Los Angeles’s streets are in notoriously bad shape. Fewer than two-thirds are considered in good repair, according to the city’s Department of Public Works. Broken sidewalks have spawned years of costly litigation, and Los Angeles pays out millions of dollars each year to drivers whose cars get damaged by potholes.

Many cities would see this situation as a mandate for change. And Los Angeles has indeed made a change: last summer, the city quietly stopped repaving its streets. Not slowed. Not fell behind. Stopped completely.

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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.

Why has Los Angeles stopped repaving its streets? The answer, it turns out, has to do with federal disability rules that, paradoxically, have made fixing roads legally riskier than letting them fall apart. Though well-intentioned, L.A.’s shift shows how such policies can unintentionally worsen urban quality of life.

The clearest explanation of the city’s shift comes from L.A.–based housing and transportation advocate Oren Hadar. Digging through budget documents and engineering classifications, Hadar explained in an essay late last year that the city didn’t necessarily abandon street work so much as reclassify it out of existence.

The city appears to have invented a new category of street work designed to avoid triggering costly federal accessibility mandates. Instead of repaving streets, StreetsLA now performs what it calls “large asphalt repairs.” As Hadar explains, this work addresses localized damage—areas larger than a pothole but smaller than full resurfacing. In effect, the city repaves only part of a street rather than its full width.

But, as Hadar notes, “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 sometime in the last year.”

The reason for the invention lies in federal disability law. Under regulations implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act, when a city alters a street, it must also bring adjacent pedestrian infrastructure into compliance—meaning the installation of ADA-compliant curb ramps at every affected intersection.

Repaving is considered an alteration that triggers these requirements. Maintenance activities, such as filling potholes or making minor repairs, are not. The city claims that large asphalt repairs are “pavement maintenance activity” and therefore do not require ADA upgrades.

That distinction carries enormous financial and logistical consequences. Hadar found that each curb ramp costs roughly $50,000, totaling about $200,000 per intersection. With roughly ten intersections per mile, curb ramps alone can add around $2 million per mile to the cost of repaving, a figure that often exceeds the cost of the asphalt itself. Design and construction typically take nine to 12 months per ramp, and federal rules require that the ramps be completed by the time the street is resurfaced.

For decades, Los Angeles largely ignored this requirement. That changed last January, when the federal government implemented updated Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines. The new rules appear to have convinced city officials that continued noncompliance was no longer viable.

Faced with this reality, the city did not dramatically scale up curb-ramp construction or seek new funding. Rather, it changed how it classified its street work. Streets are patched just enough to delay failure but not enough to qualify as an alteration. Los Angeles now plans to do another 1,000 “large asphalt repairs” during the next fiscal year.

In the short run, this approach minimizes legal exposure. But over time, it raises costs and accelerates deterioration.

Patching is a poor substitute for resurfacing, as it doesn’t correct underlying problems. Once those problems advance, resurfacing becomes more expensive. Streets that fall into severe disrepair may require full reconstruction. Each year the city delays resurfacing risks multiplying future costs many times over.

Los Angeles’s curb-ramp dilemma mirrors its long-running effort to fix its broken sidewalks. In 2016, to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by disabled residents, Los Angeles committed to spending $1.4 billion over 30 years on sidewalk repairs—the largest disability-access settlement in U.S. history. Yet a 2021 audit found that Los Angeles had repaired less than 1 percent of its sidewalk parcels since the program launched. At the current pace, the city controller said, it would take 500 years to fix all the broken sidewalks in Los Angeles.

The practical consequences of this neglect are staggering. Angelenos who request sidewalk repairs through the city now face estimated wait times in excess of ten years. Many sidewalks have deteriorated so badly that they cannot simply be patched or ground down—they require full demolition and reconstruction, multiplying costs and delays.

The irony is that the people whom the law is meant to protect bear the costs most acutely. Broken sidewalks, missing curb ramps, and deteriorating streets disproportionately harm people with disabilities, the elderly, and families with strollers. Meantime, the city pays out tens of millions in damage claims—money that could fund the very repairs it’s avoiding.

If policymakers want more accessible cities, they need rules that reward progress rather than punish imperfect compliance and that make fixing a street less legally risky than ignoring it. Absent that shift, Los Angeles offers a cautionary lesson. When routine upkeep becomes a legal minefield, cities do what any rational actor would do: they stop moving forward—and let the streets crumble beneath them.

Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Photo: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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