In 2014, LA Times columnist Steve Lopez reported on the cracked and protruding sidewalks across Los Angeles. A decade later, Lopez wrote about how little has changed. He joined Lisa McRee on "LA Times Today" to explain why he says LA's handling of the matter is often as broken as the sidewalks themselves.

Lopez writes about older adults, and heard from a reader in Venice Beach who had recently fallen while walking around her neighborhood because the sidewalk is so uneven. 

"The woman showed me where she tripped, and it was not one of the worst ones out there on our tour of bad sidewalks. And that was [because] she's got her eye on the really bad ones and missed a separation where maybe it's only an inch and a half, but because you're looking at the mountain that you've got to cross over halfway down the block, you trip on a on a smaller rupture," Lopez said. "I'm getting this now from readers that the sidewalks I wrote about ten years ago, which had been bad for ten or 20 or 30 years, are still bad, and the city is way behind. There's a backlog, according to a 2021 audit, of 50,000 service calls.”

Some property owners have been sued after people hurt themselves on the sidewalks outside. Lopez said the city has also paid out millions in trip-and-fall lawsuits. It is unclear a lot of the time, Lopez said, whose responsibility it is to fix broken sidewalks.

In the meantime, Lopez said many of the sidewalk fixes have been "sloppy."

"It looks so amateurish where they come out with asphalt and they fill in cracks. And some of it as those patches evolve, as the trees grow, it's almost like sculpture. It's almost like a unique form of LA public sculpture where you have asphalt and concrete embedded in the trees and all of this rising up. It really is a sad, sad sight. And we've got the Olympics coming to town. And we're having we're hearing the mayor say no cars [during the Olympics.] Let's all use public transit. Well, on public transit, you got to walk to the station, you got to walk from the station. And we got a lot of bad sidewalk traffic," Lopez said.

Lopez explained that, while some local officials want to do more to fix sidewalks, he doesn't feel optimistic.

"I'm sorry to say it's been like this for decades. It's probably going to be like this for decades, but that doesn't mean we don't keep pressure on," he concluded. 

Watch the full interview above.

Watch "LA Times Today" at 7 and 10 p.m. Monday through Friday on Spectrum News 1 and the Spectrum News app.