Los Angeles has some of the worst streets in America and the degradation and disrepair is costing the city millions in costly personal injury claims. What’s being done to fix L.A.’s roadways and stop the costly litigation?
Due to our success in litigating these types of cases with the City, Arash was interviewed for this video piece by SoCal Connected on KCET.
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Transcript
Dave Balinski: “I’ve got a photo here , of uh, what happened that day of the uh, of the injury.” Reporter: “Holy smokes!” Balinski: “It’s a little blurry.” Reporter: “Granada Hills resident Dave Balinski is talking about his bike injury.” Balinski:”And this was after a trip to the ER.” Reporter: “This is after they cleaned you up?” Balinski: “Exactly.” Reporter: “Balinski was riding his bike on this stretch of Rinaldi Street in North Los Angeles when he hit a heap of asphalt in the road.” Balinski: “I hit it, got airborne, went right over the handle bars, and next thing I know I woke up with a numb face and blood everywhere.” Reporter: “And his teeth coming through his upper lip. He had asphalt embedded in his face.” Balinski: “I was just trying to figure out, uh, how much blood I was losing and how I could get it to stop.” Reporter: “He’s one of dozens of people we’ve spoken with who are part of a troubling trend. Bike injuries in L.A., a few of them catastrophic, are on the upswing. And as you’ll see, so is the finger pointing. Many of them are blaming the city for not fixing known hazards.” Balinski: “It hadn’t been removed for months after my accident. And that’s what really got me angry and wanting to look into it more. Why it would be here in the first place, with no orange cones, no, uh, caution signs, no yellow tape. Really left me frustrated and perplexed.” Reporter: “The streets in L.A. are a mess. they’re ranked as some of the worst in the nation. TRIP – a non-profit focused on transportation issues found just 9% of L.A. streets are in good condition. And it’s going to take 4 billion dollars to fix them all. And you say this has been like this for ten, more than ten years?” Don Ward: “10, 10, 15 years this has been here.” Reporter: “Veteran cyclist Don Ward is talking about a pothole on Vermont Avenue. It’s a typical hazard for L.A. bikers he says. How many people? How many other bike riders do you know that have been, that have crashed, or that have been injured because of the state of the, of the roads?” Ward: “Uh, you know, I, I put up a message on social media, just to get a, uh, get an idea from my friends and I was surprised. A lot of people have actually fallen due to bad road conditions.” Reporter: “Big and small, bike accidents are costing L.A. taxpayers millions of dollars. When you started to skid, do you remember what was going through your mind?” Woman: “I was casually riding my bike to the park and all of a sudden I was down and I said, what? [laughs] what?” Reporter: “Bernice Schneiderman’s bike skidded out in the pothole. She went down, cracking 2 ribs and fracturing an elbow.” Schneiderman: “I had to go to the orthopedist a few times. You know, they wanted to make sure I’m ok. And then the physical therapy, occupational therapy for here. [Pointing to her elbow.] They have different departments, so one was for here, and one was for here, and one was for here. [Laughing and pointing at different body parts] Reporter: “She successfully filed a claim with the city to recoup some of her medical costs.” Schneiderman: “It was a needless thing if this was, uh, you know, maintained.” Reporter: “What really upset Bernice was this. Right after her crash, a city crew came out to do some repairs, just a block away, but didn’t fix the hole that had caused her crash. So there, there was a crew, there was a full crew, a street repair crew, a block away. The city knew they had already paid out, paid for your ambulance costs for this little thing. I mean that little divot could, how long could it take to fix? 10 minutes?” Schneiderman: “I could do it in 10 minutes.” Reporter: “The gap is still there.” Schneiderman: “We’re talking about what, a big subway, or infrastructure? How about a, uh, sack of cement just fixing something like this?” Reporter: “Bernice’s accident only cost the city 200 bucks. But bike injury settlements are adding up. Since last year, Los Angeles has paid out at least $20,000,000 to injured bicyclists. The city budgets $60,000,000 a year to cover all liability cases, not just bike injuries. By April, it had already paid out nearly $100,000,000. Eric Previn: “The city of L.A. is already exceeding its own liability budget by a lot.” Reporter: “Eric Previn runs a City Hall watchdog blog. He’s been keeping an eye on the bike settlement payouts.” Previn: “We are in discussions now, the mayor, uh, and his team are possibly going to have to do something called Judgement Obligation Bonds, which are terrible terms, but where you borrow money to pay off these legal settlements.” Arash Homampour: “The currency of justice is money. It’s also necessary to make up for the harm suffered by these individuals. And its also sometimes the only way you can get the attention of anybody, is that you have to hit them where their pocketbook is, as crude as that sounds, because then they pay attention and then they sort of re-prioritze the safety of the, you know, the citizens of the city of Los Angeles.” Reporter: “Homampour recently settled a case for $4.5 million in the death of bicyclist Edgardo Gabat. The 57 year old cyclist was riding on a designated bike lane on Colorado Boulevard in Eaglerock when he hit a ridge in the road. He flew off his bike, landed on his head and died.” Homampour: “And little did he know as he was riding, that at least 5 other people had ridden down that same part of Colorado Boulevard and were encountering a 2 inch change in the roadway condition, uh, that was causing bike riders to literally wipe out.” Reporter: “Since 2006, records show, there have been 5 complaints at the spot where Gabot died. Victims notified the city, 2 filed claims, but repairs weren’t done until after Gabot’s death.” Homampour: “Where’s the person that’s going ‘We have 1 accident. Ok, we have 2 accidents. This shouldn’t happen again.'” Reporter: “Cyclist David Eagler shattered his arm when he hit some broken concrete while riding down the street. He needed 2 surgeries and months of physical therapy. Even after multiple complaints about the road problem, the city had ignored it. But it’s hard to ignore a payout of $750,000.” Homampour: “All they have to do is spend, literally, a few dollars to address an unsafe condition, and prevent having to pay out millions of dollars and then ultimately prevent the tragedy to the citizens that they’re there to protect.” Reporter: “Sandy Gipp was nearly killed in an accident at a trouble spot the city already knew about.” Sandy Gipp: “I hit something and it just swerved me and my bike into a parked car and I flew right through the rear window.” Reporter: “The glass nearly slit his throat, couple more inches in 1 direction or another and it could have been life threatening?” Gipp: “Yeah, I would have, like, bled out, like, no matter how fast the ambulance would have showed up.” Reporter: “Sandy struck these mounds, created when city workers repaved the road and accidentally dripped asphalt.” Joshua Cohen: “There was actually, like, a work order from someone at the city that shows that he knew there was a problem and didn’t fix it.” Reporter: “The work order notes that the asphalt was coming out in gobs, but no one cleaned it up.” Cohen: “It would have been zero dollars to clean that up. It, the, the, the guy who made the mess, literally it would have taken him a half a second, literally, to just take a shovel and reach down and go, and just like a spatula, scoop it up.” Reporter: “Gipp settled with the city for a $100,000. Peter Godofroy hit these potholes on Valley Vista in the San Fernando Valley. He crashed, broke several bones and suffered a traumatic brain injury. Records show the city had received 12 prior service requests to fix that stretch of road. Cost to the city? $6,500,000.” Paul Krekorian: “One of the things that was very maddening to me as we considered some of these settlements and the terrible cases that you talked about, was when I asked how much would it have cost to make the repair that would have prevented this crash from happening and it was a tiny, tiny fraction of the, what it ended up costing the city. Reporter: “Krekorian is the chair of the budget and finance committee. He says the spike in bike injury payouts is due to a handful horrific cases, not because of a big increase in crashes. But they didn’t have to happen.” Krekorian: “We had a number of very severe cases where people were horribly injured and, in my view, could have been preventable.” Reporter: “Normally, this is the part of the story where we’d be telling you about some government agency wasting money. In this case, they’re not even spending it. SoCal Connected has learned that the Bureau of Street Services, that’s the agency whose job it is to fix and maintain L.A. streets has been returning tens of millions of dollars every year to the city, instead of spending that money to hire more people and fix the streets. In fiscal 2015 they gave back $23,000,000, and next year $19,000,000. In a tense meeting last April, council member Mitch Englander pressed general manager Nazario Salceda for an explanation. Englander: “How much money are you giving back this year?” Salceda: “It is a total of $19,000,000.” Englander: “$19,000,000?” Salceda: “Uh huh.” Englander: “And the bulk of that was for pavement preservation?” Salceda: “That is correct. $17.1.” Englander: “Why?” Salceda: “Um, perhaps, you know, this is a question that we should ask the uh, um, mayor.” Englander: “Why? Why do you have the money in the budget, in your budget?” Salceda: “Well, I, I, I feel again, that, as a team, working together with the mayor’s office and the CAO, we understand that there’s a need of course for, for, um, for, to balance the budget. Englander: “If we give the department money, we should not expect a dime back because there’s so much more work to be done.” Reporter: “Salceda has said that some of the money was given in the form of grants that had to be returned because projects couldn’t be completed on time. He also blamed a staffing shortage, even though he was given millions to hire more people, millions that he returned.” Krekorian: “My answer to that is, then hire the people, hire the people, do the work, we have to have these streets fixed.” Reporter: “‘Cuz that’s like saying we saved a lot of money by not doing our job.” Krekorian: [Smilinf and nodding his head] “It’s, its been a great frustration.” Reporter: ” A scathing audit by the L.A. Controllers Office in 2014 found similar problems. It discovered the bureau returned $21,000,000 between 2010 and 2013, money the audit says was intended to do street repairs. The Bureau of Street Services didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment. Now all of this has Bernice Schneiderman furious.” Schneiderman: “I am angry to hear that! Do you hear me? Angry!” Reporter: “From their perspective, they’re saving the city money. They’re doing their job to the letter of the law and they’re returning money to the general fund.” Schneiderman: “Are they saving if they have to put out $4.5 million dollars for one lawsuit? And $20,000,000 for all of them, and this and that, and here and there? Are they saving money? I don’t think so.” Reporter: “Council members Krekorian and Englander recently proposed a motion that any future bike lanes meet a certain pavement standard. They also want to put the Bureau of Street Services on a kind of performance plan to better measure success. It’s all part of reducing litigation costs and meeting the goals of Vision Zero, the city’s plan to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025. Meanwhile, even in L.A.’s bike lanes, it’s ride at your own risk.”
