TITLE: You can repeal bad laws
SUBTITLE: Endless tweaking only gets you so far.
AUTHOR: Peter Banks
DATE: 2026-05-04
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/you-can-repeal-bad-laws
SOURCE: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/you-can-repeal-bad-laws

Recently I learned that it costs the city of Los Angeles about $50,000 to replace a single sidewalk ramp, and that, because the cost was so high, the city had been quietly forgoing repairs. The second half of that claim, based on my experience living in California, sounded right. But even with my mental model of pricing $50,000 sounded insane. 

So I went and checked. It is, in fact, true. But it is much, much, much more insane than just that. Since as of June 2025, StreetsLA has stopped repaving streets entirely and the FY26 budget has effectively zeroed out repaving going forward. Just read this quote from WAPO: 

“The city appears to have invented a new category of street work designed to avoid triggering costly federal accessibility mandates. Instead of repaving streets, StreetsLA now performs what it calls “large asphalt repairs.” As Hadar explains, this work addresses localized damage—areas larger than a pothole but smaller than full resurfacing. In effect, the city repaves only part of a street rather than its full width.

But, as Hadar notes, “the thing about large asphalt repair is that it’s . . . not a real thing. It appears to be a term made up by the city sometime in the last year.”

The reason for the invention lies in federal disability law. Under regulations implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act, when a city alters a street, it must also bring adjacent pedestrian infrastructure into compliance—meaning the installation of ADA-compliant curb ramps at every affected intersection.

Repaving is considered an alteration that triggers these requirements. Maintenance activities, such as filling potholes or making minor repairs, are not. The city claims that large asphalt repairs are “pavement maintenance activity” and therefore do not require ADA upgrades.

That distinction carries enormous financial and logistical consequences. Hadar found that each curb ramp costs roughly $50,000, totaling about $200,000 per intersection. With roughly ten intersections per mile, curb ramps alone can add around $2 million per mile to the cost of repaving, a figure that often exceeds the cost of the asphalt itself. Design and construction typically take nine to 12 months per ramp, and federal rules require that the ramps be completed by the time the street is resurfaced.” 

This is far from the only insane cost overrun in California. There is the famous La Sombrita debacle where, a perforated metal “shade” 24 inches wide bolted to a Los Angeles bus pole, designed deliberately to cast almost no shadow because making it any larger or any more solid would have triggered permitting and inter-agency coordination requirements. 

Or there is the Noe Valley public toilet in San Francisco, a 150-square-foot single-stall facility projected at $1.7 million. Or of course there is California High-Speed Rail, originally pitched to voters in 2008 at $33 billion with a 2020 completion date, now estimated at $126 billion in the official 2026 plan, and as much as $231 billion in outside reporting. 

When you dig into any one of these, the answer is almost always the same: a stacking of legitimate cost reasons that compound to the point of pure delusion. Take the ramp I started this article with. Nowhere is anyone actively stealing money from the state and every bill is carefully enumerated and tracked. Instead of corruption the cost comes from legal sources and is primarily driven by two specific forces. 

The first is a multi-layered procurement system where California public works contracts must use unionized labor at prevailing wages. In addition to portion of the work going to certified women-owned, minority-owned, or otherwise disadvantaged business enterprises. 

The second, is compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act(ADA), and in California’s case Unruh Civil Rights Act. Every new ramp must meet strict slope, cross-slope, transition, detectable-warning, and landing-area specifications and any non-compliance creates litigation exposure, on the scale of billions of dollars. This specific problem can be traced back to 2013, when the DOJ and DOT issued joint guidance clarifying that any road resurfacing counts as an “alteration” but the problem is more general. Take the 2015 Willits v. City of Los Angeles settlement which will cost $1.37 billion over thirty years. 

I think when most people hear all this, a partisan bifurcation occurs. Right-wing people laugh at Commiefornia for its retarded policies and take the whole thing as evidence of the state’s general dysfunction. Whereas Left-wing people do some combination of denying it costs this much in practice, or point out that all of the individual reasons for the cost are genuinely important social issues. Disabled people deserve to be able to cross the road for example. 

This article isn’t about YIMBYism. It isn’t about how, if we tweak the specific procurement rules around ramp construction, we could get costs back to a manageable level. Instead, it is about how we have come to worship the law in America to our own detriment, having forgotten that it was us who originally wrote it — and that we can, in fact, change it to whatever we want, whenever we want.

Focus on disability access. Right now, the law is written so that the compliance burden falls on the builder — not on the regulator who approved the construction, not on the disabled person who would have to file a complaint during construction, and not on God for making disabled people in the first place. This was a conscious policy choice, codified in the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, expanded in the ADA. 

I know a person who worked at a small jewelry store. The store was sued, and forced to settle, because someone in a wheelchair could not reach the counter. That person had a genuine legal claim, and whatever you think of the specific case, they were almost certainly legally in the right. They were one of the roughly 8,800 federal Title III lawsuits filed in 2024, of which California accounts for about 42%. 

But we could simply repeal all disability access laws tomorrow. And if it were ruled unconstitutional, we could impeach the judges who made the ruling and try again. And if that was still unconstitutional, we could rewrite the constitution. And if that were electorally impossible, we could arm ourselves and overthrow the state. Hell, we could even just pretend the law didn’t exist and decide as a group to ignore it. There is nothing about the universe that mandates we respect the access rights of disabled people. This is a collective choice we have made, and it is a collective choice we can change. If, as I would argue, the burden has reached the point where we can no longer cheaply and quickly build sidewalk ramps, then we have an obligation to alter it to make ramp building possible again.

But because the plight of disabled people is genuinely sympathetic, and because there exists a special set of laws around which we have attached enormous moral importance, the very idea of reforming those laws feels impossible. The mere suggestion implies something about the direction of Human history that makes us deeply uncomfortable, and so the sanctity of our Special laws approaches religious proportions.

I have never met a person who explicitly defends the proposition that Los Angeles should stop paving its streets but that is the actual revealed preference of the system is creating. The choice that exists in reality is binary: keep all the protections and stop paving roads, or change something and resume paving but political class refuses to acknowledge this is the choice and instead it debates ever-finer procedural workarounds, ever more elaborate engineering around CEQA and prevailing wage and Unruh exposure, all inside the assumption that the underlying regimes are fixed features of reality. 

In an earlier piece I described myself as a Reformist Carlylean. The real insight of Carlyle’s work, in my view, is the idea of cant — the repetition of old forms long after their truth, meaning, or context have been forgotten. We are well past cant in the post-1960s civil-rights regime and it simply cannot persist forever. At some point we will want to do things again, and we will realize in that moment that all of these chains of legal restriction have the binding power of cobwebs — that nothing will literally jump out of a page and reprimand you if you simply ignore it. We can either choose to reform now, or wait until the cant has accumulated to the point that the thin earthen rind of legalism is thrown open by the volcano of revolutionary reform.

America is not the only place this is happening. Look at Canada. The country has effectively painted itself into a corner with its native consultation regime. 

You functionally cannot do anything in Canada at scale anymore without the approval of a patchwork of native governments, many of which are stuck in multi-decade litigations with the Canadian state — the famous Tsilhqot’in title case took 25 years from filing to judgment. As late as the 1970s this requirement quite literally didn’t exist. It was only because of laws the Canadian state has passed and enshrined such Section 35 of the 1982 Constitution, the 2021 federal enshrinment of UNDRIPA, and much much more that imported the standard of “free, prior, and informed consent” into Canadian law. If Canada can amend its constitution to give the Quebecois special language rights, there is nothing in reality stopping it from amending it again to clarify that consultation does not give natives a veto on nearly all construction. The fact that this is treated as unthinkable, even as the country’s productive capacity is paralyzed, is exactly the cant.

Another example. I have been looking at the upcoming French presidential election, and the party currently favored to win is the Rassemblement National, formerly the FN, under Jordan Bardella. One of Bardella’s principal proposals is holding a referendum on immigration. From the polling I have seen, that referendum would pass in a landslide. But it is also probably illegal. France under the current constitutional system almost certainly cannot unilaterally decide to abandon its asylum or immigration laws. In addition to this Article 11 of the French Constitution restricts referendum subjects to public services, economic policy, and treaty ratification, and Macron has stated publicly that an immigration referendum is constitutionally impossible. 

Even if France passed one, the result would conflict with EU asylum directives and the European Convention on Human Rights; for example, the Constitutional Council struck down nearly half of France’s last immigration law in 2024 on these grounds. But what does “constitutionally impossible” actually mean? If George W. Bush had somehow managed to get gay marriage made constitutionally illegal in 2002, I am skeptical that the same people now pointing to Article 11 and the European basic law would be calmly resigned to the realization that the law was, in fact, unalterable. Of course not! France amended its constitution in 2024 to entrench the right to abortion and if you can rewrite your constitution to entrench abortion, you can rewrite it to allow an immigration referendum. 

A last example. In December 2025 the European Union agreed to a €90 billion loan to Ukraine for 2026 and 2027. The original plan, and the obvious one, was to fund the package from the roughly €193 billion in Russian central bank frozen at Euroclear in Brussels since the start of the invasion. The Commission proposed converting about €140 billion of those reserves into an interest-free reparations loan, repayable only if Russia ever paid war reparations. Yet Belgium and Euroclear killed it because they were worried about legal risk — specifically a Belgium-Luxembourg-Russia bilateral investment treaty under which Russian state entities could pursue investor-state arbitration if the seizure were deemed unlawful, plus a pending Russian central bank lawsuit against Euroclear. 

This means that instead of just giving Ukraine money belonging to the country that invaded it, the EU is now borrowing on capital markets and putting the entire bill on European taxpayers, current and future, while sitting on roughly three times that sum in frozen Russian money it refuses to touch. This is pure insanity incarnate. The “legal risk” is from a treaty Belgium signed with Russia and treaties can be abrogated. Member states can legislate Euroclear’s immunity or the EU can pass a regulation declaring the assets transferred and wash their hands. None of these moves require new physics or a constitutional convention; they require the political will to acknowledge that the existing legal exposure is ONLY a contract and not an innate feature of the universe. 

The distinction between what we are actually required to do by the universe and the things we choose to do is enormous. The question we should be asking ourselves is which specific laws we have placed inside a sanctified zone where the normal mechanism of reform does not apply, and does that make sense. I love this line from  Thomas Paine in “The Rights of Man”: 

“Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.”

Because corruption and rent-seeking are costly to society even when the groups doing them are following all the rules, are deeply sympathetic, and are genuinely most in need of the money. Laws are for the living they exist to solve problems for the living, in reality. No law is above critique or reform. If the law makes pavings the road impossible it should be reformed, even if that makes it more difficult for disabled people.
