none of the local politicians in this article express any embarrassment or shame over their city's failure to maintain the streets in good working order
Oakland has been a tough place, and one of the things this has meant is we really don’t have a big budget. A lot of people are seeing the SF/SV wealth pouring in, but because a lot of land is still being taxed at levels from 10-40 years ago the city isn’t getting that money.
That means we’re getting the government services of several decades ago. This is an issue for a lot of other California cities beside Oakland — and the 2020 split roll ballot initiative will give Californians a chance to better fund our government.
Further our new transit department, OakDOT, is doing creative work with a limited budget. They’re taking the MVP approach to rolling out better infrastructure, while also being one of the first DOTs to prioritize equity in terms of who gets access to limited transit funds first.
Should they? Doing this work officially has a large overhead. At their level they need to plan for the current + future work and covering whole areas effectively rather than fixing single issues. Taking one-off workers like people from the article do would be a bureaucracy hell.
Not defending the bad state of the road. But if they do the best they can with the available budget and get as much of it allocated as they can... should they be ashamed? And ashamed of what - state funding? government? money allocation?
Or maybe they're actually bad at their jobs. But from this article is hard to tell.
Well, they did say that that there is a $100 million road improvement fund and some kind of "pothole blitz". I'd rather hear a plan than an apology I guess.
The current crop of local politicians are not to blame - it’s squarely the fault of generations of politicians and voters who severely overbuilt road systems without a plan to fund maintenance.
We should tear out 50% of our asphalt and replace it with dense housing - there’s a shocking number of giant, underutilized roads that are large enough to accommodate entire buildings. That’s how you increase density and actually fund your infrastructure.
Are you talking about oakland specifically or American cities generally? I don't really think this applies to oakland, which was built out 50-100 years ago and has almost no new roads in the last several decades.
Maintenance was deferred here for way too long, and now it's going to take a long time and a lot of money to get caught up.
> severely overbuilt road systems without a plan to fund maintenance
I've heard this before (in Los Angeles), but what I don't quite get about this explanation is: how did they have enough money to build the roads in the first place, back in the days when Oakland had a smaller population and tax base? Also, does it actually cost more money to maintain the roads then to build them in the first place (really not sure, maybe it does)?
The city council needs to be replaced with people who aren't quite as crooked. Fortunately, the FBI is actively working on this problem. One down, seven to go.
The vigilantes should sue Oakland for expenses at the end of the year, would make for a hell of a case, particularly if they can demonstrate safety and quality at lower cost than govt would have spent.
Literally, if someone is hurt, the city has the sovereign immunity. You cannot even start a tort here. The only option, besides voting, is to protest or ultimately remove such officials by force.
So, where does the repair budget go? Excuses that it's too low are just that, excuses, since people apparently would do it for free.
When you pay close to half your income in taxes and recieve few services other than roads I don't think it's fair to say that you aren't owed anything.
Oakland is a disaster. If I recall correctly, someone from the U.N. went to Oakland a year or two ago and declared a humanitarian crisis or something to that effect. I remember the wording was quite strong, saying that it matched conditions in third world countries they've been to which are in crisis. How people can just step right past so many homeless people and so much obvious city disrepair and human brokenness for years on end is beyond me. Yet Oakland and nearby Berkeley are home to a lot of people who are considered "progressive" and "caring" and who supposedly want a better world. If you can't achieve positive results for the people in your immediate vicinity (which the people of Oakland and Berkeley very much have the power to do, especially with things as simple as potholes), then do you get to count yourself as a person who can say they are working towards a better world? Thumbs up for these so-called vigilantes. They talk less and act more. I just hope they don't let the mayor co-opt their efforts by letting her go around saying she's all about it.
I remember reading a story by a motorcyclist who had ridden around the world. He had ridden through the most inhospitable places - some because of nature, some because of warfare.
I believe he was going through a US city and slept under a tree with his bike parked nearby, and he was woken and told it was too dangerous to do that. I thought it was Oakland, (but I might have misremembered and it was some other dangerous urban area).
Yeah, well... my parents won't let me walk home after dark in my tiny Canadian home town because it's "too dangerous", while it is objectively two orders of magnitude less dangerous than the large American city in which I now live (and routinely walk around after dark). People exaggerate danger, I've found.
I've spent many months cycling and walking throughout the US, mainly in the 2000s; it was striking to me to learn how scared some people are of the world around them.
I could imagine your story playing out anywhere - someone saying "it's too dangerous to do that here", doesn't actually mean much about the actual danger.
That’s an exaggeration. Oakland is actually a nice place.
My observation is that, in the eyes of progressives, working class folks and politicians, the city government and services are first a source of jobs, and services are secondary.
Oakland was just ranked as one of the 5 worst-managed cities in the United States based on the following factors: 1) Financial Stability, 2) Education, 3) Health, 4) Safety, 5) Economy and 6) Infrastructure & Pollution.
And then there's this...
"A United Nations expert on housing explicitly singled out San Francisco and Oakland as the only two U.S. cities that are part of a 'global scandal'". "[The U.N. Special rapporteur] cites SF and Oakland along with worst slums in the world", calling the "'cruel and inhuman' treatment of the homeless 'a human rights violation'". She went on to say “There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen”. "In several respects, she said, the situation in California's cities [she was speaking from Oakland] is worse than other parts of the world"
"In Mexico City, I visited a low-income settlement that had been moved by the city onto empty land near a railway line,” [the U.N. Special rapporteur] said. "They had no running water. They stole electricity." The camp was noisy and dangerous. She noted that the camp in Mexico is virtually identical to those she visited in Oakland"
"Every person I spoke to today [in Oakland] has told me, 'we are human beings,'" said [the U.N. Special rapporteur] about her conversations with camp residents. "But if you need to assert to a UN representative that you are a human, well, something is seriously wrong."
There are a lot of homeless people here for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that the 'progressives' you call out aren't making homelessness illegal. They aren't making laws against pan handling, and sleeping on sidewalks. They're not trying to bus these people away to other cities.
Oakland and other cities are doing their best to own the homeless problem and provide support to these people where they are. They've built 'tuff-shed' communities, set up sites with showers and services, recently opened a space dedicated to people living in RVs...
Are they perfect? Do they solve the problem? No. But the city of Oakland is trying to solve a problem that should not be reasonably expected to be solved by a city. This problem is bigger than Oakland - and I think the city should get credit for making the investments they do to try and help.
If every other city was doing the same thing, homelessness would probably not be the big problem it is.
Because the old people who dominate local politics literally scream and talk over you when you try to do anything that would address a few big root causes (housing prices, prop 13 & property taxes).
That city council sure hates it when someone makes them look stupid. I like how that guy claims that children will be dramatized by crude drawings of a penis. Does he know that half of those children have a real one and aren't traumatized?
When Elon Musk got the boring company going, I couldn't help wondering why there weren't entreprenuers in paving.
Why don't we have giant computer-controlled machines that go down roads, suck them in and grind them up and spit out new roads behind themselves -- as the defacto paving scenario?
I know they do this sometimes. But why not all the time? Instead of pothole fixing, just fix the entire road. Cheap road machines, drive the price down. And put down lane markings and reflectors as part of the process. And do every thing only at night.
Because stubbornly asphalt and concrete take time to pour. Plus, there is a significant amount of work just in repairing the subgrade, otherwise the newly-finished road surface will just heave and buckle. And we do have paving entrepreneurs, they open and operate paving companies.
Dumb question: if you reduce the cost of temporary fixes enough, does that become a good permanent strategy?
I'd imagine best practices are currently designed with a large per-issue overhead in mind. Getting men & material to a given location is expensive, so fixes need to last. If you have a robot that doesn't mind finding & resurfacing the same damn pothole every time it rains, would that compete?
Gah. Cold patch. That stuff seems to be next to useless, with approximately the same effectiveness as just pouring gravel into the pothole. It just spreads out everywhere.
Overall it is slightly better than filling the hole with gravel, since gravel will tend to abrade the edges of the road surface and make the hole larger. It's still a crappy fix though, the only advantage is it's quick and cheap.
You're supposed to scrape the overflow back into the hole and tamp everything down. If you do it properly it's not as good as real asphalt but it's a hell of a lot better than gravel, or a hole.
Unfortunately where I live the workers are incredibly lazy or incredibly mismanaged. They just dump it and leave it heaping up above the road surface. That degree of shoddiness is a mark of societal dysfunction...
I know it's not acceptable to just jump in there and say " word my brotha".
But this may be a reason.
No matter how good the tech is , you need guys out there swinging shovels.
It's not fun,
It's not easy,
It's hot and sweaty.
It don't pay like FAANG
It hurts your body but you won't need to go to a gym after work so you can sleep
Digging a ditch for prevailing wage in Calif is around 60 bucks an hour for union wages- even more depending upon the trade.
Apprenticeship FTW
Just employ them in the same continuous way, but let them fix more problems.
I'll bet if you asked those guys, they'd rather use a backhoe or a bobcat instead of a shovel. Their bodies will last a lot longer too - I have many older friends who just destroyed their bodies doing crap like that when they were younger.
The math here says more about America's road addiction than anything else. Oakland has an unusually large mileage of roads which are unusually broad. Additionally many of these roads are on unstable hillsides. The reality is that even if Oakland were hugely wealthy and efficient with its resources then there would still be a problem. Treating road repair like some kind of moral issue clouds the real costs.
I don't know which roads the vigilantes are focusing on. But my guess is they aren't concerned with the less frequently used roads on the hillsides. They're probably more concerned with the ones that should be obvious to city officials to fix sooner rather than later. The ones that impact people significantly near the higher concentrations of homes and places of business.
The road conditions in Oakland have been this way for decades. And whenever you talk about a problem like this in Oakland, it calls forth the general condition of Oakland, which very much is a moral problem (both due to the alleged corruption that keeps it from changing as well as the fact that you can barely enter the city without being confronted by extreme poverty and people with severe mental health problems who are just left behind). The holes in the road have at least one thing in common with the overall state of the city: neglect.
The arguments against them were absurd. Essentially: (1) Don't help people if there's a chance the broken justice system hangs you for it. (2) Don't help people unless you can help everyone. (3) Don't help because thinking about how the government is failing at one of its primary jobs makes us feel bad and makes the government look like it's failing at one of its primary jobs.
I don't know about Oakland but in Minneapolis the city will pay for damage caused by potholes. They are also very quick to patch roads after the spring thaw, normally within a day or two.
57 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadThat means we’re getting the government services of several decades ago. This is an issue for a lot of other California cities beside Oakland — and the 2020 split roll ballot initiative will give Californians a chance to better fund our government.
Further our new transit department, OakDOT, is doing creative work with a limited budget. They’re taking the MVP approach to rolling out better infrastructure, while also being one of the first DOTs to prioritize equity in terms of who gets access to limited transit funds first.
They say they can't hire people, even with those budgets and with residents wanting to help / collaborate.
Not defending the bad state of the road. But if they do the best they can with the available budget and get as much of it allocated as they can... should they be ashamed? And ashamed of what - state funding? government? money allocation?
Or maybe they're actually bad at their jobs. But from this article is hard to tell.
We should tear out 50% of our asphalt and replace it with dense housing - there’s a shocking number of giant, underutilized roads that are large enough to accommodate entire buildings. That’s how you increase density and actually fund your infrastructure.
Maintenance was deferred here for way too long, and now it's going to take a long time and a lot of money to get caught up.
I've heard this before (in Los Angeles), but what I don't quite get about this explanation is: how did they have enough money to build the roads in the first place, back in the days when Oakland had a smaller population and tax base? Also, does it actually cost more money to maintain the roads then to build them in the first place (really not sure, maybe it does)?
What they ought to do is pay a bounty per job, and bond the "vigilantes" against injury/damage.
So, where does the repair budget go? Excuses that it's too low are just that, excuses, since people apparently would do it for free.
I believe he was going through a US city and slept under a tree with his bike parked nearby, and he was woken and told it was too dangerous to do that. I thought it was Oakland, (but I might have misremembered and it was some other dangerous urban area).
I could imagine your story playing out anywhere - someone saying "it's too dangerous to do that here", doesn't actually mean much about the actual danger.
My observation is that, in the eyes of progressives, working class folks and politicians, the city government and services are first a source of jobs, and services are secondary.
And then there's this...
"A United Nations expert on housing explicitly singled out San Francisco and Oakland as the only two U.S. cities that are part of a 'global scandal'". "[The U.N. Special rapporteur] cites SF and Oakland along with worst slums in the world", calling the "'cruel and inhuman' treatment of the homeless 'a human rights violation'". She went on to say “There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen”. "In several respects, she said, the situation in California's cities [she was speaking from Oakland] is worse than other parts of the world"
"In Mexico City, I visited a low-income settlement that had been moved by the city onto empty land near a railway line,” [the U.N. Special rapporteur] said. "They had no running water. They stole electricity." The camp was noisy and dangerous. She noted that the camp in Mexico is virtually identical to those she visited in Oakland"
"Every person I spoke to today [in Oakland] has told me, 'we are human beings,'" said [the U.N. Special rapporteur] about her conversations with camp residents. "But if you need to assert to a UN representative that you are a human, well, something is seriously wrong."
I wouldn't call it "a nice place".
There are a lot of homeless people here for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that the 'progressives' you call out aren't making homelessness illegal. They aren't making laws against pan handling, and sleeping on sidewalks. They're not trying to bus these people away to other cities.
Oakland and other cities are doing their best to own the homeless problem and provide support to these people where they are. They've built 'tuff-shed' communities, set up sites with showers and services, recently opened a space dedicated to people living in RVs...
Are they perfect? Do they solve the problem? No. But the city of Oakland is trying to solve a problem that should not be reasonably expected to be solved by a city. This problem is bigger than Oakland - and I think the city should get credit for making the investments they do to try and help.
If every other city was doing the same thing, homelessness would probably not be the big problem it is.
Why don't we have giant computer-controlled machines that go down roads, suck them in and grind them up and spit out new roads behind themselves -- as the defacto paving scenario?
I know they do this sometimes. But why not all the time? Instead of pothole fixing, just fix the entire road. Cheap road machines, drive the price down. And put down lane markings and reflectors as part of the process. And do every thing only at night.
I'd imagine best practices are currently designed with a large per-issue overhead in mind. Getting men & material to a given location is expensive, so fixes need to last. If you have a robot that doesn't mind finding & resurfacing the same damn pothole every time it rains, would that compete?
There's the assumption that per-crack overhead is too large to justify frequent visits again.
Unfortunately where I live the workers are incredibly lazy or incredibly mismanaged. They just dump it and leave it heaping up above the road surface. That degree of shoddiness is a mark of societal dysfunction...
I'll bet if you asked those guys, they'd rather use a backhoe or a bobcat instead of a shovel. Their bodies will last a lot longer too - I have many older friends who just destroyed their bodies doing crap like that when they were younger.
The road conditions in Oakland have been this way for decades. And whenever you talk about a problem like this in Oakland, it calls forth the general condition of Oakland, which very much is a moral problem (both due to the alleged corruption that keeps it from changing as well as the fact that you can barely enter the city without being confronted by extreme poverty and people with severe mental health problems who are just left behind). The holes in the road have at least one thing in common with the overall state of the city: neglect.
No, really: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/4/29/18621740/this-wgn-anc...
What if someone gets in a car wreck because of a pothole? Is the city liable?