In 2016, Los Angeles County voters approved a permanent, half-cent sales tax hike for expanding and improving transportation and enhancing public safety. Despite raising the baseline county sales tax to 9.5 percent, the tax hike passed with nearly 70 percent of the vote, reflecting the traffic congestion, long commute times, and poor road quality endemic within Los Angeles County, and which costs Angelenos dearly each year in wasted time, wasted fuel, and higher car insurance and auto repair costs.

Voters trust governments to use tax revenue to prioritize the projects with the greatest impact and to build those projects at a reasonable cost and on time. But one LA project—an eight-mile bike path along the Los Angeles River—is a highly visible testament to how government violates that trust. 

Building this path, which will connect two existing bike paths along the river to create a continuous thirty-two-mile path, may now cost as much as $1.2 billion. Construction hasn’t begun, and there is no firm completion date. Even the approaching 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, which is viewed as a motivating deadline for delivering LA infrastructure, will arrive with this unfinished. 

The bike path had been advertised as one of twenty-eight priority transportation projects, dubbed Twenty-Eight by ’28, that were to be completed before the Olympics. But the bike path is now listed for an estimated 2031 completion date, fifteen years after the sales tax increase, and has the latest estimated completion date of all twenty-eight projects. An LA transportation spokesman noted late last year that “at this point, we are not looking to complete any segment, or at least we are looking to complete maybe . . . groundbreak for Olympic Games, but........

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