Nearly two months ago, on November 12, Mayor Eric Garcetti stood with Councilmembers Mike Bonin and Joe Buscaino and Controller Ron Galerpin at the road repaving project at Barrington Avenue and National Boulevard. The Mayor announced that, thanks to new revenue, the city would now be repaving 200 additional miles of roadway, above and beyond its regular repaving budget every year.
Garcetti also promised, in response to a question posed by me on behalf of Streetsblog, that the city would look at ways to streamline the process on getting paint on the ground after a road is repaved. Earlier in the same press conference, Buscaino told horror stories of how it could take weeks to get the road repainted leading to confused travelers and unsafe conditions.
This might not sound like the most difficult goal, but it requires coordination both between city departments, including Transportation (LADOT) and Public Works' Bureau of Street Services (BSS), and outside agencies such as Big Blue Bus and Metro.
Sadly, even by the most generous of estimates, the poster-project for the new way of doing things took a slow route to repainting. The intersection of Barrington and National was repaved in mid-November 2014. It was repainted in 2015.
In mid-December I inquired to the Mayor's office on why the intersection had not been repainted yet. They responded that even though the intersection at National and Barrington had been begun to be repaved in mid-November, the repaving phase of the project hadn't been completed until early December.
Even if we accept that rationale, it still took a month to get the street repainted.
This isn't a knock on the Mayor's office. I'm happy that Barrington was repaved. I'm happy that there are new continental crosswalks at the east-west intersections. But the project timing does provide an interesting baseline to measure how much progress the city makes when it comes to trimming the time it takes to get crosswalks, bike lanes, and other road markings repainted after repaving.
We'll find a repaving project next November and follow-up to see how much the city has improved. How are the city's repaving and repainting timelines working in your neighborhood, whether in L.A. or other municipalities?
