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 highways. So when the city’s mayor Karen Bass pledged to make the 2028 Olympics a “no-car” games, more than a few eyebrows were raised.

As Paris handed over the Olympics flag, Bass touted her vision at a press conference: parking will not be available at many of the venues and sports fans will need to take public transit to reach the sites, which will range from downtown to Inglewood to the beach in Santa Monica.

While the city does have a large network of light rail, subway lines and buses, compared with previous host cities like Paris, London and Tokyo, its system falls far behind. In addition, decreasing ridership and safety issues on public transit have taken the spotlight this year, raising questions about how the city will encourage people to get on board.

Related: ‘No-car Games’: Los Angeles readies for its 2028 Olympics closeup

Can LA get its act together in time for 2028 and what would that even look like?

A challenge of scale and culture

One of the main problems is sprawl: the LA city limits contain a land area of 469 sq miles (1,214 sq km), compared with just 41 sq miles for Paris. Sprawl means that people often have to change buses or trains at least once to get from one place to another – which cuts down on their likelihood of using public transit.

And in a city that has long worshiped the automobile and where people have grown accustomed to long commutes, officials also face the challenges of getting riders out of their comfort zone.

“People in Los Angeles like having a lot of space to operate their cars, even if it means they’re just going to be sitting in traffic in their cars,” says Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. “It’s a political challenge that the leaders of Los Angeles will need to overcome in order to make good on the promise of having a car-free games.”

But Matute does think creating a system that gets people around to Olympic sites is possible – 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 are looking back to its hosting of the 1984 Games for inspiration – which were also car-free games. And at that time, Metro and the LA region didn’t have a single line of subway or light rail.

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

From cars … to buses and bikes?

The real heavy lift for moving the 15 million expected visitors coming for the Olympics will not come from trains: it will come from buses. That means constructing bus-only lanes, better bus stops and changing curbs to accommodate riders.

LA’s transit agency plans to borrow 2,700 buses – which would double its fleet – from surrounding cities in California and throughout the south-west. In keeping with Bass’s goal of a “greener” Los Angeles, it’s important that the buses run on natural gas or electricity, and not diesel. They are even looking at ways to borrow electric buses from universities and schools. “It’s possible that there could be some electric yellow school buses taking people to the Olympic Games,” Reynolds says.

All those buses need dedicated places to drive – especially on the freeways. During the pandemic, there was a boom of building bus lanes, with 30 miles of new lanes created, and there is funding for another 15 miles. Most of those will be permanent, but there will also be dedicated bus lanes created just for moving people to the venues, Reynolds says.

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

There will also be some 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 kind of vibrancy that we have as a city.”

Bus lanes can be deployed in a short amount of time. The Institute of Transportation Studies did a research project in 2017 looking at areas around the United States that had quickly deployed bus lanes and found that one city had deployed them in just six weeks. There are also new regulations allowing Metro to use cameras to catch and fine drivers who illegally use bus lanes.

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

A unique opportunity

There are other reasons to look to the 1984 Olympics as a model. At the time, many businesses shifted their schedules to keep people off the roadways. They also limited truck deliveries to nighttime hours in busy parts of the city. The same could be done in 2028 – especially shifting to 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 peoples’ habits often are not. Mutate says that after London hosted the 2012 Olympics, the infrastructure was continually used, but people’s transit habits snapped back to their previous versions within two weeks of the end of the event .

Still, Los Angeles has a shot at creating a lasting shift, says Mutate. The Olympics and Paralympics, as well as other upcoming sporting events such as the World Cup in 2026 and the Super Bowl in 2027, offer a unique opportunity to pivot public transportation in a new direction.

Mutate says the concept of the transit-first games actually emerged more than a year ago, but he was encouraged to see the mayor’s office go all-in on the idea this week. “I think people are going to say: this is the time to pull off the band-aid to make public transportation more viable,” Mutate says. “Los Angeles can move forward a decade in four years.”

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