The Indicator from Planet Money - Can LA host a 'car-free' Olympics?

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

Los Angeles is synonymous with car culture. But now that it's hosting the 2028 Olympics, could that be changing? On today's show, LA's public transit building bonanza, and why some worry the new infrastructure will benefit tourists more than locals. Related episodes: Why the Olympics cost so much Why building public transit in the US costs so much For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.  See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darren 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. Rest in peace, Brian Wilson. And at the time, the Little Duce Coupe 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. Quite 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 Angelinos who already use LA's public transit.

Let's start with what is easily seen as the most important road in Los Angeles. Wilshire Boulevard is 16 miles long and essentially L.A.'s main street. It's lined with skyscrapers for almost its entire length and connects many of the county's diverse neighborhoods. Yeah, the L.A. 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 lot of, low-rise, car-dominated, and essentially suburban past, behind it for good. Now, L.A. is breaking with its suburban pass by building a multi-billion-dollar subway under

the street. It'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 tarpits and L.A.'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 de Leon. She's with Act LA, Alliance for Community Transit, Los Angeles. Los Angeles has the potential to build this amazing city. We have great food, great neighborhoods, diversity. We have nature. The question is, can we access all this in a day?

And 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 Korea Town, the child of Guatemalan immigrants. And Scarlet'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 Korea Town, 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. There'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's many communities into one transit network. The short-term goal is not to have a traffic nightmare when L.A. hosts the 26 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. So 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 same debt attracting new riders and servicing tourists who are concerned.

coming in for the Olympics. And that writer 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 writer that you want to attract versus the writers 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 Subway C increased land values, home prices, and rent. If 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, making them what we call complete green streets, where they would be protected bus lanes, protect. 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 strings. In 2016, L.A. 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 fast of a region with that investment. Stephen Chung is the CEO of the LA Economic Development Corporation and the World Trade Center, Los Angeles.

His 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 dense, because just 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 L.A. is much bigger and complex than people imagine. The county of Los Angeles has as 88 cities, 100 unincorporated areas. Still, he believes there is an upside for Angelinos, 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. Then 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 and other big cities, around the globe before you judge LA. When you compare and contrasts, you need the mixture 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, Darien,

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. Cue the horns. And check out to those work at Forbes. Thank you for writing with us, Sanari.

Always, and catch you on the Expo line. See you there. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Jimmy Kearley. It was fact-acted by Sarah White As. Take and Canon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.