Big wide stroads enable this to happen in the first place.
If you change streets to not feel like highways then a lot of this would be impossible to do in the first place. However that would require a bigger reckoning with car culture in the US that it seems we’re not ready to have yet.
This. I live in south LA and I’m a block away from a street with regular takeovers, mostly on Sunday nights. It is a residential street with seven (!) lanes of traffic. Part of the problem is admittedly that LAPD does not enforce road traffic laws because doing so would inconvenience their friends and family, and they don’t care about the (mostly black or Latino) residents of the residential neighborhoods in which these happen. But takeovers don’t happen in cities that are designed for humans because they’re physically impossible.
Cities that were "designed for humans" would have open businesses and activities for people to do at night. Here in SF for example businesses start closing around 7PM. There's one restaurant near me open later than 10PM, but it has no indoor seating. Golden Gate Park is covered with signs telling me not to be there after sundown. The roads aren't the problem — there's nothing else to do.
I can absolutely assure you there is plenty to do in Los Angeles at 7pm. It’s not San Francisco. The problem is the seven and nine lane residential streets with no traffic lights for a mile.
I think part of what "not designed for humans" is probably suggesting is that you shouldn't have to drive away from your nine lane residential street in order to go find something to do.
I don’t think it has anything to do with the number of lanes directly, it’s just a bunch of opportunistic assholes taking advantage of a bunch of lazy cops.
I have little insight into LA because South Pasadena isn’t known for street races but here in San Diego, the intersection between my house and the I15 (in an immigrant/family oriented suburb at the outskirts of the city) regularly gets taken over by these assholes on Friday nights. They not only do donuts in a four lane intersection but use it as a launch point for late night freeway races which regularly break triple digit mph [1].
The cops are fucking useless [2]. There’s at least three squad cars every time and all they do is a half assed attempt at crowd control.
At this point I’m hoping my alibaba bulk order of caltrops doesn’t get held up by customs.
[1] a few years ago “in my youth” I pushed my Toyota Corolla to the max racing one of these fellows at midnight going west on the 52 right before the warped asphalt (which has sadly been fixed). If I managed to reach the limits of my speedometer you can bet the guys with turbos are even worse.
[2] a few months ago I was driving down the freeway a few cars behind a cop right as they received a call. For the next five minutes I watched several dozen cars completely ignore the flashing lights, forcing the cop car to weave in and out of traffic like a street racer.
I don't think it does either. The article even mentions this:
Drivers became more brazen during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, which cleared normally clogged streets and freeways of traffic. Suddenly, many streets were empty and drivers believed they had a newfound freedom to speed, either for takeovers or street racing.
Actually this is a nation wide phenomenon and not just in LA. Road deaths/accidents and road rage incidents are increasing since 2020. I believe The article mentions the takeovers in Arizona also.
I personally think that quote is exactly correct. The empty streets in 2020 caused people to start going faster and taking advantage of the roads and they haven't changed their mindset.
Although in fairness to the police, pulling over a person for a traffic ticket can lead to a gun fight so it's possible police have decided it has a high risk and low reward as far as their time goes.
Before the late 1800s, cityfolk did not have to go get entertained at night or do other business -and they lived and they prospered for thousands of years. Nor do people in small villages have to.
I live in inner city Portland where street racing is a huge problem. I live in an area designed for humans.. the area was great until the lockdowns came
Lockdowns of any kind are not designed for humans.
> they don’t care about the (mostly black or Latino) residents of the residential neighborhoods in which these happen.
From wikipedia:
> As of 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department had 10,008 officers sworn in. Of these, 81% (8,158) were male and 19% (1,850) female. The racial/ethnic breakdown:
48.8% or 4,882 was Hispanic/Latino (of any race)
30.9% or 3,090 was non-Hispanic White
9.62% or 962 was African American
7.66% or 766 was Asian
2.46% or 246 was Filipino American
remaining were Indian and Other Ethnicities.
I'm not the one who framed it as a race issue, am I? The issue is almost certainly one of class; cops are paid well and are likely to live in middle class neighborhoods. The drag-races likely most common in lower income neighborhoods.
true class is how someone conducts themselves, not their color, neighborhood, job, or income.
is it nice to stage street takeovers or is it dangerous and thugish? what did the "cops" do that was questionable, except perhaps show too much restraint?
When I talk about class I am talking about income, not moral conduct. That should be obvious from the context. Cops push the races out of high/medium income neighborhoods because that is where the cops live.
I'm not a fan of American car culture, but this complaint sounds misplaced. Seoul has no shortage of 10-lane streets, sometimes right next to residential areas. I've yet to hear about anyone "taking over" the street.
What America needs is a competent police force that's held accountable for what it's doing (or not doing).
We need to apply bigger penalties and have better enforcement. We also could use some dialing down this aspect of pop-culture (movies and music in particular)
Comment to skorpeon87 [who is shadowbanned] who said:
"only fools could believe people are influenced by movies, music, and video games."
If that were true, then we would not see people protesting against misogyny or clamoring for more representation in the various media and producers would tell them to take a hike that it was disproven in the 90s.
> We also could use some dialing down this aspect of pop-culture (movies and music in particular)
Some politicians tried this back in the 90s and were widely derided for it. The matter hasn't really been addressed since; the public has seemingly decided that only fools could believe people are influenced by movies, music, and video games.
I bet in Seoul though they don't hesitate to just strip you of your drivers license completely for infractions like this. That's basically impossible to do in the us. We are utterly dependent on driving, and to strip someone of a license is to effectively remove their means of subsistence.
Not exactly. Rural 2 lane roads have a long history as being used as drag strips. Although perhaps less problematic when it's not near any houses, cross streets, etc.
I am an avid strong towns reader. However I live in inner city Portland in the exact neighborhood strong towns wants everywhere and street racing is a huge problem here which has led to homicides.
Blaming this on stroads is a dangerous politicized oversimplification.
they're talking about stroads. the anti-stroads people aren't against cars or roads or streets, they're against stroads in particular, because they combine all the worst things about streets and roads, and kill all their benefits.
i think the anti-stroads people are right but naive: stroads are bad, but how did we get them? and in light of your answer to that, how can we expect them to be fixed? undoing stroads will be a huge expense that will only benefit the overwhelming mass of people. it'll never happen.
> This is a word that is exclusively used by anti-carrists.
No, it is used by folks who like proper design:
> Streets: The function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth. On a street, we're attempting to grow the complex ecosystem that produces community wealth. In these environments, people (outside of their automobiles) are the indicator species of success. Successful streets are environments where humans, and human interaction, flourish.
> Roads: In contrast, the function of a road is to connect productive places. You can think of a road as a refinement of the railroad — a road on rails — where people board in one place, depart in another and there is a high speed connection between the two.
> Stroads: Stroads are a mash-up of these two types of paths. We like to call them "the futon of transportation" because, just as a futon is neither a particularly good bed nor a particularly good couch, a stroad is neither a particularly good road or a particularly good street.
People who use the word "stroads" want society to stop building stroads and go (back to) building streets and roads. See the ten-minute mark of the video you posted on how The Netherlands does it: stroomweg (highway), gebiedsontsluitingsweg (road), erftoegangsweg (street).
See also his video "The Best Country in the World for Drivers":
You get stroads when people put businesses on roads rather than on streets. When a road is "well-designed", that is, functioning as a route rather than a destination, it seems like a clever place to put a business, because people can get there quickly. But once you build a lot of commercial uses along a road, traffic gets worse because people are slowing down to enter parking lots, and it usually gets widened, making it more dangerous to cross: now you have a stroad. The "obvious" solution is not to allow development along roads, instead pushing this to streets (which may require building more streets), but the lure of tax revenue and short-term thinking is often too strong.
I'm sure you mean well, or at least as well someone who wants to restructure society according to their current hobbyhorse can possibly mean. I like walkable urbanism myself. But the problem with this kind of argument is that people know there are countries where you can have huge highways without this kind of thing happening. Some of them remember living in, say, America circa 2014. And while we cannot--nor should we want to--go back to the benighted days of eight years ago, people will naturally wonder if it's not possible to revert those changes (whatever they are) that made this specific kind of problem start to happen, instead of just plunging ahead into the total revolution of their way of living.
> Police say they don’t have enough manpower to stop such street takeovers, which have been popularized by the “Fast & Furious” movie franchise. Residents are fed up.
you'd have to be a baby to take that seriously. cops are just lobbying for more money, "manpower." how old is "fast & furious?" 20 years? more?
Are you sure it's actually easy for police to stop illegal street races without starting dozens of high speed car cases? These street racers have fast cars, little regard for public safety, and no desire to let themselves be arrested. It doesn't seem so trivial to me, but you seem to think it's just a matter of police attitude.
You're blaming street width? Why not blame oxidation or the vulcanization of rubber? Those are also involved.
For my part, I blame the shitheads not getting their asses thrown in jail with vigorous immediacy. Let the cops barricade the roads and load up the wagons.
HN draws in a large urban audience. A small, but vocal subset of urbanites absolutely hate car transportation and suburbia. It's a fast growing subculture with many adherents. They favor bike and rail transportation, "complete streets", and removal of surface parking lots.
The /r/fuckcars subreddit, for example, would absolutely turn this thread into an anti-car talking point.
I personally don’t hate cars, but I hate that we let them park anywhere for basically free. If we built more high-volume garages and then banned street parking in city cores, our sidewalk cafes and restaurant culture would improve dramatically. Remove parking, expand the sidewalks.
Road width is an issue because it inherently encourages fast, not uncommonly reckless, driving. There's a science to this which is implemented in places like the Netherlands, but it gets totally ignored by people who are excessively pro-car.
I'm sure that works well for a country the size of the Netherlands (33500km²). The 48 contiguous US states, on the other hand, comprise an area of 8 million km², and people need a way to travel and travel quickly. The alternative to accessible transportation (and affordable housing) is de facto segregation, and I was raised to believe that's a bad thing lol
It's a trendy hobbyhorse for the past couple of years: Every problem with cities is because of car culture. And the problem with rural areas is they aren't cities, because of car culture.
"Stroads" as they're called they're not a street or a raod they're both. Too wide for a street but with multiple entries and exits too much access for a road. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad
I'm surprised police wouldn't use something like a Stringer/blast ball to disperse large crowds that are beyond control, a riot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_ball
given that they blocked off the bridge, it was surprising that the police made the decision to just let it go until they got tired and left. there's one way on and one way off a bridge, and one of those ways is blocked with traffic.
These are called “sideshows”, and always have been. They started in Oakland a long time ago. The news media in Northern California has been reporting on them for years, always using the name “sideshow”.
They most commonly happen at urban intersections but have even popped up on freeways and bridges.
True, but the name comes from it being done draw people away from the main event.
The real action is (or was, anyway) happening somewhere else and the idea was to distract the cops for a while.
San Francisco is starting to experiment with minor changes: adding speed bumps that don't affect the normal flow of traffic, but get in the way of people doing doughnuts:
It's worth keeping in mind, in the context of police complaints about underfunding in the article, that the LAPD's budget is literally more than 50% of LA's entire city budget. They have nearly 10,000 officers.
Hold on a second. LAPD might be more than 50% of the budget of some Los Angeles taxing body. But --- this comes up over and over again in these discussions --- most municipalities have multiple taxing bodies. Defund advocates were all over my town claiming that the majority of our money was going to the police. But of course that wasn't true; it was a big portion of the village budget, but 2/3 of our property taxes funded school districts, which are separate taxing bodies.
Are you sure LAPD is >50% of taxes paid by LA residents? Or is it just >50% of the budget of some taxing body that is essentially just "police, fire, and sewers"?
It would be pretty shocking if LAPD was actually 50% of all Los Angeles spending. It seems pretty unlikely. Compare "Los Angeles public schools budget" to "LAPD budget" in search results.
I don't know the specific numbers for LA, but the city discretionary budget doesn't seem like an unreasonable choice for the denominator here. That's the budget from which the mayor or city council can either allocate more to the police, or not. The number probably doesn't include the school district budget but in California that's typically not controlled by the same governing body and doesn't necessarily have the same geographic boundaries; it's not just an accounting distinction. And school boards don't even have much say here; school district funding is mostly controlled at the state level.
People are hung up on what the City Council can or can't do. But the City Council is limited to that budgeting lever because other fiscal policy is devolved to other elected bodies. All those bodies together define the city's services. Nobody would live in Los Angeles if it weren't for LAUSD. Most of public health in Los Angeles is provided by the county, not the city. Some of streets & san is paid for by use fees. Water reclamation is another body.
Again: none of this is to say that LAPD can't be overfunded. It absolutely can be. You might even be able to demonstrate it by looking at LAPD as a percentage of the city general fund... over time. But you can't do a single point measurement of LAPD's allocation from the general fund and use it as a comparative metric. That's incoherent.
I'm stuck on this because it comes up over and over again in police reform discussions, and reformers/defunders/abolitionists (I'd call myself the first of those, I guess) keep making cringeworthy innumerate arguments. I'm just across the street from Chicago in a village with just 50,000 people, and even here people make the same mistake, trying to look at the village budget in isolation --- it sounds right! Just like "the Los Angeles city budget" sounds like the thing you want to look at! But it's just not.
I agree that a single data point like this doesn't provide useful intuition about whether the police are overfunded; I believe they generally are but that's based on what they do (and don't do) with the funding they have.
If you want to boil the current funding in a city down to one number, though, I don't think there's an obviously better one. You can add the school district and utility district to the denominator, the school district police to the numerator, the county sheriffs to both, etc, but you'll have to draw a line somewhere and there's likely to be some arbitrariness. Where do you put the DA's office? How do you think about tax funds which are funneled up to the state and feds but then back down in more or less localized ways (including e.g. grants to police or other city programs)? How do you think about payments on one-off referendum-authorized bonds, or the Port of Los Angeles budget? Maybe you could show me that all of these questions have either clearly right answers or don't affect the numbers enough to matter, but extrapolating from what I remember from spending some time digging into the Oakland budget a few years ago, I'm skeptical.
I don't think it's arbitrary at all. Just look at the tax breakdown for a Los Angeles resident --- there's a bunch of places to get it (every metro area publishes them! they're like the receipt for your property taxes!). Once you have the relative numbers, you can back out what it means for X% of the city general fund to go to the police. Of course, schools are so expensive, whatever X% is, the real number will be <(X/2)%.
the Los angeles Police is 1.9b of a 4.9b departmental operational city budget, but there are 600m appropriations and 6.2b non departmental that are in other areas, that aren't terribly clear. So if you have 1.9b of a 11.7b budget, that about 16%.
It looks like property tax accounts for the largest chunk of revenues--20%--but keep in mind that property tax usually fund school districts and county covernment as well (here in NM something like 90% of county budget is property tax.)
So yes, at any place you happen to live your taxes and other governmental fees can easily go to a number of different entities, so while it may be true that LAPD accounts for 16% of the LA budget, it amounts to a much smaller percentage of the taxes you pay.
(Its also possible that the LAPD budget receives funding from other sources and is not accounted in the 1.9b above.)
Again, that appears to be of the Los Angeles municipal general fund. Look for the schools in those numbers. If they're not there, you're just looking at one taxing body.
I'd be surprised if schools weren't the most expensive thing in Los Angeles. They are everywhere else I've looked.
LAUSD is gigantic, spends about $20 billion a year (I think about 10x what LAPD spends) and to really throw aspiring accountants for a loop, has its own police force and police budget.
23% seems shockingly high to the point that I wish activists would get the number right so that the story wouldn't be "activists heavily overstate how much of your tax dollars go to police" and instead "a shockingly high portion of your tax dollars go to police".
It means exactly what it says it means. It's a percentage of the operating budget of the city. You don't in fact need the percentage across all taxing bodies in order to think that this percentage is too high. This is the number that the governing body of the city is in control of. They can't do anything about expenditures on other things by outside taxing agencies. Why are you so desperate to overcomplicate a city budget? This doesn't require arcane knowledge or special mastery. It's an operating budget, and when people bitch about police funding they're talking about operations expense. Nobody gives a crap if the percentage changes when you include estuary maintenance or school district vehicle maintenance. That stuff is not in the purview of the city governing body, and it's not going to affect the percent of the municipal budget that goes to police operations. What is with the insistance that this be buried in pedantic bureaucracy?
There's nothing arcane about adding up what a city spends on parks, libraries, public safety, administration, and schools.
There is something deeply weird about finding the one taxing body in a municipality that is responsible for funding the police and then freaking out at what a big chunk of that taxing body's budget the police are. It's like complaining that parks are almost 100% of the parks department budget.
It's entirely possible that LA spends way too much on LAPD. You can demonstrate that by absolute dollars, by dollars spent per capita, or by a percentage of all tax dollars spent on policing. You probably† can't reasonably do it by looking at LAPD as a percentage of a single taxing body.
† (There might be a city where you can do that; I don't think Los Angeles is one of them).
Well, it's certainly confusing. But LA County isn't the only source of funding for the police either. The city appears to contribute ~1.9B a year out of a 10.5B budget in discretionary police spending. https://cao.lacity.org/budget20-21/2020-21Budget_Summary.pdf
My understanding is that if you include non-discretionary spending (pensions etc) that number goes up significantly.
Let me just say that I don't doubt LAPD is too expensive. I'm just saying, if we're making assessments based on percentages, those percentages only make sense in the context of all taxing bodies. Observing that something takes up 23% (or 51%) of a single taxing body doesn't mean anything at all; it just establishes that particular taxing body owns the LAPD.
The problematic realization is that as we all get taxed at higher rates than every we're continually met with political and police leadership constantly acting overwhelmed and out of options in enforcing the very same laws they diligently enforce on those of us who can afford to pay the fines. Out neighborhoods are less safe now, but we pay for protection that only works against us.
In many states the speed limits are being lowered well below reasonable levels and speed cameras are deployed to opportunistically capitalize on citizens, rather than deploying officers on streets to monitor for other offenses that go unchecked... The worst part still being that we're paying outrageously high income and other taxes. Eventually people will start to ask what the purpose of high taxes are for, and why becoming a police officer is more and more of a desk job than being on streets.
Let me just say, I don't want to think what crime and violence in LA would be with fewer police... It says something about our society that we need that much police to keep us from committing more crime and violence against each other.
For those who don't know what a street takeover is, from the article:
"Drivers fueled by the need for speed show off by skidding around blocked-off intersections, filling the air with clouds of burning rubber in what’s known as a street takeover.
Crowds numbering in the hundreds gather for the late-night displays-"
Come on with the panic stuff. People have been drag racing forever. I remember going racing with my buddy 20 years ago in his souped-up GT3000. Yes, it's dangerous and obnoxious. But I highly doubt we're in any sort of epidemic.
Drag racers would find near empty stretches of highways to race on, even going to the lengths of setting up rolling roadblocks. That's different from doing donuts in a crowd of people.
Eh. I street race, and I've been doing it since the late 90s. I've been in MA, NC, SC, VA, FL, OH, MO, and all around them frequently during that time.
It's _way_ easier to find events of some sort now. They're more organized, safer, and the cars are faster.
I was fairly well connected back "in the day" and it was a monthly thing at best, with the occasionally drags on someone's street on the weekend. Now I know a handful of people, yet I can find an organized street event twice a week.
I've been told it's even more common on the west coast.
Here in the California central valley sideshows have picked up quite notably in the last five years or so. These aren't really about drag racing, it's more a bunch of cars showing up somewhere to show off and do donuts in some intersection.
A lot of injuries from people standing too close to spinning cars, and when the cops show up everyone races off, often causing accidents with complete innocents.
California has some new laws against the practice, so I guess we'll see where that goes.
The Rock tried a few years ago, but Vin Diesel escaped near the end, real physics were not involved. They need someone who doesn't look like a grown adult perhaps.
I imagine it is expensive and there may not be a leader. All you need is a date, time and location and some social media and the next guy organises it.
This is a perennial problem in California before Covid.
The draggers are what I refer to as a "self-correcting problem." Generally the roads have potholes and obstacles (these aren't offical dragging areas after all) so fairly quickly somebody will screw up, vaporize their car and kill some girl. At that point, there will be a big bruhaha, lots of wailing mothers and the cops will shut them down for a while.
The biggest problem for locals is that this will cause several hundred pedestrians and cars to suddenly appear in the dark where they're not supposed to be. It's really easy to get in an accident with them and sometimes they shut down your only path home.
This went on in the 70s when I was in high school. It's been going on much longer than that, see "American Graffiti", "Return to Macon Country" and "Two Lane Blacktop".
Let them have fun; if they do any damage, they're also the ones paying. IMHO it's a deeply-ingrained part of American culture to be rebellious and risktaking, and a good thing as long as it doesn't happen in excess.
It's a deeply ingrained part of American culture to have a complete disregard for those around you. Any minor change in behavior that could improve the life of everyone around you is an affront to "freedom."
Destroying property, keeping thousands of people up at night, getting people killed. You can't just throw "fun" on it and say it's okay.
Everything you do will affect others, like it or not, positive or negative. That's just the price of freedom, and it's something I have no resistance about continuing to pay, because the alternative is an authoritarian socialist dystopia.
that could improve the life of everyone around you
By painting car shows as gang activity and by emphasizing the angry neighbors, the article has painted this entire genre of social gathering and an entire circle of enthusiasts as antisocial, and in need of policing.
Instead of thrilling
mass gatherings that push the limits of our car infrastructure and actually do something new and innovative with it (for once), cities will be hollowed out, denuded of their culture, so that sleepy suburbanites can move in and lodge noise complaints. Urban revival will only mean basic bitch breweries and putt putt, instead of mass gatherings of poor workers, with rowdy music and sizzling fajitas.
Imagine if an intersection was shut down for 3 weeks, or maybe 3 decades. Every night, it threw the best party you’ve ever attended in your life. Instead of being a place where you commute every morning and think about how cool it would be to quit, that intersection becomes the place you meet your best friends, or make the happiest memories of your life.
Cars and roads don’t just kill and maim us. Their psychic operation on us makes it impossible for us to dream.
Interesting article and thanks for posting it. I've been curious about that aspect of car culture since I have been rebuilding a Chrysler 300C and searching on youtube for how-to videos often brings up sideshows. Its been fascinating.
It's a huge failure of reporting that this article contains precisely zero data about how dangerous this practice actually is is (or, alternatively, if it results in measurable harm like increased congestion or transit times.)
I'm left wondering if this is a real problem, or just a bunch of HOA types getting all bothered that people who don't look like them are behaving in an unseemly manner.
If you're going to call something "dangerous" in your headline then I would like to see at least one statistic, please.
Here's a statistic for you. 100% of my two (2) kids can't get to sleep until 10pm on Sunday nights because I live half a block from a south LA takeover intersection.
> It's a huge failure of reporting that this article contains precisely zero data about how dangerous this practice actually is is (or, alternatively, if it results in measurable harm like increased congestion or transit times.)
Noise pollution is a measurable harm, and some of those measurements are massive.
If you change streets to not feel like highways then a lot of this would be impossible to do in the first place. However that would require a bigger reckoning with car culture in the US that it seems we’re not ready to have yet.