The key here to see if they can pull this off is the addition of 3000 buses.
LA Metro currently only runs 2000 buses, and that’s for the entire service area, I’m guessing the new buses are going to be concentrated in the Olympic areas.
I used to rely on the bus back in college. It was not convenient. The bus schedule controlled your schedule. My bus to school ran every hour.
If I wanted to travel from the San Gabriel valley to downtown LA, it was over two hours.
An early job I had, 20 mile commute, combined riding and walking (job was a mile from the bus stop) meant a 5:30am bus trip to get there by 8.
It’s functional but hardly convenient. It’s a far cry from a 10m wait for a subway train. One mistake in the chain, and it was quite punishing.
One year, the last bus from campus (at 8:05pm, which i really hated — just too early for a college student) was late. It was caught in LA traffic because of the World Series at Dodger Stadium. Which was 30 miles away.
And the riders that night were trapped. Last bus, had to sit and wait for it. Couldn’t pop back into the library and come back in an hour for the next one. Hour and a half late.
LA is huge. As busy as downtown is, it’s busy everywhere. Buses are the most scalable and flexible solution. All you need for a new bus route is a bus and a sign.
But as a user, all I can say is they beat walking, but just barely.
People don't want to ride public transit in Los Angeles, its not safe. Los Angles wants to anything but crack down on crime and the homeless. A major problem with the LA light rail system is the homeless taking over trains and harassing passengers.
Two months ago, LAPD began doing its job again and patrolling the stations and trains. Early estimates are that property crimes and violent crimes dropped by over 75% in August. It only took a few murders and LA Metro revoking[2] the security contract[1] for LAPD to start doing its job.
Because LAPD and LA Sheriff almost exclusively assigned officers who had already hit their 8/40 for the day/week, almost all of the time on the LA Metro contract was billed at overtime hours. With its own internal police force, LA Metro can actuall field a security force almost 50% larger for the same amount it was paying LAPD/LAS.
[1] In the 1990s, in order to increase the size of the police force, the LA City Council shut down the LA Metro police force and forced LA Metro to contract security out to LAPD and LA Sheriff. Security in the system started worsening immediately, reaching rock bottom earlier this year. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-06-26/editorial-w...
It's surprising that a city like LA, comparing it to Madrid, has roughly the same number of buses. Specially because Madrid has an incredible subway and commuting train network supporting all this trips.
From what I see, the LA Metro Rail sees 60 million travelers a year, but Madrid subway is over 600 million... [0]
The city has been making changes to the bus system recently. They are implementing the next gen bus plan with a goal of having 80% of the ridership get 10 min or better frequency. Of course that might not include some distant san gabriel valley stop if its seldom used compared to somewhere pretty heavily trafficked with high ridership busses like in east hollywood. Not sure of your commute if you were using foothill transit busses, but the next gen plan is for la metro busses at least.
Adding 3000 buses won't do anything if they don't also add bus priority lanes and lights. Otherwise they just sit in traffic and at red lights like everyone else.
They have been building out more bus lanes and increasing their priority where they can. What makes it a little tricky is a bus will never just get straight priority/preemption because they cross other bus lines going a perpendicular direction all the time, and these will naturally conflict.
I think people are misinterpreting car free. Car free likely just means more of a park and ride type situation. You hop on a designated bus that will be available at various locations, and that bus will take you to the venue.
I used to live in Santa Monica and work in El Segundo. My commute by bike was 55 minutes and joyous, mostly. By car it was 50 minutes and horrible. The funny thing is that the only reason I took the car for a few months was because of injuries from getting hit by a car while biking.
It’s not like cars have exactly been working well for LA. They’re slower than biking for a lot of trips. With a bike and the bus or train I often beat traffic during rush hour.
Fortunately, LA has wide roads with many lanes and can repurpose them for other uses, if they want to.
If you’re ever in the city for critical mass or CicLAvia I can’t recommend it enough. Best way to see the city.
E-Bikes and escooters are even more convenient. Sustained speed, easy acceleration, wind and hills have almost no impact, not as sweaty.
The only way la pulls this off is with a gigantic conversion of streets to zero cars and e-bikes only.
The other aspect that speeds up bike Transit in cities is that you can park far closer, typically and far more quickly than with a car.
The sad fact is that in a city if you bike it isn't "if" you get hit by a car it's when.
The only way to practically reduce that likelihood are totally separate dedicated pathways for bikes.
I wonder if elevated lanes for biking is feasible, since you simply don't have to hold as much weight. Do we really need concrete and steel? Can we do it with Kevlar?
In Minneapolis there are two major rail to bike path conversions and they boost the bike ability of the city by an order of magnitude over bike lanes adjacent to car lanes.
The paths by the Mississippi River are equally effective.
Cities simply don't have the willpower for such projects if rail or other park systems don't provide most of the work.
I'm hopeful that the sodium ion battery revolution might result in near zero cost Urban personal transportation within large city limits, car Transit limited to fixed entry points.
At some point I predict that a small e-scooter for a single person with a 50 mile range will cost under $50. That will probably require sodium sulfur technologies and maybe some solid state technologies.
That scooter will be collapsible and easily carried to an inside point to be recharged.
City and traffic planers of Hamburg and Hannover visited LA in the 50ties and 60ties to bring the "car centric principles" over to German big cities. For example in Hamburg a fully develop tram network was removed to make more space for the car. Neighbourhoods were divided to bring streets with 6 lanes through it. Wider streets is not necessarily less traffic jam.. We know this now. But until today we deal with those decisions, but it is getting better and we already reverted some things to make the city more friendly for people instead of cars.
I can understand how it could have been a good idea at the time. Car ownership had only recently become mainstream and was rapidly growing as the dominant form of transport. Redesigning cities that have historically catered to pedestrians and horses to be ready for the transport of the future was quite forward-thinking, however poorly it turned out.
I don't think they'll achieve it and I think that's okay. LA has some of the infrastructure but momentum is the big part. If the Olympics are the catalyst to get the ball moving on this, then I don't care if they only achieve 20-30% of the goal, because I think if you get some momentum and some success it can be used to drive more. It's something everyone wants in LA, but so many things are "sticky". I hope this can help get them unstuck.
The 1984 Olympics there were expected to be a traffic disaster. Turned out that everyone stayed away because it was expected to be a traffic disaster. I had a 65 mile commute into Los Angeles at that time and it was a doddle.
My dad had those for most of his career. He worked at nuclear plants but lived in the nearest kind of big town, which was always at least 60 miles away from the plant. I can’t imagine what that did to his mental health, the nuclear power industry isn’t something I recommend anyone getting into.
I visited LA a couple of years ago. The smog in that region was awful. Out of all of the cities to represent the United States. I can’t believe LA was picked as the spot to showcase on an international level.
A “4-year sprint” to make it “car free” is nothing more than a Potemkin Village in my opinion. International visitors will be greatly disappointed at how terrible this country’s public transportation infrastructure
Paris and LA were the only two cities who bid for the Olympics in 2017. They got the 2024 and 2028 Olympics respectively. I'm not sure any other city in the US wants to host the Olympics.
I'm not sure there's many cities in the entire world that want to host it at this point...
I mean look at Paris. The city’s residents emptied out.
This is still ok in Europe, especially France, which have a culture of weeks long summer vacations, so it wasn’t as much of a disruption as timing the vacation right.
I’m not sure how well it will work for the residents of LA when US residents have no such limitation.
OTOH, LA is large and broken up enough enough that it may not be very noticeable for the residents as long as they remain in their residential areas.
People in Brazil were convicted for money laundering related to buying votes for Rio 2016. The US refused to submit a bid for the 2020 games because the IOC was demanding more money. Tokyo, which had the strongest 2016 bid according to the IOC grading process, took 2 runoffs to win the bid for 2020 with some pretty shady voting patterns.
So yeah, it’s no surprise that hardly any city wants to bother with the IOC.
I can’t believe LA was picked as the spot to showcase on an international level.
LA is the only host in Olympics history to have been selected by default, a feat it has accomplished every single time it has "won" the Olympics. (for the 1932, 1984, and 2028 Olympics, LA was the only bidder).
LA is, paradoxically, the reason that cities/countries go crazy spending money on the Olympics: despite being an undesired host, LA is the only city in Olympics history to have made a profit every time it has hosted. (The profits from the 1984 games are still funding youth sports programs in the LA area today.) This is because LA has such a large athletics scene that only two or three venues needed to be built for the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, and all of these venues remained in use after the Olympics. Almost all of these venues are still around today (except for the 1984 velodrome).
I was working there off and on in the early 80's - everyone was moaning about it, claiming to have "smog withdrawal" whwn they went off to the San Gabriel mountains at the weekend. Coming from London though, little to complain about here (at least on the air quality side of things).
Steve Ovett must've been lying or had Covid when he collapsed while running in 1984. And Haile Gebrselassie and Justine Henin withdrawal shows they were just cowards in Beijing 2008?
Car free or not. There will be tons of public transportation extraordinary options running during the Olympics. There is simply no other option to move all these people around - athletes and their crew, service people for the venues, journalists, etc. etc. Not to mention the spectators.
That's not public transportation."Mass transportation", maybe. Shuttling athletes and their minders from the Olympic village to the venues is a different set of challenges from delivering a city's residents to their places of work, school and recreation day in, day out.
I have been thinking. Should we actually move towards reducing people involved? Like ban all spectators, just stream televise them. Journalist can get their interviews over Teams meetings. No need for dignitaries to be present either. Basically you need only athletes, maybe coaches and support staff. For catering, well develop some efficient meals that don't need heating and produce them off-site.
All this would save lot on very many things, both in emissions and in costs.
June gloom is not smog.
CA has some of the strictest emission controls since the 90s at least. Electric cars are plentiful. It’s not the 70s any longer.
Now a fire can and does happen occasionally but that is far from a given at any particular time.
> International visitors will be greatly disappointed at how terrible this country’s public transportation infrastructure
The 2026 World Cup will be the first hit. People from all around the world will have to go to stadia in the middle of nowhere in seas of parking lots, without any or any good transit options for getting there. Combine with the very expensive prices of everything, local cultural expectations that will not sit well with everyone (tipping iPads for self-servicing yourself), and I personally think a lot of people will absolutely hate it, which will also cloud the Olympics' perception before they even start.
I'm wondering whether there's also going to be a large-scale operation a few months ahead of the games of deporting homeless people from the city as we have seen in Paris. (also, I heard they have already quite rolled back on that "car-free" goal. Don't have the source available, but google is your friend.)
> I'm wondering whether there's also going to be a large-scale operation a few months ahead of the games of deporting homeless people
Yes. Already beginning in cities all across the US since the Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v Johnson.
Prior to this decision, a locality without sufficient shelter beds could not just sweep through an encampment arresting/fining/evicting the residents while seizing and destroying their possessions like sleeping bags, blankets and tents, or fine/arrest and impound vehicles of people sleeping in vehicles (yes, all the above happened in spite of the law, but it did result in some restraint on the part of the authorities). Now, homeless hate can be unleashed without restraint.
Hate it is. In one memorable letter to the editor of a local paper, a woman wrote, "Homeless are like cockroaches and I wish I had a giant can of Raid." (for non Americans, Raid is a brand of insecticide-- maybe obvious from context).
People who were in foster care as children make up 50% of the homeless population in the US [1]. Homeless demographics have changed recently, people becoming homeless for the first time after the age of 50 is now the second largest single group in California at 41% [2]. The US is a brutal society that is failing its most vulnerable.
"Overly optimistic" is an overly optimistic statement. As an LA native I laughed out loud when I read that.
LA is the kind of place a small town of under 25k blocks a critical freeway extension for over 40 years until the state gives up. There is no way it's happening.
While thats true its still a place thats increasingly favoring transit or biking investment. Ballot initiatives are popular. More rail is being built here as we speak than anywhere else in the US with a few concurrent projects in varying states of planning or construction. Say what you will about south pasadena and the 710, theres a metro rail stop in their downtown and new bike lanes going up.
They can and I bet they will declare victory on this by moving the goal posts.
Like measuring only during the Olympics and for a subset of area or subset of travels, etc.
Readit News
LA Metro currently only runs 2000 buses, and that’s for the entire service area, I’m guessing the new buses are going to be concentrated in the Olympic areas.
I used to rely on the bus back in college. It was not convenient. The bus schedule controlled your schedule. My bus to school ran every hour.
If I wanted to travel from the San Gabriel valley to downtown LA, it was over two hours.
An early job I had, 20 mile commute, combined riding and walking (job was a mile from the bus stop) meant a 5:30am bus trip to get there by 8.
It’s functional but hardly convenient. It’s a far cry from a 10m wait for a subway train. One mistake in the chain, and it was quite punishing.
One year, the last bus from campus (at 8:05pm, which i really hated — just too early for a college student) was late. It was caught in LA traffic because of the World Series at Dodger Stadium. Which was 30 miles away.
And the riders that night were trapped. Last bus, had to sit and wait for it. Couldn’t pop back into the library and come back in an hour for the next one. Hour and a half late.
LA is huge. As busy as downtown is, it’s busy everywhere. Buses are the most scalable and flexible solution. All you need for a new bus route is a bus and a sign.
But as a user, all I can say is they beat walking, but just barely.
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/a-timeline-of-violen...
Because LAPD and LA Sheriff almost exclusively assigned officers who had already hit their 8/40 for the day/week, almost all of the time on the LA Metro contract was billed at overtime hours. With its own internal police force, LA Metro can actuall field a security force almost 50% larger for the same amount it was paying LAPD/LAS.
[1] In the 1990s, in order to increase the size of the police force, the LA City Council shut down the LA Metro police force and forced LA Metro to contract security out to LAPD and LA Sheriff. Security in the system started worsening immediately, reaching rock bottom earlier this year. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-06-26/editorial-w...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-27/metro-ok...
looks like cars aren't safe either in LA, and that's not counting accidents
From what I see, the LA Metro Rail sees 60 million travelers a year, but Madrid subway is over 600 million... [0]
It’s not like cars have exactly been working well for LA. They’re slower than biking for a lot of trips. With a bike and the bus or train I often beat traffic during rush hour.
Fortunately, LA has wide roads with many lanes and can repurpose them for other uses, if they want to.
If you’re ever in the city for critical mass or CicLAvia I can’t recommend it enough. Best way to see the city.
The only way la pulls this off is with a gigantic conversion of streets to zero cars and e-bikes only.
The other aspect that speeds up bike Transit in cities is that you can park far closer, typically and far more quickly than with a car.
The sad fact is that in a city if you bike it isn't "if" you get hit by a car it's when.
The only way to practically reduce that likelihood are totally separate dedicated pathways for bikes.
I wonder if elevated lanes for biking is feasible, since you simply don't have to hold as much weight. Do we really need concrete and steel? Can we do it with Kevlar?
In Minneapolis there are two major rail to bike path conversions and they boost the bike ability of the city by an order of magnitude over bike lanes adjacent to car lanes.
The paths by the Mississippi River are equally effective.
Cities simply don't have the willpower for such projects if rail or other park systems don't provide most of the work.
I'm hopeful that the sodium ion battery revolution might result in near zero cost Urban personal transportation within large city limits, car Transit limited to fixed entry points.
At some point I predict that a small e-scooter for a single person with a 50 mile range will cost under $50. That will probably require sodium sulfur technologies and maybe some solid state technologies.
That scooter will be collapsible and easily carried to an inside point to be recharged.
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Cars would be far less of a problem if that was still the case.
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Any improvement is welcome, hopefully it won’t regress after Olympics, but wouldn’t be surprised.
Absolutely insane.
A “4-year sprint” to make it “car free” is nothing more than a Potemkin Village in my opinion. International visitors will be greatly disappointed at how terrible this country’s public transportation infrastructure
I'm not sure there's many cities in the entire world that want to host it at this point...
This is still ok in Europe, especially France, which have a culture of weeks long summer vacations, so it wasn’t as much of a disruption as timing the vacation right.
I’m not sure how well it will work for the residents of LA when US residents have no such limitation.
OTOH, LA is large and broken up enough enough that it may not be very noticeable for the residents as long as they remain in their residential areas.
So yeah, it’s no surprise that hardly any city wants to bother with the IOC.
It’s because they’ve done it relatively recently and efficiently, and no other city wants the hassle.
They have the 2028 slot because Boston pulled out, after half the city’s politicians revolted against the idea
LA is the only host in Olympics history to have been selected by default, a feat it has accomplished every single time it has "won" the Olympics. (for the 1932, 1984, and 2028 Olympics, LA was the only bidder).
LA is, paradoxically, the reason that cities/countries go crazy spending money on the Olympics: despite being an undesired host, LA is the only city in Olympics history to have made a profit every time it has hosted. (The profits from the 1984 games are still funding youth sports programs in the LA area today.) This is because LA has such a large athletics scene that only two or three venues needed to be built for the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, and all of these venues remained in use after the Olympics. Almost all of these venues are still around today (except for the 1984 velodrome).
That was the concern in 1984. I believe the air quality in 1984 generally was far worse, and the Olympics did fine.
All this would save lot on very many things, both in emissions and in costs.
June gloom is not smog. CA has some of the strictest emission controls since the 90s at least. Electric cars are plentiful. It’s not the 70s any longer.
Now a fire can and does happen occasionally but that is far from a given at any particular time.
The 2026 World Cup will be the first hit. People from all around the world will have to go to stadia in the middle of nowhere in seas of parking lots, without any or any good transit options for getting there. Combine with the very expensive prices of everything, local cultural expectations that will not sit well with everyone (tipping iPads for self-servicing yourself), and I personally think a lot of people will absolutely hate it, which will also cloud the Olympics' perception before they even start.
Yes. Already beginning in cities all across the US since the Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v Johnson.
Prior to this decision, a locality without sufficient shelter beds could not just sweep through an encampment arresting/fining/evicting the residents while seizing and destroying their possessions like sleeping bags, blankets and tents, or fine/arrest and impound vehicles of people sleeping in vehicles (yes, all the above happened in spite of the law, but it did result in some restraint on the part of the authorities). Now, homeless hate can be unleashed without restraint.
Hate it is. In one memorable letter to the editor of a local paper, a woman wrote, "Homeless are like cockroaches and I wish I had a giant can of Raid." (for non Americans, Raid is a brand of insecticide-- maybe obvious from context).
People who were in foster care as children make up 50% of the homeless population in the US [1]. Homeless demographics have changed recently, people becoming homeless for the first time after the age of 50 is now the second largest single group in California at 41% [2]. The US is a brutal society that is failing its most vulnerable.
[1] https://cbexpress.acf.hhs.gov/article/2022/october/reducing-...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2024-05-28/old...
>For people who know Los Angeles, this seems overly optimistic
LA is the kind of place a small town of under 25k blocks a critical freeway extension for over 40 years until the state gives up. There is no way it's happening.