I don’t think SUV vs car makes a meaningful difference when e.g. delivery vans and garbage trucks exist.

The average American wants a big SUV/Truck

Typical meme. Passenger vehicles of any type cause negligible road wear. The weight of a sedan (say, 4000lbs) versus a light truck (say, 6000lbs) is just not significant, further the ground pressure will be close due to tire sizing.

Road wear is a power law, and heavy trucks cause the wear https://blog.ucs.org/dave-cooke/trucks-cause-the-lions-share...

A lot of city governments no longer really focus on the day-to-day living experience in their city. Instead, they focus on property value and the discovery of increasingly palatable ways to limit or justify raising property taxes in order to stay in power.

Because you need to build a form for concrete, and to build the form after paving means you'd have to cut then patch that new asphalt, which will just end up forming potholes.

> Why don't they asphalt curb to curb for a mile and then come back and do the ramps one at a time?

As someone who did a stint in this kind of construction: not possible, you'd still need to re-pave about 30-50cm worth of road, because curbstones are (usually) suspended in a bunch of concrete to avoid them getting dislocated by cars hitting or driving over them. The result will be a faultline from which you will get potholes in freeze cycles.

The proper way is to do everything at once, leaving one slab of contiguous asphalt without faultlines.

The article says the city claims the biggest issue is federal regulations (the ADA) not city regulations.

My neighborhood in NJ just got those fancy ADA compliant curb ramps last year, along with a repaving. It did take them much longer to install the curb ramps (like a week or two?) than it did to pave (one day) so I can imagine there is a significant cost, even if it's a smaller amount of materials.

Typically taxes need to go up 2x to cover the costs. Most infra projects get done with Fed money because cities can't afford it. Also why home developers build the road and then hand it over to the city for upkeep. Its too expensive.

It can easily afford it.

What the city can't seem to do is rid itself of corrupt employees and corrupt practices.

These people talk a big game, but when it comes to basic office management, they're less than worthless.

I wish I could vote to leave the offices empty. I honestly think that would improve things.

The point is for the road to be better to use.

If it's cheap and fast, then there's no reason to wait to do it "properly" later. Do the quick fix first.

I would prefer that over here in slovenia.... instead, we can't repave a street without digging a few meters deep, finding ancient roman remains, and delaying the repair for many months... heck, even without finding roman stuff, we had an 800m long road closed for 2 years...

So yeah, it's either potholes or road closure for a year++.

fwiw, works fine in my Firefox in reader mode

We pay 7.25% sales tax in California, the highest in the country. Plus, county taxes can go up to 3.5%, adding up to 10.75% total. It's not too much to ask for basic stuff like maintaining the streets when paying this kind of money. The roads in Orange County, where I live, are great though.

Streets were only decades newer if they haven't been re-built since then. But when streets were new, they were built recently. That still provides evidence that is somehow possible to build streets. Did people want to pay for streets the first time they were constructed? Go ahead and say it's not mismanagement.

Yeah this seems like a failure at the federal level. There should be incentives for city street departments to implement the newest standards, not "follow these rules, or else" type of thinking. LA residents now to have to deal with outdated ADA standards and half-assed repairs.

> Citizens don't want to pay for it.

Yes. We do. We're literally screaming for it.

My experience is that once you get north of the city limits of San Diego, into either neighboring cities or unincorporated areas, the roads get a lot better.