Los Angeles wants a ‘no-car’ Olympics. Can the city of drivers turn a corner?

Los Angeles is world-famous for its gridlocked traffic and endless freeways. So when the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, promised to make the 2028 Olympics a “no-car” game, eyebrows were raised.

As Paris handed over the Olympic flag, Bass laid out her vision at a press conference: parking is not available at many venues, and sports fans must take public transportation to reach the venues, which range from downtown to Inglewood to Santa Monica Beach.

While the city has a large network of light rail, metro and bus lines, the system lags far behind previous host cities such as Paris, London and Tokyo. In addition, declining ridership and safety issues on public transport have been in the spotlight this year, raising questions about how the city will encourage people to join.

Can LA get everything in order by 2028? And what would that look like?

A challenge of scale and culture

One of the biggest problems is sprawl: LA’s city limits cover 469 square miles (1,214 square kilometers), compared to just 41 square miles for Paris. Sprawl means people often have to change buses or trains at least once to get from one place to another — making them less likely to use public transportation.

And in a city where the car has long been adored and people are accustomed to long commutes, drivers also face the challenge of pushing cyclists out of their comfort zone.

“People in Los Angeles like having a lot of space to drive their cars, even if that means sitting in traffic in their cars,” said Juan Matute, associate director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. “It’s a political challenge that Los Angeles leaders must overcome to make the promise of car-free play a reality.”

But Matute does believe it is possible to create a system that gets people to the Olympic venues – with the right planning.

Seleta Reynolds, the chief innovation officer at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, also known as LA Metro, the agency that oversees transit operations and design for the county, says they look back to the hosting of the 1984 Games for inspiration — that was also a car-free Games. And at the time, Metro and the LA region didn’t have a single subway line or light rail.

Reynolds says there will be at least one new rail line opened per year between now and 2028 for the next four years. “But in the meantime, we know that even with all that rail expansion, it’s still not going to be enough,” she says, “and we’re still going to have to take a page out of the 1984 playbook and really rely heavily on buses to move people.”

From cars… to buses and bicycles?

The real heavy lifting of moving the 15 million expected Olympic visitors won’t come from trains: it will come from buses. That means building bus lanes, improving bus stops, and adjusting curbs to accommodate passengers.

from LA plans of the public transport company to borrow 2,700 buses — which would double the fleet — from surrounding cities in California and throughout the Southwest. In keeping with Bass’s goal of a “greener” Los Angeles, it’s important that the buses run on natural gas or electricity, not diesel. They’re even looking at ways to borrow electric buses from universities and schools. “It’s possible that we’ll have a bunch of electric yellow school buses that will take people to the Olympics,” Reynolds says.

All those buses need dedicated places to run, especially on the highways. There’s been a bus lane boom during the pandemic, with 30 miles of new lanes, and funding for another 15 miles. Most of those will be permanent, but there will also be dedicated bus lanes to help people get to the sites, Reynolds says.

The agency is also considering how to build more protected cycling infrastructure, improve pedestrian access and create a series of mobility hubs – places where people can go to catch a bus to a venue. Many of these hubs would be located in existing light or heavy rail transit stations, but some would be standalone areas where people could go to visit fan zones and watch games with other community members.

There will also be a number of streets, Reynolds says, that will be completely closed to cars during the games: “Opportunities for us to showcase what’s great about Los Angeles — our neighborhoods, our culture, the vibrancy we have as a city.”

Bus lanes can be built in a short time. In 2017, the Institute of Transportation Studies did a study of areas in the United States that had built bus lanes quickly and found that one city had built them in just six weeks. There are also new rules that allow Metro to use cameras to catch and fine drivers who illegally use bus lanes.

Metro has secured about $17 billion for its slate of projects, but still needs $3 billion to get the job done. The agency has a list of 28 projects it wants to complete by 2028, but only 5% is currently completed.

A unique opportunity

There are other reasons to look to the 1984 Olympics as a model. Many companies back then adjusted their schedules to keep people off the roads. They also limited truck deliveries to nighttime hours in busy parts of the city. The same could be done in 2028 — largely by adopting remote work — for the 17 days of the Games.

Research shows that infrastructure for mega events like the Olympics or the World Cup is permanent, but people’s habits often aren’t. Mutate says that after London hosted the 2012 Olympics, the infrastructure was used continuously, but people’s habits of using public transport reverted to their previous versions. within two weeks after the end of the event.

Still, Los Angeles has an opportunity to make lasting change, Mutate says. The Olympic and Paralympic Games, as well as other upcoming sporting events like the 2026 World Cup and the 2027 Super Bowl, present a unique opportunity to take public transportation in a new direction.

Mutate says the concept of transit-first games actually came about more than a year ago, but he was encouraged to see the mayor’s office fully embrace the idea this week. “I think people are going to say, ‘This is the time to rip off the Band-Aid and make transit more viable,’” Mutate says. “Los Angeles can move forward a decade in four years.”

Reynolds agrees. “It’s an opportunity for us to let people try something different, to travel in a different way, and make that experience so great that they decide they want to do it again and again, even after the games are over.”