If you were scrolling through social media during the Olympics closing ceremony’s handoff from Paris to Los Angeles, you inevitably encountered one recurring post (aside from Tom Cruise memes and eagle-eyed Angelenos recognizing a fake palm tree-filled Rosie’s Dog Beach in Long Beach that the broadcast tried to pass off as Venice Beach): Traffic is going to be a nightmare in 2028.
Except it won’t—probably. Maybe. Hopefully. L.A. mayor Karen Bass reiterated plans for “a no-car Games,” as multiple outlets reported from a press conference in Paris over the weekend. One major component of that: Attendees “will have to take public transportation” to get to the 2028 Olympics’ various venues. As for managing car traffic, there’ll be designated freeway lanes for Olympics buses and companies will be encouraged to adjust their employees’ schedules or move to remote work.
The DTLA, Long Beach and USC-adjacent venues are all within a couple of blocks of light rail or subway stops. But what about the spots in Carson and the Valley that aren’t quite as transit-connected? That’s likely where the 3,000 buses that L.A. plans on borrowing from agencies around the country will come into play.
None of this should be shocking if you’ve been following L.A.’s Olympic pursuit over the past decade: The city’s final bid book from 2017 promised that it would “aim to achieve that 100 percent of ticketed spectators travel to competition venues by public transport or Games transport systems, designed specifically for spectators, such as shuttle bus systems for venues and managed first and last mile walking routes.”
But as transportation journalist Alissa Walker has pointed out in her must-read newsletter Torched, this “car-free” promise has actually somewhat softened recently to mentions of a “transit-first” approach among local leaders. Moreover, she points out that those first-and-last-mile solutions—things like widening sidewalks, protecting bike lanes and adding some shade along pedestrian paths—have been more or less silent so far.
These sorts of improvements seem particularly important for the Games’ in-between-transit destinations. Take, for example, Inglewood, where SoFi Stadium and Intuit Dome are sandwiched between the K and C Lines but not within walking distance of either (that city’s proposed people mover won’t open until after the Games, if it even actually gets built at all). And as for the shuttles, if they’re anything like the ones to the Hollywood Bowl, it means—even with more subway expansion projects on the horizon before 2028—many locals will still be driving to a parking lot somewhere to board them.
So what does this all mean for traffic? If L.A.’s 1984 Olympics are any indication, it’ll be fine—maybe even better than fine. The same fears of traffic nightmares circulated ahead of those games, but staggered work schedules and fleets of buses meant that “Los Angeles freeways flowed more smoothly” than they had in years, as the L.A. Times reported at the time. In fact, one writer even referred to it as an “automotive nirvana,” which high volumes of traffic but little congestion.
Of course, the past isn’t any guarantee; things have, of course, changed since then. There were two million fewer people living in L.A. County in ’84 than there are now. But at the same time, not a single one of Metro’s 109 miles of railways were open yet. The ’84 Games also arrived at a low point in Olympic history, in the middle of the Cold War and back-to-back boycotts—but L.A.’s financially successful hosting gig seemed to redefine the Games going forward. The ’28 Games will kick off at a time when—even though countries are wary of the costs of hosting the Olympics—the public’s interest in them seems reinvigorated after a wildly positive response to Paris. And there’ll likely be lessons to pick up from Paris, too, like that city’s employment of security zones to limited unnecessary travel.
So empty your tank of all of those traffic jokes now, because they’re driving us crazy and we’re already real tired of them.