After Paris 2024, the next Summer Olympics will be held in Los Angeles in 2028. Los Angeles wants to extend Paris’ sustainability in terms of mobility and wants a car-free city. Respect for the environment has been one of the objectives of the Paris Olympics. That respect included traffic, with dedicated lanes for athletes and Games staff.
Los Angeles, the city initiating the Olympic Games challenge, wants to rise to that challenge and aspires to a car-free, traffic-free Games. For this hyper-communicated and overcrowded city, the challenge is even greater, as cars and motorways are part of its identity in a large urban space. The organisers of LA28 are already looking for ways, the main one being the use of public transport and teleworking.
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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told reporters that the city will invest in transport improvements. “We’ve been building our transportation system to do that,” she said, noting that the plan would require borrowing more than 3,000 buses from other parts of the United States. Bass recalls Los Angeles ’84 and argues that it had no traffic problems and “in 1984 we didn’t have any of the technology we have today”.
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LA28 also wants to follow in the footsteps of Paris 2024 by looking at the city as a stage, and to combine the Eiffel Tower, Versailles and the Seine as part of the Games, as they have done in Paris. “We don’t have an Eiffel Tower, we have the Hollywood sign. We have incredible venues. We have incredible geography and we’re going to show it,” said Casey Wasserman, president of LA28.
Another of LA28’s challenges is homelessness, which in Los Angeles numbers around 75,500 people. “We’re going to house people, we’re going to get them off the street,” the mayor concluded.
