Nail in your tire in Los Angeles

Leave it in.

A nail or screw standing in the tread is usually doing a fair job of plugging the hole it made. Pull it out in the street and a tire that was losing 2 psi a day can be flat before you have found somewhere to put the jack. Take a photo of where it sits, check the pressure if you have a gauge, and book. We will take it out with the tire off the wheel, where the hole can be inspected from both sides.

What decides whether it can be repaired

Four things, and only one of them is visible from outside.

Where it went in. Tread area only. A puncture in the shoulder or the sidewall is not repairable, by us or by anyone following the US Tire Manufacturers Association standard. The shoulder is closer to the middle of the tire than people expect, which is why the answer cannot be given over the phone.

How big the hole is. No wider than a quarter of an inch.

What it did on the inside. A nail that entered at an angle can run under the belt and open a tear in the liner several inches from where the head is sitting. This only shows when the tire comes off the rim.

How far it was driven afterwards. A tire run at low pressure damages its own sidewall internally. If the light had been on for a week, expect that conversation.

The repair itself is a plug and a patch, fitted together, from the inside, with the tire demounted. A plug pushed in from outside without demounting is not a repair to the standard and we will not do one. Plug against patch and can a nail in a tire be repaired? go through it properly.

Why the road surface is the story here, and what we can actually show

Chicago and Dallas both publish pothole reports by address. Los Angeles publishes none. We enumerated the request types in every MyLA311 service-request release from 2019 to 2025 and every year carries the same twelve — bulky items, graffiti, illegal dumping, appliances, encampments, e-waste, dead animals, single and multiple streetlight issues, other, water waste, feedback. There is no pothole type and no street-surface type in any of them. So nobody should quote you a Los Angeles pothole count, including us.

What the city does publish is better. StreetsLA maintains a street inventory as a public feature service, cut dated 1 June 2026, which carries a condition grade on every one of 69,249 street segments. Summing centreline miles across the whole layer: 4,046.27 miles graded Good, 1,262.43 Fair and 1,266.34 Poor, out of 6,575.04 miles in total. That is 19.3 percent of the city's centreline mileage rated Poor (DERIVED: 1,266.34 divided by 6,575.04). By lane miles the answer is close: 4,632.49 Poor out of 23,460.64, or 19.7 percent. Twelve segments carry no grade and are excluded from both.

And it is not frost that did it. On the NOAA 1991-2020 annual normals, Los Angeles International and Downtown both average 0.0 nights a year at or below 32F; all four Los Angeles stations average 0.0 days a year with a maximum at or below 32F, which is the condition that actually drives a freeze-thaw cycle through pavement; LAX and Burbank both carry an annual snowfall normal of 0.0 inches and 0.0 days of a tenth of an inch or more. Whatever opens a Los Angeles road, it is not water freezing in it. We do not have a sourced explanation for what does, so we are not going to offer you one.

The graded map does not look the way you would guess

Grouped by neighbourhood council, over the 100 named council values in the layer that carry at least a mile of street — one of which is a catch-all label rather than a real council — the worst-paved are not where the cliché puts them.

Neighbourhood council	Share of centreline miles graded Poor	Rank of 100
Atwater Village	43.0%	1
Hollywood United	40.6%	2
Silver Lake	38.8%	3
North Westwood	36.1%	4
Hollywood Hills West	34.8%	5
Venice	32.2%	6
Los Feliz	30.0%	7
Echo Park	29.6%	8
Downtown Los Angeles	28.6%	9

At the other end of the same ranking: Northwest San Pedro at 5.2 percent Poor is rank 100, Northridge West and Coastal San Pedro at 6.9 percent, Empowerment Congress North at 8.2, Porter Ranch at 9.1, West Hills at 10.3. Several of the best-paved streets in the city are in South Los Angeles and the Harbor. Neighbourhood pages: Echo Park and Silver Lake, Venice, Downtown, South Los Angeles and San Pedro.

By council district, over the full fifteen, CD 4 is the worst paved at 28.5 percent of its centreline mileage graded Poor (188.4 of 660.4 miles) and CD 12 the best at 14.5 percent (101.3 of 696.6 miles), with more than six points between CD 4 and second place.

The city has a published plan for some of it. StreetsLA's five-year pavement preservation programme, cut dated 8 April 2026, lists 4,828 street segments for resurfacing between FY 2026-27 and FY 2030-31, weighted to the front with 1,532 segments in the first year. The layer's own name carries "SUBJECT TO CHANGE", and we carry that too. Your tires will not wait five years either way.

What we do at the visit

Wheel off, tire off the rim, nail out under inspection, inner liner checked, plug and patch fitted from the inside, remount, rebalance that wheel, TPMS reset where the vehicle supports it at the roadside, pressure set to the door placard.

While the gauge is out we measure all four tires, in the groove beside the wear bar rather than on it — California's CVC 27465(c) excludes tie bars, humps and fillets from a tread measurement — and read the DOT date codes. If a repair is not possible we supply and fit a replacement at the same address on the same visit. We do not fit tires bought elsewhere and we do not sell used tires.

The California tread law page covers the depth question, tire age covers the date codes, repair or replace covers the decision, and find your tire size covers what a replacement would be.

Our price: $145

A mobile puncture repair is $145 for the first tire and $50 for each additional tire in the same visit, with no separate call-out fee. Repair is subject to on-site inspection. If the damage is not repairable we tell you on the spot; you pay for the inspection and not for a repair that was not done, and you decide whether to replace.

We need level, paved, legal ground with room at one corner of the car. In Los Angeles that usually means checking the street-sweeping sign first — see street sweeping and mobile tire service. More Los Angeles pages: mobile tire repair, flat tire repair, slow leaks, what it costs, who is open now, and our Los Angeles service area.

Questions people ask

• Should I pull the nail out? No. It is partly sealing the hole. Leave it in, photograph where it sits, and let it come out with the tire off the wheel.
• Can I drive on it? If the tire is holding pressure, a short careful drive to somewhere the van can work is usually better than a long one. Driving on a tire that is actually low is what turns a repairable puncture into a replacement.
• How many nails can one tire take? The standard limits repairs by position and size, not by a count, and repairs must not overlap. We will tell you at the inspection whether a second repair is safe in that tire.
• Does a nail in the shoulder really write the tire off? Yes. The shoulder flexes under every rotation and no patch is rated for it. This is the single commonest reason a repair turns into a replacement.
• How many potholes does Los Angeles have? Nobody can tell you, because the city's 311 system has no pothole request type at all. What it does publish is a condition grade on every street segment: 19.3 percent of 6,575.04 centreline miles were graded Poor in the June 2026 inventory.
• Is it worse in winter here? Not through frost. All four Los Angeles weather stations average 0.0 days a year with a maximum at or below freezing, and the snowfall normal at LAX and Burbank is 0.0 inches. The freeze-thaw story from other cities does not apply.