By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Editor
I’m done. Fed up with it. Finished.
Living for 20+ years in Los Angeles is to blame. Or to credit. I like to think of it as the latter.
What I am referring to is driving. I don’t enjoy getting in a vehicle, sitting in traffic or even being behind the wheel on near-empty two-lane country roads. I would rather be at the dentist than driving somewhere. And I used to do PR for a car company.
It’s because of L.A. The reason is that the city is so spread out that anytime you go somewhere you know it’s going to take 45 minutes to two hours. Toss in the traffic, complete lack of traffic flow that backs up surface streets for miles and the horribly designed freeway interchanges that seem to have been created to see how many vehicles that can make come to a stop and you have a situation that will test anyone’s patience.
And yet LA Mayor Karen Bass has stated that Los Angeles will have a “car free Olympics” for LA 2028. I doubt it will happen.
The issue is that if you don’t have people in cars then you need public transportation. And the problem here is that LA understands public transit the way Donald Trump understands tariffs. For example: LA Metro has a rail line from downtown that stops a mile short of the airport. And then it built another line whch, too, stops a mile short of the airport. To make up for this, you have to board what the city calls a “people mover” to get to the terminals. Either that or take a bus.
The once-glamourous train station is in East LA (and is, quite frankly, has become something of a homeless shelter) is more than 25 miles from LAX and, according to a Google search, takes 1 hour, 3 minutes to drive. Public transportion would take half the day. A private company, Fly Away, does it in an an hour on a bus.
Plus, the Summer Games are happening over the place. Among the venues are Dodger Stadium, the LA Coliseum, the Rose Bowl, SoFi Stadium and places in Anaheim, Carson, downtown, Long Beach and the Valley. Heck, the surfing is at Trestles which isn’t even in LA at all; it’s in San Clemente which is closer to San Diego that it is to downtown Los Angeles. Things are so spread out that there are two Opening Ceremonies, one at SoFi and the other at the Coliseum. They are eight miles apart which doesn’t sound too bad but there’s no public transit even to SoFi and driving the 105 and 110 freeways between the two could well take an hour and a half.
How the heck is public transportation going to get people to all those different places? The answer is simple: it can’t. Especially in public transit-challenged LA and because there’s no public transit between many of those places.
The only way Los Angeles can host a carless Olympics is for the people to stay in the areas by the venues. Long Beach has 10 sports and annually hosts major events such as the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach IndyCar race and the prestigious Congressional Cup sailing regatta, so that might work for some, but others will have to bounce around from one part of LA to another.
And how will they get there? By car.