Contributor: It’s no wonder Angelenos are painting crosswalks themselves

On July 22, a feel-good story made headlines in Los Angeles: A cadre of civic-minded volunteers had spent a month of Saturdays coming together to paint crosswalks near Stoner Park in the Sawtelle neighborhood. A concerned resident (and friend of mine), Jonathan Hale, modeled the effort on other DIY crosswalks after he witnessed a series of close calls between pedestrians and cars. Yet, within three days of the reports about the civic effort, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation sent a crew to remove the crosswalks.

Why did LADOT act so quickly? It wasn’t because the crosswalks were sloppy. Hale had studied the code, and even the local City Council member’s representative said it “looks beautiful.” In California, every stop-sign intersection also legally includes a crosswalk regardless of paint, so the volunteers were only making that visible.

One stated concern is lawsuits filed under the Americans With Disabilities Act: L.A. officially requires all crosswalk installations to include curb ramp installations to minimize risk. This legal interpretation is neither universal nor strictly followed in practice. But as former official Diego de la Garza commented, LADOT believes in robust processes, always studying the potential for “lighting, signals and speed limits” alongside crosswalks. He suggests that merely painting a crosswalk without a holistic approach creates an “illusion of safety.” In other words, LADOT removed the crosswalks because the city cannot simply make one improvement; its mandate is to study a set of possible improvements whenever considering one.

No one who pays attention to Los Angeles will be surprised by this. Scholars talk of measuring a local government by its “state capacity”: how well it manages finances, maintains order and delivers public goods. By these measures, Los Angeles has a legacy marred by ambitious goals gone unexecuted because of a flawed and bloated process. Consider three of former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s ambitious goals: Build 28 public transit projects by the 2028 Olympics, eliminate all traffic fatalities by 2025 and end street homelessness by 2028.

Today, only four of the 28 original transit projects are completed. Traffic deaths have gone up from 186 in 2015 to 337 in 2023. And of the $1.2 billion raised in 2016 to build 10,000 units of homeless housing, the city has completed 5,597 units. Since 2018, the number of unsheltered people in the city has increased by 17.8% to 26,972.

These failures clearly demonstrate that our local government simply will not get things done quickly and effectively.

Consider Vermont Transit Corridor, a bus rapid transit proposal that Metro’s former leadership states could have been implemented by 2028 but is now unlikely to be. The delay came when the Metro board stopped the project as conceived to instead study building a rail line (without any funding source). This second-guessing was inspired by vague concerns about racial equity.

Or consider sidewalks. A simple monthlong sidewalk repair is routinely delayed by a design and contracting process that takes almost two years, leading to wait times of up to 10 years. One can begin to understand why a couple of years ago in Brentwood, former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger resorted to filling potholes himself.

The city’s homeless housing projects funded by Proposition HHH took an average of three to six years to build, with one taking 18 years because of layers of approvals and a California Environmental Quality Act lawsuit.

This is precisely why our vigilante crosswalk painters opted for DIY work: They wanted to see a crosswalk painted, not bogged down by red tape. Thankfully, just seven days after LADOT undid Hale’s work, the city repainted the crosswalks. Facing public pressure, the city decided that absolute ADA liability avoidance need not be the priority. And it likely never should have been: Since 2020, L.A. has paid nearly $300 million in liability claims from broken infrastructure and only $1.4 million in ADA lawsuits.

But without deeper reforms, we are unlikely to see the city painting more anytime soon: Only days after the crosswalks were removed, emails show that LADOT is refusing to consider street improvements. Why? Because of recent city budget cuts, the department “no longer has adequate staffing” to consider conducting “studies” for implementing “traffic control devices” (i.e., a crosswalk). Rather than simplifying the process, L.A. is throwing up its hands and saying to residents, “No more crosswalks!”

In contrast, consider how Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro famously fixed a broken freeway in 12 days. Then-Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels got average Bureau of Motor Vehicles visit times down to nine minutes. Back in 1994, after the Northridge earthquake, local authorities had the Santa Monica Freeway back in service in less than three months. And recently, when public pressure was applied, even LADOT found the time to remove and repaint crosswalks in 10 days.

Los Angeles should be working to streamline every process it can, increasing state capacity and making it easier to do good. But seeing this happen will require a fundamental political reorientation. Moderates must stop pretending the status quo works, and progressives should stop promising ambitious moonshots without first making existing services functional.

But most importantly, it requires more citizens like my friends at Stoner Park, who are invested enough in their city to seek reform, ideally with their hands and their votes.

Thomas Irwin is an economic development professional for a nonprofit in Los Angeles and a housing organizer with the Faith and Housing Coalition and Eastside Housing for All. He writes “The Pontification” on Substack.