If you frequent the roads of the Santa Monica Mountains like I do, then you are familiar with the ride up Little Sycamore, a climb up into the more desolate western end of the range. A couple miles up you know when you cross over into Ventrua County, as there is this road sign in the middle of nowhere telling you that Little Sycamore becomes Yerba Buena Rd at this point. If you miss the sign, the surface of the road tells you. Sycamore in recent history has had a good smooth surface, but when you cross into Yerba Buena the road is suddenly riddled with thick cracks, both in the direction of travel and across.

A lot of cyclists complain about this, but I appreciate the chance to engage my skills as a cyclist. And the descents on YB do have to be done with a lot of care. The handlebars feel like a jackhammer on these descents. But I digress...

So last weekend when I turned onto Sycamore I noticed that the road had been re-paved! I sure didn’t think it needed it, but now Sycamore has a new jet-black really-smooth surface. Then, I wondered about YB, which really DOES need resurfacing.

Nope!

So now at the junction of the two roads there is even more of a disparity: Shiny new road merges into riddled-with-cracks road. It’s like LA County is trying to really show-up Ventura.

What IS new on YB is new Bott’s Dots replacing the broken ones, leading me to reason that resurfacing is not planned in the near future. Like Ventura is saying back, “Yeah, and we ain’t gonna fix it either.”