Asphalt and ghost lines: Fresh-paved LA streets go unstriped

It would seem to be a simple task — to paint white lane lines and yellow center lines on a street once it's been paved. But a lack of coordination among Los Angeles city departments, staff shortages and equipment breakdowns have made the average wait for paint on city streets about 22 days.

During those days, motorists navigate by what Councilman Mitch Englander called "ghost striping," a combination of faint outlines and plastic stick-on reflectors that mark the lanes, left-turn pockets, stop limit lines and crosswalks waiting to be added.

When the day comes for a street to finally get its stripes, the city's two striping trucks roll in. The city has only one truck that can lay down white stripes, and one truck that paints yellow stripes.

The city's Finance and Budget Committee has recommended the council spend $2.8 million to speed up the process in response to a Department of Transportation pledge to cut the pave-to-paint turnaround time down to just ten days.

That money will buy some equipment and hire ten workers for three months. But it will take a bigger investment of about $14.5 million to resolve the problem long term, according to a Department of Transportation report. It and the Bureau of Street Services and other departments that have a role in fixing streets, will jointly request the larger amount in next year's budget.

Jay Handal, who co-chairs a budget watchdog committee drawn from L-A's elected neighborhood councils, criticized the engineering, paving and striping departments for not coordinating their work.

"We usually ended up with blackout tar, which is dangerous for a driver especially at night when there's no striping on the street," Handal said.

In the past five years, as the city increased the number of miles of streets getting fresh asphalt paving or the black touch-up coating called slurry, the city fell farther behind in its striping, a report said. Staff shortages and equipment breakdowns were also a problem.