The road ahead

The scariest thing I do each day is walk my kids to school. It's only four blocks but we really pack in the full LA experience: speeding cars, wide lanes, obsolete signals, unmarked crosswalks, broken streetlamps, jackknifed sidewalks, very few shade trees, and the ominous trails of splintered tail lights. In 2018 the city began outreach on an ambitious plan that would make our walk safer by creating a network of kid-friendly streets connecting 21 schools in the neighborhood — it even includes planting shade trees. The grant money, which came from the state, was awarded in 2023. But due to staffing shortages, the soonest LADOT can install these safety improvements near our school is 2028.

With traffic deaths once again the leading cause of death for kids in LA, I don't need to imagine the potential outcome of delaying this work. Not far from our house, a 4-year-old named Alessa was killed in a crosswalk while walking to school with her mom, a story that has been covered since 2019 by transportation reporter Ryan Fonseca. Alessa's family sued the city for wrongful death, claiming LA was aware that the intersection was dangerous and did nothing, as Fonseca reported: "Documents show city officials knew for years that schoolchildren were at particular risk around Alessa's school." In 2023, the city paid the family $9.5 million to settle. It certainly wasn't the biggest liability payout that year — LAPD lawsuits perennially hold that honor — but it was part of a growing trend. Yesterday, these ballooning liability payouts were cited as one reason LA is facing a nearly $1 billion budget shortfall. And just looking at the cases that are bankrupting the city, many have one element in common: our dangerously outdated and neglected infrastructure.

Last fall, LA Mayor Karen Bass promised a big change: the city, instead of planning its $1 billion infrastructure budget one year at a time, would switch to a capital improvement plan, or CIP, where 15 departments would work together to set shared, multi-year priorities for funding infrastructure in the right-of-way. The text of Executive Directive 9 is clear about the stakes: "Many communities suffer from deferred maintenance that degrade our streets, sidewalks, parks and aging facilities, and delay improvements that prevent injury and save lives." As I fantasized about someday walking to school without fear of death, I also had a concern: "One major challenge confronting this new steering committee will be balancing any improvements being proposed 'for the games' versus the improvements that are urgently needed for Angelenos trying to navigate our deadly streets, dangerous sidewalks, and inaccessible parks every single day."

As it turns out, there wasn't much of a challenge. According to a mayor's office presentation made at yesterday's Pedestrian Advisory Committee meeting — and a task order solicitation posted today — the city's first capital improvement plan will be focused exclusively on projects related to the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

It's already being referred to as the "Games CIP."

This is not necessarily a surprise. Megaevent-hosting was mentioned by officials as the motivation for creating a CIP in the first place, and this language — "As we prepare for major international events and the uncertainties of a changing climate, we must ensure our City’s infrastructure is safe, clean, accessible, resilient, well-maintained, and world-class" — was right there in the original ED 9 order. But creating a CIP is all about setting priorities as a city. And I would guess that, at this particular moment, some Angelenos might argue the first CIP should be focused on how to rebuild $350 million of fire-decimated public infrastructure to set brand-new, climate-resilient standards for the city.

Before I go on, let's also just take a moment to appreciate that, once again, the city is planning to make capital improvements for our so-called "no-build games."

What's most puzzling to me about this Games CIP is the timeline. Obviously, yes, we should have done this years ago. But funding coming through the 2026-2027 budget seems way too late to make any significant changes by early 2028. Unless the plan is to come up with a whole new system to tear up a shit ton of pavement and plant a shit ton of trees REALLY FAST, in which case I'm in. But the whole idea behind a CIP is that it's a long-range planning document, not a quick-fix one. Long Beach's current plan to build infrastructure for 2028, Elevate '28, is a five-year plan that's already in motion.

LA does have a few games-related capital projects finally happening, but the timeline is completely different from the Games CIP. For example: LADOT recently awarded a $5 million contract to Fehr & Peers to make improvements to active transportation corridors around and between venues. The task order solicitation shows a schedule where construction begins at the end of 2025.

I'm not necessarily saying LADOT shouldn't make these games-focused improvements. These are dangerous streets on the high-injury network. And sporting venues are major trip generators — of course we should make the public right of way around them more safe and multimodal so people can walk, bike, or take transit to all the games, all the time.

But ideally, in a normal city, you would do both the games stuff and the everyday stuff simultaneously. In Paris — WHICH WAS AWARDED THE GAMES IN 2017, THE SAME YEAR AS LA; please put this on my tombstone — the city built an entire network of bike infrastructure then added even more bike infrastructure just to connect venues. Paris also built additional transportation infrastructure, including turning 300 streets in front of schools into tree-filled plazas for play. These types of spaces have been piloted here in LA. While not official venues, school streets would be transformative to have in place for local families ahead of the games. And they would check both boxes.

But my dreams of the legacy improvements that might still happen by 2028 are fading fast, because even though LA never had enough money to make basic fixes — now we have even less.

That was the last bit of bad news in yesterday's financial officer report — the city's revenue projections are way down. Several measures intended to generate new revenue will be jockeying for positions on our 2026 ballots: a new funding mechanism for parks (a needs assessment is currently in progress), a fire bond, and an infrastructure bond are all being discussed. In this political climate, there's now added pressure on the city to produce a successful series of megaevents. But the more immediate question is who, exactly, is going to produce them. "The severity of the revenue decline, paired with rising costs, has created a budget gap that makes layoffs nearly inevitable," City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo said yesterday. "We’re not looking at dozens or even hundreds of layoffs, but thousands."

I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this, so I'm not even going to pose this as a question. But if LA is planning for "thousands" of layoffs across departments, and the services laid out by the Games CIP have already been established as essential, who gets to keep their jobs?

The number of layoffs isn't set. Until the budget is released next month, city officials are working to negotiate with unions that represent city workers. But some of those layoffs had previously been set in motion, impacting the safety of LA's streets. In 2023 a mom was killed walking to school with her 6-year old. With an understaffed department still unable to accelerate permanent fixes, the city moved quickly to install plastic bollards and speed humps — good, but the bare minimum, infrastructurally — outside many schools. But the city also dramatically boosted the number of crossing guards: over the past year, the number had grown to nearly 500 LADOT employees, all over LA, who made walking to school safer overnight. This month, the city ran out of money to pay those crossing guards. Ours is already gone. 🔥