LA Mayor Bass Wants “No-Car Games” for the City’s 2028 Summer Olympics
Meanwhile, there was a 65-percent jump in total crime in the city’s transit system during the first three months of 2024.
I am not a big fan of the Olympics; this year, it was more irksome than ever.
And while I am breathing a sigh of relief that the Paris Olympics is over, I am bracing myself for the much closer Los Angeles games in 2028. My hometown of San Diego hosted a few events back in 1984, so I will be much more directly impacted next time.
I can only hope there are no drag queen orgies for the opening ceremony.
That being said, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has an intriguing goal for the next event. She wants to have “no car” games.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Saturday promised that the city was working to expand public transportation to the point that the 2028 Summer Olympics could be a “no-car” Games when they come to town.
She says that on top of the new transportation, she would encourage businesses to allow employees to work from home during the 17 days that the games were in the area, hopeful to avoid traffic jams.
Bass was in Paris with other Los Angeles city officials to participate in the closing ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Olympics, where she was given the Olympic flag.
“As we’ve seen here in Paris, the Olympics are an opportunity to make transformative change,” Bass said while speaking on Saturday. “It’s our top priority to ensure that the Olympic preparations benefit Angelenos for decades to come. … We want to make sure that we’re helping small businesses, that we’re creating local jobs and making lasting environmental and transportation improvements throughout Los Angeles.”
Given the sprawl of the Los Angeles area, this goal will cost billions to achieve. Bass’ plans appear to rely on buses.
Moving thousands of spectators across the sprawling Californian city poses a huge challenge for organisers – with current hopes for car-free transit pinned on a fleet of buses, after plans for a major rail network upgrade fizzled out, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Nor will it come cheap.
The most recent budget forecasts expenditure of nearly $7bn (£5.5bn) on the Games themselves, in addition to any transport upgrades.
I will simply point out that electric buses have been less than reliable, and if Los Angeles officials take this direction in this sustainability quest, it is likely to prove problematic.
Furthermore, the city’s transit system has had a massive spike in crime, which could make the experience less than appealing for Olympic athletes and their fans.
A motion will be introduced Thursday at a meeting of Metro leaders aimed at increasing safety to combat a spike in violent crime on Los Angeles’ transit system.
The motion will be presented a week after Los Angeles Mayor and Metro Board of Directors Chair Karen Bass said she ordered an immediate surge in law enforcement on Metro trains and buses.
Bass said the motion will increased public safety personnel on the system and establish a unified command designed to police the system, which has seen a 65-percent jump in total crime in the first three months of 2024, according to new data.
Forty years ago, Los Angeles set a new standard on how the games could be run and succeed.
Los Angeles’ successful bid for the 1984 Olympics marked a turning point in the history of the Games, showcasing a financially viable model, which emphasized private funding, sponsorship deals, and the use of existing infrastructure. The LA Games in 1984 reshaped the Olympic model for future events in the years that followed.
It also introduced several new events aimed at increasing female participation and new technology that increased allowed better communication between athletes and improved efficiency.
The 1984 Games made a profit of over $200 million, becoming “the only Olympics in history to present a truly positive financial balance sheet,” Olympic Games expert and historian Kevin Wamsley told Newsweek.
It will be interesting to see what happens in four years. I suspect it will not be the same level of success enjoyed in 1984.
I hope for a more tasteful opening ceremony and the USA dominates the medal count.
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from the sound of most of the news lately, it shouldn’t be a problem for her to meet her goal, since only homeless people will be able to afford living in California in 2028.
Public transportation is great, if you want to run your life on somebody else’s schedule.
The IOC should add a stock car race to the competitions.
Monster trucks bellowing thick smoke jumping tire fires and BLM flags
I think they are considering a squatter competition…..not weight lifting but illegally occupying homes….. Let the Crimolympics begin!
I’ve been to the 1980, 1984, 1996, 1998, 2002 and 2012 games. I haven’t been to, nor plan on going to, any other Olympic games….ever. They’re dead to me, just like the NBA has been for the last decade.
It’s becoming the Wokalympics. I haven’t watched in years and have no plans to in the future, although I do hear news about it:
Did you know that this year an American won a fourth Gold medal in the same Olympic event…one of only six Olympians in history to have achieved this feat? No? Vincent Hancock won the gold medal for the fourth time in Skeet Shooting. The only Olympic skeet shooter to ever win more than once. To celebrate his excellence, Meta (facebook and instagram) “shadow banned” him…
“Your account and content won’t appear in places like Explore, Search, Suggested Users, Reels, and Feed Recommendations,”
Facebook and Instagram users are apparently so fragile they can’t be exposed to a sport involving firearms…not even one using the double barreled shotgun that Joe Biden has expressly approved for self defense.
I can’t wait to NOT watch those Olympics, too!
Me too brother!
It’s been two decades since I’ve watched an Olympics event. I pre-boycotted.
By then all of the competitors in female sports will be men, and nobody will be watching.
btw…drag queen orgies is the latest event to be added to the olympics
WILL L.A. ALLOW ANOTHER OLYMPIC MASSACRE ? of israeli athletes like their nazibros did in ’72?
b/c L.A, is as lefty primed as most other lefty run cities in america
The softball and canoe slalom events will be held in OKC because the world class sites are built. Riversport is the US training site for canoe events. And the softball complex is where the Women’s College World Series is held.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/sports/2028-los-angeles-olympics-oklahoma-city-venues-softball-canoe-slalom/3442896/
https://www.riversportokc.org/events/welcoming-the-world-to-okc/
https://www.usasoftball.com/devon-park/venue-information/
It will be interesting to see what additional improvements the city will make for these two events. One thing I know, the athletes will be served great steaks and BBQ.
I’m going to abide by Mayor Bass’s request and not drive my car in LA during the games.
Which will be easy because I live on the other coast and wouldn’t be caught dead driving around LA in the first place.
Take heart, Mayor! I’ll watch just as much of your games as I watched the Paris games – exactly and precisely zero.
As will I.
It’s so heartening to see the woke host city find a new way to damage Olympics viewership that the woke Olympics hadn’t already thought of itself.
Every plan or projection of what future events will be has built into it certain assumptions that are unspoken. If I may, I will toss out a few concepts that everbody assumes are true, but may well not be:
1) Staging an Olympics is absurdly expensive for the host city. That means that they have to get the money from somebody, and usually it is by taxation. On a national level, we are in what my ancestors would refer to as “interesting times”. On a national level we are functionally in a recession if true figures were published, and inflation while denied is soaring. The dreaded D-word is not unthinkable. It is hard to tax income that does not exist if things start going Tango Uniform. Thus it is hard to afford an Olympics.
And California and LA are special cases. Their tax rates and business regulations are higher than in most of the country and major businesses, even whole industries, are fleeing the state. Which means no tax income and no services economy.
2) Politically, our country is divided in ways that are beginning to remind us of say just under 160 years before the date of the Olympics. The integrity of the entire electoral process is in question. One of the two major parties has selected its candidates with absolutely no input or votes from either party members or the public. As we speak, the honesty, competence, and intentions of those in government at all levels are rationally open to public question. In such an environment Los Angeles may not be the kind of place where the world will want to visit, operating outside of the rule of law.
3) Finally, there is the nature of the society in Los Angeles. It is nothing like the image Hollywood wants to proclaim. Poverty, public drug abuse, rampant crime without punishment for protected classes, literal human waste in the streets, and an invasion of hostile foreign nationals who really don’t care how this country appears to the world, or if this country survives, may not make LA the best and most functional place for an Olympics.
4) Then there is the matter of this “car-free”. Los Angeles is the type-example of traffic jams. If you do not have a car there, you are functionally imprisoned where you live, Any fantasy of pulling a working metropolitan mass transit system for people out of some magician’s hat is fiction of the first order. It cannot be done in 4 years, especially with the fiscal limitations I listed above. I note that Phase I of the California High Speed Railway has been under construction for 9+ years at a horrendous cost and is nowhere near operational. And this is being worked on primarily in rural areas. You are not going to get a transportation system in one of the largest and busiest urban areas in the world in 4 years; when they have not even started concept planning. Just as an example, how long does it take to create an environmental impact statement and get it approved at all levels?
I suspect that the country may be preoccupied in 2028.
Subotai Bahadur
“may not make LA the best and most functional place for an Olympics.”
LA is not the city the Olympics needs — it is the city the Olympics deserves.
My official “Comment of the Day”.
The 2028 Olympics have to match and surpass the 1984. Rather, I bet they try to out-grunge the Paris 2024. … if LA is functional by then.
Let them swim in the sewage canal known as the LA River.
How much you want to bet that ‘Her Honor’ will be sporting around in a big, black stretch limo, as usual.
and that ridiculous red track suit. Watch the video of her coming off the plane with the Olympic flag. I thought she was the spokesperson for the special Olympics. A dude even manhandles her out of the way so he can get down the stairs…it is classic slapstick.
Wants a “car free” Olympics, because the air conditioner- and meat-free Olympics went over so well.
Hopefully the LA LGBTQ community will be doing the opening ceremony again. Maybe this time they can roast Islam. Wouldn’t that be SO woke?
By 2028, L.A. will need Snake (Escape from NY/LA) Plissken to be able to conduct the games.
Free rent in CA:
https://babylonbee.com/cleanArticle/9-best-camping-spots-in-california