Two weeks ago we sent you our third newsletter! Since then, new content has hit the site, and there’s an exciting project on the way, which we’ll get to below. If you found us through the escalator piece, which made the front page of Hacker News, welcome!

Ninety feet a minute

LA Metro’s escalators are specified to run at 90 feet a minute, below the legal limit in all 139 cities we checked. At Hong Kong’s usual speed, the ride up from the platform at Civic Center/Grand Park would take 53 seconds instead of 87. The strangest part turned up in LA’s own archives, though, in what the original subway planners asked for. Read the piece →

We’ve also looked at Metro Micro, which carries four riders an hour, and the five council districts with no Metro rail station at all.

The $300,000 club

An LAPD Detective III made $449,639 last year, and more than half of it was overtime. In all, 302 sworn LAPD employees cleared $300,000, against 15 at the NYPD, a department four times the size.

Nearly half of those 302 weren’t sergeants, lieutenants or command staff. And for one rank in the group, average overtime came out ahead of average regular pay. See which one →

It’s worth reading alongside the LAPD’s $1.15 billion staffing estimate for the Olympics and our look at why most LAPD calls for service aren’t calls from the public.

Dog parks, eventually

LA’s parks department says the city needs 71 more dog parks by 2050, or roughly three a year. It’s opened one in the last seven years. We measured how far every Angeleno lives from a dog park, and found what the city devotes more than 70 times as much land to instead. Read the piece →

If you read our piece on the Los Angeles Country Club’s property taxes, you might already have a guess. And for parks in general, two council districts have almost the same number of parks, and one has sixty times the land.

The city’s land, mapped

We mapped every parcel in LA County with the City of Los Angeles listed as its owner. It adds up to 88 square miles, and about 41 of them are outside the city limits, including a big stretch of desert the city bought for an airport that never got built. Of the parcels the city itself called surplus in 2017, 401 still belong to it. Explore the map →

	Every parcel with the City of Los Angeles listed as its owner.

Matching funds

The latest mayoral filings, which run through September 19, show Nithya Raman has now drawn more in public matching funds than Karen Bass, $2.66 million to $2.24 million, and more than she’s raised from donors. Bass still leads in total, $7.07 million to $4.86 million, not counting outside spending.

Before November, it’s worth revisiting the path each candidate has to a win and how many council votes Raman actually missed.

Nine million words

As for that exciting project, we’ve cracked the code to download the transcripts of 584 Los Angeles City Council meetings going back five and a half years. That’s more than 9 million words from councilmembers, the clerk, the city attorney and everyone who stepped up to the podium for public comment.

We already know who talks the most (it isn’t close), whether the council or the public does more of the talking, and why the clerk keeps calling someone named Jumbo Shrimp to the podium. The full project is coming soon. Until then, Roll Call tracks who actually shows up, and our look at how often the council votes unanimously covers what they do once they’re there.

A new look

If the site looks different, that’s because we spent the weekend rebuilding it for phones, with headlines at the top of the screen and many of our charts redrawn to fit. Take a look →

Corrections

We corrected two claims in our Flock camera piece, about the LAPD’s Beverly Grove cameras and West Hollywood’s vote to keep Flock. Every change is listed on our corrections page.

From the archive

• Twelve thousand hours above Los Angeles
• Half the restaurants in Los Angeles sit in 20 of its 114 neighborhoods
• Los Angeles has lost a third of its film jobs in four years, and 2026 is running below the strike year
• Parking fines weigh 10 times as much in LA’s poorest communities
• The only other Los Angeles mayoral election that looks like 2026 was in 1969
• Heather Hutt’s district has permitted more housing per year than any other, and almost none of it is built yet
• Los Angeles County lost 165 people a day for five years. We ran the next century four ways

Keep in touch

The data catalog includes the records behind the reporting, with eight datasets available as free downloads. If you’re a reporter, researcher, campaign or newsroom that needs something specific, write to [email protected].

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See you in two weeks.

The Basin
basin.la · [email protected]