Can L.A. Really Pull Off a “Car-Free” Olympics?

This story is part of Design Goals, our week-long series celebrating the interplay between sports and style.

While some will watch the Summer Olympics to see how many gold medals end up around gymnast Simone Biles’s neck, others will tune in for glimpses of a different type of win: Paris’s astounding transition away from cars in the years leading up to the games. After her election in 2014, Mayor Anne Hidalgo used the 2024 Olympics to accelerate a transportation revolution that kicked vehicular traffic off major thoroughfares, expanded the region’s Metro system, built 600 miles of bike lanes, planted 65,000 trees, and created over 200 pedestrian plazas outside schools. 

The result is a Paris where residents overwhelmingly opt for other modes of transportation over cars; Over the last two decades, car traffic has fallen 50 percent, and so have injury crashes and air pollution. (And, as some in Paris have noted, the infrastructure updates have made it easier to weave through unpredictable games-related closures.) Throughout the French capital, the change is tangible: cacophonous corridors replaced with quieter and safer streets, glaring pavement swapped with shady green microforests.

In August, the baton will be handed to Los Angeles, host of the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. L.A. has hosted the games two times before, and the city has built a civic identity around being ready to leverage the risk of a megaevent that’s thrown dozens of other cities into crisis. In 2017, when Paris and L.A. were awarded their games simultaneously, Hidalgo and former L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti signed an agreement to align their climate goals leading up to the events. But seven years later, it’s becoming increasingly unclear if L.A. can deliver part of its 2028 Olympics promise: to produce what planners have dubbed the "car-free games."

The declaration is a practical one: There’s no parking at venues due to security perimeters, so games-goers will have to largely do without cars to traverse a 500 square-mile region. This is, of course, already the reality for many Angelenos; Metro, L.A.’s transit authority, serves nearly one million people daily. But the city’s wide, dangerous, and perpetually clogged streets make getting around very difficult without a car—let alone with 10 million Olympics ticketholders moving around town. Which may explain a recent messaging shift by some officials, who are now calling them "transit-first" games, signifying an attempt to (slightly) walk back the "car-free" commitment.

To achieve a "car-free games" in L.A., two things need to happen: "Reduce car space, and increase investment in non-car modes," says Yonah Freemark, principal research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, who has studied Paris’s reduction in car use. Leaders haven’t carved out more room for sidewalks, bike lanes, and plazas, he says, which is what L.A. needs to work on most. "L.A. is just not designed for the same level of walkability," says Freemark. "There hasn’t been enough work to ensure the streets are safe and comfortable for pedestrians and bikers."

L.A. is delivering on other sustainability aspects of its bid. The LA28 organizing committee promised the "radical reuse" of existing facilities: venues are being privately funded, at no costs to taxpayers, and hopefully, leveraged to turn a profit, like organizers famously did in 1984. (Although L.A. is fudging a little by allocating $54 million in public money to a convention center renovation.) Classic venues will be back in rotation, including the L.A. Memorial Coliseum (used in both the 1984 and 1932 games), Dodger Stadium, and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena; with newer billionaire-bankrolled venues in adjacent Inglewood (SoFi Stadium and the Intuit Dome) added to the mix. "We are going to deliver the right games for L.A., not change L.A. to fit the games," LA28 chairperson Casey Wasserman said in July. LA28 is applying such a light touch to L.A.’s built environment that it won’t be erecting temporary facilities for softball and canoe slalom—these events will be held will be held in Oklahoma City.

The transportation plan is a different story. In 2018, Metro’s board of directors approved Twenty-Eight by ’28, a list of 28 major transportation projects to be accelerated in advance of the games that will serve as the ultimate legacy improvements for everyday commuters. In April, L.A. Mayor and Metro board member Karen Bass touted the latest $900 million in federal dollars awarded for games-related transit infrastructure. "I look forward to more accessibility and easier travel for Metro’s current riders and for future riders, as we continue preparing to be on the world stage," she said. It’s still not quite enough funding; six years later, only a handful of the original 28 projects are complete. Some are on track for 2028, like a people mover connection from LAX to the K and C lines, and the completion of the D line subway to Westwood, where athletes will stay on the UCLA campus.

Yet even though L.A. is building more subway and light rail lines than any other place in the U.S., the city is no closer to being "car-free." Despite a robust pandemic-era recovery—L.A.’s Metro system now has the second-highest ridership in the U.S., after New York and before Chicago—overall, transit ridership is lower now than it was a decade ago, even with these major rail expansions. In recent years, L.A. has also seen worsening air pollution and a record-high number of traffic deaths.

"Moving ‘car-free games’ from marketing slogan to reality would have required the government sending clear, unambiguous signals that the city and county would de-prioritize automobile transportation relative to other modes, in order to bring modes like walking, biking, and public transit to greater parity with driving," says Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. But there’s one signal government leaders could easily send now. Advocates recently collected signatures to place a measure on the ballot to direct the city to implement its own plan for bike and bus lanes, says Matute—and it passed 65.5 percent to 34.5 percent in March. That’s a clear mandate from voters to make streets safer and more multimodal ahead of the games.

L.A. City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who also sits on Metro’s board, agrees. "We’re at a crossroads: We can either seize this moment to show the world how a city built for cars can truly become biking and walking friendly, or miss out on a transformative legacy. To me, there is only one option," she says. "The Olympics have to serve as a catalyst for L.A. to shift from a car-centric city to a multimodal transit model for the nation, with permanent bike and bus lanes, safer intersections, and more green spaces. Previous host cities have seen lasting benefits, and with the right support, we can too."

L.A. has made a radical transportation shift for the games before. During the 1984 Olympics, the city was without a rail system—the extensive streetcar system used in 1932 had been dismantled, and the contemporary Metro lines would not open until 1990—so planners turned to buses to get everyone to the venues. Spectators received access to a custom-designed regional park-and-ride system along with their ticket purchase, and PSAs taped by celebrities like Bob Hope encouraged everyone else to work from home, carpool, and avoid roads during peak hours. For 2028, L.A. will again need to rely on buses: about 2,700 will be bought or borrowed, temporarily doubling the size of Metro’s fleet, to create entirely separate transit systems to move athletes and spectators. (The athlete buses will be paid for by LA28; it’s not clear where the rest of the money is coming from yet.) But the other part that worked in 1984—telling everyone else to keep off the roads—won’t fly this time, says Matute, who is planning a symposium to explore how L.A. can advance its long-term transportation goals through the games. "Information about traffic conditions flows much more quickly now," he says. "Even during the 1984 games, traffic grew worse as people had information that they could move around more freely than they expected."

If L.A. wants a "car-free games," the only real solution is to make not using cars a faster, easier, and more obvious choice for everyone. And that means local leaders are going to have to work together. After it was clear many of the Twenty-Eight by ’28 projects wouldn’t get funded, Metro consulted with other transit agencies in the region on a new priority list of projects that can deliver high impact for low costs—for example, a network of bus-only lanes that keeps transit moving faster than cars—leveraging smaller interventions across the region into one cohesive strategy. "The Metro board was really clear in what it would consider on that list: projects that provided a legacy, projects aimed at correcting historic inequities in access to opportunity, and projects that had a clear nexus to the games," Seleta Reynolds, Metro’s chief innovation officer, told a room of local transportation planners earlier this year. "What can we all collectively join together and deliver during this moment that helps move the needle?"

In addition to Metro’s list, another concept is gaining the support of a growing coalition: the Festival Trail, a 22-mile, non-vehicular, zero-emission path connecting many Olympic venues. The proposed route traces a diagonal from southwest to northeast: from LAX, through South L.A., to Downtown, to Pasadena, and also travels along the L.A. River all the way to the Sepulveda Basin in the San Fernando Valley. Chris Torres, founding principal at Agency Artifact, says the idea is not only to create car-free access to events during the games, but also to permanently stitch together all the other pedestrian, bike, and transit legacy projects that will (hopefully) be finished by 2028. "The trail represents a series of investments that have not yet been connected," says Torres. "A big part of the project is wayfinding—storytelling about what’s right around the corner."

Torres, who lives in South L.A., points to an intersection in the neighborhood of Hyde Park. It’s only a few miles to SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, yet it’s not exactly convenient to get to either of those places without a car. The Festival Trail reveals a myriad of options: an east-west Rail to Rail path converting a former freight right-of-way into a linear park; the southern end of Destination Crenshaw, a Black cultural district traveling along Metro’s K line; a bus rapid transit line down Vermont Avenue that goes all the way to Exposition Park. By 2028, all these projects would be open and linked, and the Festival Trail would brand the route with signage and maps, add more greenery and shade, and create plazas to host viewing parties and street vendors along the way.

In over 200 stakeholder meetings about the concept, Torres says the biggest concern he’s heard is that each neighborhood wants its own car-free connection to the trail—and that’s kind of the point. "This corridor is what we hope will be the first of many corridors like this in many different communities," says Torres. "That’s the legacy opportunity here."

Top illustration by Tiago Galo / @tiago.galo

Related Reading: What Happens to Athlete Housing After the Olympics?

Alissa Walker is a writer based in Los Angeles where she has covered transportation, housing, urban design, public space, and environmental policy for two decades. She writes the newsletter Torched, which tracks the legacy improvements that L.A. is making for the 2028 Summer Olympics.