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Why isn't LA repaving streets?

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Re: Why isn't LA repaving streets?

#301

Post by saghm »

scoofy wrote: post #113
GorbachevyChase wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Chuck Marone and his group make good points but their admonition by ASCE is also deserved. He really went too far with disparaging the profession because of differences in purely value judgments. Furthermore, the type of infrastructure you get is a political decision. Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built. The “what”…

Not liking Chuck Marone is irrelevant. The question is whether or not the thesis is correct, and it seems correct. Everyone hates Nassim Taleb and he can be an asshole, but his math is impeccable. When your concern is with someone's personality because you don't like their math, then you've lost the plot.

Personality is not relevant when determining if someone is correct or not, but it does empirically matter in terms of how likely someone is to get something done based on that. If you think being right is the only thing that should matter, you've achieved your goal already once you reach that step, so congrats! If you agree that it's not the success criteria, it makes sense to start paying attention to those other factors, or else you'll end up only being right and not successful.

I'd argue that if these issues are important to you, and you want to convince people, you'll be more effective if you find a more compelling argument than "you aren't allowed to care about what you just told me you care about".

Re: Why isn't LA repaving streets?

#302

Post by ak217 »

tonymet wrote: post #290
ak217 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has biked and rode trains to work for the past 30 years and continues to do so, I think requiring bike lanes whenever streets are repaved is a pretty awesome idea. ADA ramps are pretty great too, they are not just for disabled people, though the ADA lawsuit regime where private companies get sued needs to stop. Yes I understand there is a funding issue, it needs to be solved by making the design and ap…

Awesome ideas are not often practical

Oh it's quite practical, many cities have done it. It just requires standing up to a bunch of selfish assholes who would rather pave over every bit of available space so they can drive around really fast in their giant SUVs while pedestrians and cyclists scurry about on the broken pavement of the 5% of the street right of way given to them, and get run over when they don't get out of the way of the SUVs fast enough.

Re: Why isn't LA repaving streets?

#303

Post by tonymet »

ak217 wrote: post #302
tonymet wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome ideas are not often practical

Oh it's quite practical, many cities have done it. It just requires standing up to a bunch of selfish assholes who would rather pave over every bit of available space so they can drive around really fast in their giant SUVs while pedestrians and cyclists scurry about on the broken pavement of the 5% of the street right of way given to them, and get run over when they don't get out of the way of the SUVs fast enough.

this attitude really helps improve cyclists' reputation.

Re: Why isn't LA repaving streets?

#304

Post by danudey »

scoofy wrote: post #184
ndriscoll wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I look at a city/county budget, the schools absolutely dwarf everything else (it's not quick to disentangle different levels of government, but roughly speaking, it seems like schools are usually roughly the same cost as all other services combined where I've looked), which makes it hard for me to take seriously the idea that it's infrastructure like roads and sewage specifically leading to unsustainable b…

When you are looking at your city budget... you're probably looking at cash-based accounting: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashaccounting.asp This looks at current costs . The school is a cost every year, so every year that cost shows up on the budget. The problem is that road/water/sewer maintenance often doesn't show up on these budgets because these systems are usually built all at once. Because of this th…

So you get 40 years of "sewers cost us almost nothing to maintain woo" and then five years of "sewer maintenance is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars this year".

Re: Why isn't LA repaving streets?

#305

Post by danudey »

ndriscoll wrote: post #272
imtringued wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand your argument. You can defer maintenance but school, police, firefighter, etc spending is constant. If your infrastructure is in trouble and your budget can't pay for the maintenance, you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying. Los Angeles has about 7500 miles of roads. At a reasonable cost of $5 million per mile that is 37.5 billion US…

Sure, if you treat all other things as impossible to tweak except the thing you want to argue is the problem, I guess. But taking a quick look at the city budget, I see they spent $200M on overtime for police. So there's a place where they could save like $70M with no change to service with correct staffing? I'm sure there are other places where they are not currently 100% efficient. Or, since they have ~4M residents…

Overtime for police can often be largely attributed to special events or occasions; for example, the city might have an entirely correct amount of officers for most of the year, but then during superbowl, presidential visits, Fourth of July parties, Pride, etc. They have a much higher need for patrol units, escorts, traffic management, etc. for those denser areas with more going on. They can't simply transfer officers around because that would leave other areas of the city under-patrolled, which runs the risk of unacceptably higher response times.

As a result, officers that worked Saturday through Thursday might also come in for a shift on Friday/Saturday, or might work a longer shift or split shift that day.

So the problem might not be that the police force needs 30% more staffing, but that the police force needs 80% more staffing on extremely rare occasions.

Re: Why isn't LA repaving streets?

#306

Post by ak217 »

tonymet wrote: post #303
ak217 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it's quite practical, many cities have done it. It just requires standing up to a bunch of selfish assholes who would rather pave over every bit of available space so they can drive around really fast in their giant SUVs while pedestrians and cyclists scurry about on the broken pavement of the 5% of the street right of way given to them, and get run over when they don't get out of the way of the SUVs fast enough.

this attitude really helps improve cyclists' reputation.

To be honest with you I really don't give a shit about my reputation when it comes to this, I care about me and my kids not getting splatted by a speeding SUV when we dare to use the street, because I face this situation daily.

Re: Why isn't LA repaving streets?

#307

Post by stinkbeetle »

ndriscoll wrote: post #272
imtringued wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand your argument. You can defer maintenance but school, police, firefighter, etc spending is constant. If your infrastructure is in trouble and your budget can't pay for the maintenance, you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying. Los Angeles has about 7500 miles of roads. At a reasonable cost of $5 million per mile that is 37.5 billion US…

Sure, if you treat all other things as impossible to tweak except the thing you want to argue is the problem, I guess. But taking a quick look at the city budget, I see they spent $200M on overtime for police. So there's a place where they could save like $70M with no change to service with correct staffing? I'm sure there are other places where they are not currently 100% efficient. Or, since they have ~4M residents…

This is how lobby groups in general operate. They have settled on a solution and work backward from there to develop a problem that only their solution can fix and if other citizens and voters don't like it, they are the problem (NIMBY, greedy, selfish, populism, etc).

Re: Why isn't LA repaving streets?

#308

Post by tonymet »

ak217 wrote: post #306
tonymet wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this attitude really helps improve cyclists' reputation.

To be honest with you I really don't give a shit about my reputation when it comes to this, I care about me and my kids not getting splatted by a speeding SUV when we dare to use the street, because I face this situation daily.

You'll never succeed with this attitude.

Re: Why isn't LA repaving streets?

#309

Post by DANmode »

thfuran wrote: post #295
DANmode wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roads don’t get worn all at once.

Right. They do it at a rate approximately proportional to the fourth power of the per-axle weight of the vehicles driving by. So really only the heaviest vehicles matter much at all.

They all matter, above the weight of a Smart car.

Re: Why isn't LA repaving streets?

#310

Post by Rebelgecko »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #58
stock_toaster wrote: post #38

Maybe roads would last longer if we weren't all being forced to buy super heavy SUVs just so automakers can skirt emissions and fuel economy requirements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPm4de6-eTg

A lot of EVs are heavier than SUVs... but don't let facts get in the way of your crusade.

Most EVs are SUVs
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