What Street Construction?

Photo by Atwater Village Newbie via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr

"City of LA's Bureau of Street Services successfully cleared vehicles from the streets of Atwater Village by 6:00am, but haven't started much work here 2 hours later," the neighborhood blogger noted today in this Flickr photo. Another photo shows a car ticketed for street sweeping restriction: "City of LA is leaving $58 parking tickets on cars that had to move off closed streets in Atwater Village and had noplace to park but on other streets restricted for sweeping."

In a blog post earlier this week, the anonymous blogger vents "if your block seems to be in reasonably good condition and you wish Street Services would go do something more useful, like repair potholes and cracks in other parts of the neighborhood, well that's really too bad for you."

But as Street Services director Bill Robertson explains, waiting for a street to fail before fixing it is far more costly than maintaining it at its current state, which saves the city money in the long run. It's the only way to do it when the city underfunds a department responsible for 6,500 miles of streets--1,000 of those that are currently "failed"--and 800 miles of alleys (oh, and 10,750 miles of sidewalks).