Can LA host a 'car-free' Olympics?

0:01NPR

0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money, I'm Darian Woods. And with me is reporter and Forbes columnist, Sonari Glinton. Many listeners will recognize his voice from NPR and Planet Money and his years covering the auto industry. Now, Sonari lives mostly car-free in Hollywood. It's good to be with you, Darian. And, you know, I've been thinking about Hollywood and driving, and Brian Wilson died this summer.

0:40Rest in peace, Brian Wilson. and at the time, the Little Deuce Coop album went to number four on the Billboard charts. Oh, the harmonies. Yes. I know it's a gratuitous song cue, but driving is a core part of California culture and even more so Los Angeles culture. That, though, is changing. Right. I heard Los Angeles is having a bit of a mass transit renaissance. It's building a new subway, light rail, and adding$120 billion of transit infrastructure for Los Angeles County over 40 years. Yeah, there's the 28 by 28 plan, which aims to complete 28 huge projects in time for the 2028 Olympics. Now, the goal is a no-car Olympics.

1:25Quite a goal for a city known for its car culture. Today on the show, the debate over how those billions of dollars should be spent and how those funds will serve the Angelenos who already use LA's public transit.

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2:53Let's start with what is easily seen as the most important road in Los Angeles. Wilshire Boulevard is 16 miles long and essentially LA's main street. It's lined with skyscrapers for almost its entire length and connects many of the county's diverse neighborhoods. Yeah, the LA Times architecture critic said it really poetically. Wilshire is our boulevard of cold feet and second thoughts, the place where Los Angeles confronts its deep ambivalence about putting a low-rise, car-dominated and essentially suburban past behind it for good. Now LA is breaking with its suburban past by building a multi-billion dollar subway under the street.

3:34It's expected to transform the city. Yeah, exactly. And one new station will connect with a brand new museum with new galleries worth$720 million. They had to use a special machine to dig through the tar pits and LA's very topography. Development-wise, this is pretty sexy. What's actually sexier is if we can experience our city without traffic. That's transit advocate Scarlett DeLeon. She's with ACT LA, Alliance for Community Transit Los Angeles. Los Angeles has the potential to be this amazing city. We have great food, great neighborhoods, diversity. We have nature. The question is, can we access all this in a day?

4:19And the answer right now is no, unless you want to be in traffic for two hours. Now, I met Scarlett in Koreatown, one of the neighborhoods that straddles L.A.'s Wilshire Boulevard. This is where Scarlett grew up, in Koreatown, the child of Guatemalan immigrants. And Scarlett's group advocates for transit and affordable housing in the city. Like many folks in my community, we were public transportation dependent. And so most folks in Koreatown, but also most folks in Los Angeles who are working class, who are immigrant, who are black, rely on the bus system to get to essential services. Los Angeles Metro already runs one of the largest bus fleets in the country with more than 2 ,000 buses.

5:08There's also six rail lines, just over 100 rail stations and a bike share network. It adds up to around a million rides a day. Now, this ongoing expansion includes three new subway extensions, additional light rail, including to Los Angeles International Airport, and multiple bus rapid transit corridors. The long-term goal is to stitch together Los Angeles' many communities into one transit network. The short-term goal is not to have a traffic nightmare when LA hosts the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 28 Olympics. Well, you know, the Olympics are being called a no-car Olympics. And if you are in Los Angeles, you know that that's almost like impossible to have.

5:53So which means that folks are going to, or the agencies and the city is going to have to very quickly figure some stuff out. Scarlett worries the investments are not focused on the working class residents who rely on transit now. Instead, she says it's aimed at attracting new riders and servicing tourists who are coming in for the Olympics. And that rider is not living here currently. It's like, it's a value on budgets, right? Like you are choosing to create a system for a certain rider that you want to attract versus the riders that are already on the system, which are working class folks. Scarlett says the big, splashy projects like the subway also have a bunch of unintended side effects, like areas near subways see increased land values, home prices and rent.

6:45If you had your choice, where would you put the priorities? If I had my choice, Metro would be, before doing anything, improving the bus service and really making an investment on bus lanes, on high ridership, streets. It's making them what we call complete green streets where they would be protected bus lanes, protected bike lanes with green infrastructure. And what that would do, it would improve bus service. It would improve reliability. It's cost effective for Metro and it would mostly possibly impact current riders who are already using that bus every day. Funding for this transit expansion, though, comes with strengths.

7:31In 2016, LA residents passed a sales tax to fund transit. It's called Measure M. Now, to sell a permanent sales tax, planners leaned hard on big promises. A big subway expansion, a light rail expansion. The plan had everything from bike paths to earthquake retrofits, but it was clearly sold to the public as more subway. Overall, the plan was meant to ease congestion, expand public transit, and make it easier to drive, bike, and walk around the city. You're not going to transform that vast of a region with that investment. Stephen Chung is the CEO of the LA Economic Development Corporation and the World Trade Center Los Angeles.

8:13His job is to promote and help improve LA's economy. $120 billion, although it's significant, but the region is so vast that you can only make a small dent because just the cost of construction is so high that you're not able to basically address this vast area that we know as Los Angeles. He says LA is much bigger and complex than people imagine. The county of Los Angeles has 88 cities, 100 unincorporated areas. Still, he believes there is an upside for Angelenos because many of the new transit systems to the Olympics will go in and through communities that need it and will still be there once the games are over.

8:52Then those folks in the underserved community have better access to transportation to move them around, to jobs and to other opportunities as well. Stephen Chung says you also have to look at other transit systems in other big cities around the globe before you judge LA. When you compare and contrast, you need to make sure of both systems of rail and bus a lot of times in order for you to truly make an impact on the transit access as well as usage. Now, the test, Darian, will be whether drivers get out of their cars, not just for the Olympics, but long term. and for Scarlett, whether it improves the transit system for the people who rely on it right now.

9:33Cue the horns and check out Sonari's work at Forbes. Thank you for riding with us, Sonari. Always, and catch you on the expo line. See you there. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Jimmy Keely. It was fact-acted by Sarah Juarez. Kate McCannon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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