- State & Local
- California
In 2016, Los Angeles County voters approved a permanent, half-cent sales tax hike for expanding and improving transportation and enhancing public safety. Despite raising the baseline county sales tax to 9.5 percent, the tax hike passed with nearly 70 percent of the vote, reflecting the traffic congestion, long commute times, and poor road quality endemic within Los Angeles County, and which costs Angelenos dearly each year in wasted time, wasted fuel, and higher car insurance and auto repair costs.
Voters trust governments to use tax revenue to prioritize the projects with the greatest impact and to build those projects at a reasonable cost and on time. But one LA project—an eight-mile bike path along the Los Angeles River—is a highly visible testament to how government violates that trust.
Building this path, which will connect two existing bike paths along the river to create a continuous thirty-two-mile path, may now cost as much as $1.2 billion. Construction hasn’t begun, and there is no firm completion date. Even the approaching 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, which is viewed as a motivating deadline for delivering LA infrastructure, will arrive with this unfinished.
The bike path had been advertised as one of twenty-eight priority transportation projects, dubbed Twenty-Eight by ’28, that were to be completed before the Olympics. But the bike path is now listed for an estimated 2031 completion date, fifteen years after the sales tax increase, and has the latest estimated completion date of all twenty-eight projects. An LA transportation spokesman noted late last year that “at this point, we are not looking to complete any segment, or at least we are looking to complete maybe . . . groundbreak for Olympic Games, but not complete any of the segments.”
The project was considered not just for recreation but also for bike commuters from the Boyle Heights and Chinatown neighborhoods, and for those riding the train to be able to bike to LA’s Union Station. But Los Angeles is as close to a pure car-culture city as there is. Realistically, how many Angelenos will be commuting by bike from Chinatown or Boyle Heights, or riding their bike to Union Station along this path? Despite LA’s nearly ideal year-round climate, Census data show that only about 1 percent of LA workers commuted by bike in 2014. Even frigid Minneapolis; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; and Missoula, Montana, have a higher percentage of workers commuting than LA does.
If you have spent any time in Los Angeles, you know why so few commute by bike. Los Angeles is an incredibly dangerous place for biking commuters. Between 2020 and 2024, Los Angeles reported 3,107 bike accidents, including 71 fatalities. If you ride your bike in LA, you are taking a significant risk, one that few are willing to do. Los Angeles is car central, and that is not going to change anytime in the foreseeable future.
This bike path project, which was to have been finished last year, remains in the environmental impact review (EIR) period. Public comments were submitted on the draft report until last month.
EIRs seemingly take forever. For projects like this bike path, the EIR is tasked with considering all possible significant environmental impacts, including air quality, noise, aesthetics, effect on biological resources, effect on cultural and historical resources or artifacts, traffic, hydrology, and environmental justice, among others. Baseline data is then collected on issues ranging from biological species to traffic counts, typically taken over several months, to noise and air pollution, to soil sampling.
Those involved in the process can include city planning, city transportation department, county flood control, state transportation department, utility companies, and even rail agencies. There can also be conflicting assessments from these different agencies, ranging from ADA considerations to floodplain standards. Moreover, whereas some of these issues have clear definitions that are in principle straightforward to measure and assess—such as noise, which is measured in decibels—others are not so clearly defined, such as “environmental justice,” which will mean different things to different people, and which is a relatively recent addition to California’s EIR playbook. There are also six alternatives to the project under consideration.
And, of course, costs have risen alongside the project delays. Early concepts resembled a straightforward single-bank path. Over time, alternatives have expanded to potentially include dual-bank routing, 16- to 20-foot-wide facilities, new bridges, grade separations, and elaborate access points.
Los Angeles did not stumble into a billion-dollar price tag by accident. It designed its way there.
Metro, which is leading the project, has built hundreds of millions of dollars into the estimate to account for inflation, material volatility, and unknowns. While prudence is sensible, contingencies of this magnitude also signal a system that expects overruns as routine. Instead of enforcing cost discipline, the response is to normalize extraordinary expense.
It is not just an enormous budget overrun that plagues this project; there is a lack of a clear plan for governance of the path. LA Metro funds and designs transportation projects but does not want to assume long-term maintenance on land it does not own. The county, meanwhile, appears reluctant to take on new obligations without dedicated maintenance funding. The result is bureaucratic stalemate. Projects should not reach advanced planning stages without clear operations and maintenance visions. That this happens in Los Angeles highlights the deeper problems within its governance.
If Los Angeles gave up on the eight-mile bike corridor, then $1 billion and perhaps more could pay for a substantial set of transportation improvements in Los Angeles County if the funding focused on repairing existing infrastructure and selectively expanding capacity on the most congested corridors. Because the region has thousands of miles of aging streets and some of the most congested urban roads in the United States, the key question is not whether $1 billion would move the needle, but by how much.
One of the most direct uses of $1 billion would be repairing deteriorated streets across Los Angeles County. The cost of road resurfacing varies, depending on the level of deterioration and the type of repair required. Some streets require only a slurry seal, which is about $100,000 per mile for a four-lane road, and which can extend the life of the road for several years. Roads in greater disrepair require replacing the top layer of asphalt, which is about $800,000 per mile for four lanes. If a $1 billion budget were averaged 50/50 across these two repair categories, more than two thousand miles of four-lane LA roads could be upgraded.
It is obvious what the choice should be. So, why isn’t common sense prevailing? LA voters need to ask themselves this question later this year.
