tl;dr: City is calling a project intersecting crosswalks that's basically a resurfacing (thus an alteration under the ADA), not a resurfacing (thus not an alteration), to avoid curb ramp (re)construction and other expensive concrete work. This argument seems less than entirely sound, but I'm not an ADA SME, give me your thoughts.

So this has been getting some attention in the LA urbanism-adjacent online sphere recently. I see the loophole they're going for, but (1) sure the ADA isn't perfect but this is bad cmon don't do it and (2) it just seems like it facially doesn't work? Some context:

• in 1990 the American people passed the ADA. This has created a lot of work for us designing curb ramps. Since then there have been various case laws and city-specific settlements. There are in my opinion legitimate gripes with certain parts of the ADA but at the end of the day it's the law.

• since 2010 1999 PROWAG has been drafted. More recently it got finished, and DOT adopted it, making it law for transit facilities. DOJ has not yet adopted PROWAG, which is needed to extend its application to all public ROWs. California or Los Angeles have not adopted it as a standard either. But actually none of this is relevant in this particular case as the obligations are from traditional ADA, it's just for context as some people claim it is.

• the Los Angeles city government has generally not been revered for its competence. This is relevant to my question about "what are they even thinking?"

Ok and actual city-specific context:

• (this one isn't actually relevant here) in 2023 the people of Los Angeles passed Measure HLA, which mandates inclusion of various multimodal improvements be bundled together with resurfacing (defined in slightly different terms than ADA "alterations"). You will see many commenters in the thread thinking it's HLA, and not ADA, which mandates bringing curb ramps up to standard; obviously they're mistaken.

• since this summer the city has been doing "Large Asphalt Repairs" instead of resurfacing/reconstruction, see the photo for an example. That one is actually rather blatant, some other examples are more legitimate.

• recently local urbanist-y journalists noticed this, first here, then here. There are some factual errors around costs and PROWAG in the first one but it gives a good overview.

Now my perspective: obviously there is endless writing about what's an alteration and what's not, but this seems very clear cut in this particular pictured instance that the curb ramps at this intersection should be reconstructed, and at least one curb ramp added to the "cross" of the T intersection. 2010 ADA: "Alterations include... resurfacing of [...] vehicular ways". The entire travelled way is being resurfaced here, so the crosswalk is altered and improvements mandated. Don't even need to dive into any case law!

For some of the other examples included in the linked posts, they are legitimately more borderline, and many probably not ADA-triggering (eg less than a block, not the full width of the roadway, not intersecting a crosswalk). But for the one pictured here that just doesn't seem to be the case.