Los Angeles plans ‘car-free’ Olympics to avoid traffic jams

During rush hour, car trips of a few miles can take an hour or more in Los Angeles. (AFP Photo)

PARIS: Organizers of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics said today they would require spectators to take public transportation to Olympic venues and encourage remote working in a bid to avoid the gridlocked city’s notorious traffic problems.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said 2028 Olympic leaders want the Los Angeles Olympics to be “the car-free Games” by investing in public transportation and encouraging Angelenos to embrace pandemic-style remote work for the duration of the event.

“The ‘No Car Games’ means you’ll have to take public transportation to get to all the venues,” Bass said at a news conference ahead of tomorrow’s Paris Olympics closing ceremony.

“To achieve this, we have developed our transport system.”

The plan would require borrowing more than 3,000 buses from other parts of the United States, she added.

Bass was adamant, however, that Los Angeles traffic, where rush-hour gridlock can lead to car rides of just a few miles taking an hour or more, would not be a problem, citing the city’s history of the 1984 Olympics.

“In 1984, people in Los Angeles were terrified that they were going to have terrible, terrible traffic,” she said.

“We were shocked to find that this was not the case. In 1984, we had none of the technologies that we have today.”

She added that city officials 40 years ago encouraged employers to stagger schedules or allowed workers to work remotely with great success.

“I think we can do it again,” Bass said.

“The idea of ​​organising a car-free Olympic Games involves encouraging people not only to not drive, but also to use public transport to get to the Games.

“We’ve certainly learned from Covid that there are essential workers, people who need to come to work.

“But if you limit yourself to that, it will be much easier, because we have been through the Covid crisis. So people will have a reference point in recent history for how to proceed.”

Bass said the city would also aim to house Los Angeles’ 75,500 homeless people before the Olympics.

Asked whether Los Angeles would follow Paris’ lead in moving thousands of homeless people to locations outside the city ahead of the Olympics, Bass said: “We’re going to house the Angelenos.

“That’s what we’ve done and we’re going to continue to do it. We’re going to house people, we’re going to get them off the streets.

“We will place them in temporary housing, address the reasons why they became homeless in the first place and place them in permanent housing.”

Tomorrow’s closing ceremony in Paris will mark the official start of the countdown to the Los Angeles Olympics, with the city offering a glimpse of what to expect in 2028 as the curtain falls in the French capital.

“I think that’s the real LA that you’ll see at the closing ceremonies tomorrow, as a first step,” said LA28 President Casey Wasserman.

“We don’t have the Eiffel Tower, we have the Hollywood sign. We have incredible locations. We have incredible geography and we’re going to show that both physically and in the way we present ourselves, which I think people will get a sense of tomorrow.”