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.

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.

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.