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Now that the Paris 2024 Olympics are over, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass accepted the Olympic flag in Paris last month, the beginning of the runup to the 2028 Games in the City of Angels has started. The question on many city officials’ minds is: will Los Angeles maximize the opportunities that hosting the Olympics offers?
The Mayor announced this past August that the 2028 Olympics would be “car-free,” which may be challenging in a city that is known for being dependent on its freeways.
However, the car-free announcement isn’t too firm, either, with a spokesperson clarifying last week that “most LA28 venues will not require spectators to drive in their cars and will be accessible by public transportation and Games-specific transportation systems.”
Yet, limiting car travel so significantly in Los Angeles is still an ambitious goal. Even if it is possible, many city leaders are questioning whether such improvements during the 2028 Games will result in lasting effects for the city.
There is a chance the city improvements may not benefit L.A. in the long run, as Olympic planners arrange to borrow 2,700 buses to shuttle athletes and ticket holders to the event, which the regional transportation authority is calling “games enhanced transit.” While these buses will help decrease car traffic, they cannot do anything long-lasting for L.A. because they will need to return to their lenders when the 2028 Games end—ending what enhancement they provide during the games and resuming traffic.
Other temporary measures that the city plans to take during the 2028 Olympics is limiting some streets and freeway lanes for Olympic-related shuttles only. As with the borrowed buses, this will only temporarily relieve city traffic, but the street and freeway limitations could disappear as soon as the torch is passed onto the next city.
The Games do offer L.A. transportation money and benefits, and City Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, who sits on the region’s Metro board, stressed the importance of the city not just relying on short-term arrangements to handle the influx of visitors during the Games. It’s crucial, she said, to “use the Olympics to accelerate a lot of the work that we know we need to do anyway, around ‘first-mile, last-mile,’ around connectivity, around bus and bike lanes.”
Yaroslavsky stated that such improvement would help visitors during the Games but would also remain after the Games end, relieving Metro of some of the obligations to pay for them and providing long-term improvements for the city.
These projects could exceed $200 million combined, so securing outside support for them as part of the Games would be a significant benefit to local taxpayers, according to Yaroslavsky.
Other improvements being discussed include modernizing stations and improving streets and sidewalks that visitors during the Games will use to get to venues.
While the Los Angeles transit system does need work, the city was chosen for the 2028 Olympics in part because it already has the stadium and many other amenities that hosting the Games requires. Due to this, L.A. could potentially gain less than other cities, like Atlanta, for putting on the two-week multi-sport event.
L.A. already has the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which was the home of both the 1932 and 1984 Games and will be the scene for the opening and closing ceremonies—becoming the first facility to ever perform the role three times. But the area also has the Rose Bowl and SoFi Stadium, as well as many other indoor arenas for basketball, gymnastics, and other sports.
With many projects already in the works for transportation needed to host the Games, local governments cannot expect the Olympics to pay for other major capital investments that are currently underway, which makes Yaroslavsky’s approach reasonable. Let the Games pay for the improvements that would help the 2028 Olympics be a better experience, but that will also create lasting effects and free local dollars to pay for other parts of the growing system.
Yaroslavsky rightly noted, “The Olympics will be a failure if we don’t leverage it to go get what we need.”
