LA’s mayor says 2028 will be ‘no-car Games’ despite city’s notorious traffic

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has said the 2028 Olympics will be a “car-free Games” as the city prepares to host the event in four years.

Bass and Casey Wasserman, the president of the LA 2028 organizing committee, highlighted some of the planning that has already been completed. Bass was preemptive about the city’s notorious traffic, addressing the issue in her opening remarks at a press conference in Paris on Saturday.

“We’re already working to create jobs by expanding our public transportation system so that we can have a no-car Games,” she said. “And that’s an accomplishment for Los Angeles, because we’ve always been in love with our cars. We’re working to make sure that we can build a greener Los Angeles.”

Bass said public transportation is the only way to reach the city’s Olympic venues. Her plan to tackle traffic includes using 3,000 buses borrowed from other U.S. cities and asking companies to let their employees work from home during the Games.

It is the third time that Los Angeles has hosted the Olympics. The city also hosted the Games in 1932 and 1984. Bass said widespread concerns about traffic before the 1984 Games were unfounded.

“Angelinos were terrified that we were going to have horrible, horrible traffic, and we were shocked that we didn’t,” Bass said. “But I’ll tell you, in 1984, we didn’t have the technology that we have now. We’ve learned through Covid that you can work remotely.”

Tom Bradley, who was mayor of Los Angeles in 1984, had local businesses stagger their hours to reduce the number of cars on the road. Bass said she wants the city to go even further in 2028, allowing non-essential workers to work remotely during the Games.

“Part of the car-free Olympics is getting people to stop driving,” Bass said.

Paris has been praised for how accessible the Games have been, with almost every location reachable by metro, train, tram or bus. Los Angeles has bus and light rail systems, but only two metro lines, a public transport system that pales in size compared to recent host cities such as Paris, London and Tokyo.

Bass admits she has not yet received commitments from companies in LA to allow their employees to work from home during the Games.

“I think it should work by talking to the city’s largest employers about staggering hours, something that was done 40 years ago when we didn’t have tech-savvy cell phones and PCs,” Bass said. “I don’t think it’s going to be hard this time, honestly.”

Bass also said she plans to improve the lives of homeless people by 2028. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority said in June that there were 45,252 homeless people in the city in 2024. Organizers in Paris have relocated thousands of homeless people for these Games. Bass said she is working with both the government and private sectors to address the problem.

“We’re going to house the people of Los Angeles. That’s what we’ve been doing and we’re going to continue to do that,” Bass said. “We’re going to house people. We’re going to get them off the streets. We’re going to put them in transitional housing, address the reason why they were homeless and put them in permanent housing.”

Wasserman spoke about the political climate in the U.S. as the country heads into a fraught presidential election. He noted that three different sitting presidents have supported Los Angeles’s efforts, dating back to Barack Obama’s letter supporting the city before the winning effort in 2017.

“I want to remind people that this is about red, white and blue,” Wasserman said. “This is not about red and blue. We’re all marching behind the same flag, the same name, the same anthem, and this is something that will bring our country together.”