Oakland’s Pothole Vigilantes address gaping problem, one road crater at a time

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.

What they ought to do is pay a bounty per job, and bond the "vigilantes" against injury/damage.

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.

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.

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).

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.