them, and then another four centuries to update all the existing ramps. Instead, we have tens of thousands of curb ramps that are decades old. The irony is too bitter to be funny - the city’s historic failure to maintain one part of its basic infrastructure (curb ramps) has now forced it to stop maintaining another part of its basic infrastructure (streets).

LA simply doesn’t spend enough on its streets and sidewalks - $267 per capita according to Streets For All. That’s “almost half of what NYC and San Diego spend, and a third of what is spent in Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco”. Worse, the city has never comprehensively planned how it installs or maintains its infrastructure, which is why organizations like Investing In Place spent years advocating for the city to transition to a five-year Capital Infrastructure Plan. Mayor Bass signed an executive order in late 2024 putting in motion the process of drafting a CIP. But that process is still in its infancy, and no one knows whether it will lead to more resources allocated toward maintenance of curb ramps, streets, or anything else.

What does this mean for HLA?

Remember Measure HLA, which we passed last year by an almost 2:1 margin, voting to force the city to implement its own Mobility Plan that passed in 2015 but had stalled for years? The plan says that when a street is repaved, the city has to install any elements (bike lanes, bus lanes, etc.) planned for that street in the Mobility Plan. What happens when the city stops repaving its streets?

This question has been covered extensively by Streetsblog L.A.’s Joe Linton, who has not only been reporting on the city’s terrible implementation of HLA so far, but also, in a personal capacity, filed a series of HLA appeals to the Board of Public Works. One of those appeals revealed the city’s thinking on large asphalt repairs and HLA. When the city repaved Hollywood Blvd. and installed protected bike lanes last year - a wonderful project! - Linton noticed they didn’t put in all the elements required by the Mobility Plan.

He filed an appeal, and amazingly, the city claimed the project didn’t trigger HLA at all, because they didn’t actually resurface the street. It was a large asphalt repair.

The appeal was denied.

Once again, the city has made a legally dubious decision, all hinging on the idea that large asphalt repair is only maintenance. The HLA implementation ordinance says HLA is not triggered by “routine pothole repairs; utility cuts; or emergency repairs“. Is large asphalt repair just a repair? It’ll probably be up to the courts to decide.

If all the city will do to maintain its streets going forward is large asphalt repair and slurry sealing, HLA implementation is basically not going to happen until someone forces LA’s hand. The city’s invention of large asphalt repair has allowed it to wriggle out of two basic commitments - making our sidewalks safe to walk on, and making our streets safe to ride on. Maybe ADA and safe streets advocates can come together to fight this large asphalt abomination together, because the safety of just about every Angeleno outside of a car depends on it.