Many in Los Angeles are anticipating that the 2028 Olympics will, through investments in infrastructure, shift the operating paradigm of mobility, transportation, housing, and more within the city. Whether or not the games can or will live up to the hopeful expectations of both public and private sector interests, is to be seen. At a panel at CoMotionLA’s recent convening in Los Angeles, featured panelists discussed just what their ideal next five years for the city might look like. VX News provides an excerpt of the panelist’s comments, including those offered by: Nancy Sutley, LA’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Hilary Norton, Commissioner of the California Transport Commission, Nik Karalis, CEO of Woods Bagot, and John Rossant, CEO of CoMotion. Amongst the topics discussed are sustainability and housing policy challenges; the future of mobility; public safety; and an Olympics 2028 wish-list.
Nancy Sutley On Sustainability and Housing:
From my vantage point working on sustainability, climate change is the urgent crisis that confronts us, as well as a number of other crises, including the lack of both affordable housing and housing generally, and how all of these issues relate. I think there is an exception to the idea that Los Angeles doesn't like density. I know there's a lot of mythology around no growth and lots of influential policymakers who talk about that, but density, in fact, is what's happened.
I live less than two miles from here. Close enough to Dodgers Stadium to walk to a baseball game. Maybe accidentally, we had a downtown stadium long before many communities around the country had a downtown stadium. It doesn’t have the best transit access, but it is a downtown stadium. When I think about sustainability, there's the pieces of decarbonizing our economy and reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. The city owns a lot of the infrastructure, and a lot of the other carbon intensive infrastructure is in public ownership. Metro has several thousand buses, the Port of Los Angeles, the airport, the Department of Water and Power. Embracing the vision of a zero-carbon city, getting to zero carbon by 2050, there is a lot that we must do including decarbonizing the grid. Decarbonizing the electric grid helps to enable zero carbon transportation and zero-carbon housing. By the arrival of the 2028 Olympics, what's already happening here in terms of mobility and electrifying mobility and giving people choices instead of an internal combustion engine vehicle will be in full bloom. [New housing] is going to be infill, because we are a fully built out city. If you walk around downtown, if you go to my neighborhood, if you go to Hollywood, if you go to many other parts of Los Angeles, you will see that infill and reuse happening. I think, five years from now, when the Olympics arrive, you will see the same spirit that makes Los Angeles a wonderful place to live. You will see that our diversity is our spring, and that you'll see it supercharged.
Hilary Norton
Because I'm one of the California Transportation Commissioners, and for those of you who are not from California, we spend the gas tax money, which is five to eight billion a year, on trying to transform our mobility system. I live in a house that will be 100 years old in 2028. I live in Eagle Rock, which is one of the streetcar communities that was built along the streetcar line. We have been part of the communities that have been fighting for bus rapid transit that will now open by 2028.
For me, my ideal would be that Los Angeles has the best Paralympics ever. And that Paralympics is fueled by zero emission transportation like a streetcar downtown and an aerial tram that can go to Dodger Stadium and can hook up to many Paralympic events. I aspire that we will have transformed our goods movement network from what we have now, which is mostly diesel, to EV and hydrogen. I aspire that we really make good on the Downtown LA 2040 Plan, which is that 1% of the land is going to have 30% of our future residential density and 20% of our entire density. If we do that right, it's going to be extraordinary.
One of the best chapters in your book is about transforming the gas stations into community assets. Those community assets can be housing or EV charging, and can transform our region, and make LA a place where people come to and say, “I never expected it to be so clean and multimodal.” The Paralympics are going to be the biggest, most-attended, and most inspired mobility event for people who are in wheelchairs and are living life independently and are adapted athletes. We’re going to be so proud of that.
John Rossant on the “Mobility Revolution”:
I'll dial back and talk about what happened seven years ago, and why we decided to come to LA. We saw that we were in the very first stages of a profound mobility revolution, a deep transformation of how goods and people all move around cities. Transformation in terms of decarbonizing mobility, introducing new modes of mobility, whether it's things that fly in the air, vehicles to go underground, gondolas, etc.
For a century and a half, we had a limited number of modes of mobility in any given city. What’s happening now is what I think of as a Cambrian explosion, going from a single celled organism to invertebrates and mammals. We are in the first stages of that transition. We believed that Los Angeles, the city that birthed car culture, the city of the freeway, was going to lead the mobility revolution. Eight years ago, the LA Department of Transportation led in being the first city in the world to issue a roadmap on organizing mobility and transportation digitally and data-wise. We were advanced in this regard, and now cities around the world have adopted it as well. We had a mayor who talked about LA as the transportation technology capital of the world, and as an incubator.
In 2016, thanks to the great efforts of Hilary and many others, voters passed measure M, which has given us this great rollout of public transit in LA. Seven years later, I'm a little concerned frankly. We’re committed to LA, but will LA continue to lead the mobility revolution? I think that’s a big question mark. I absolutely support the mayor in her commitment to prioritizing housing, which should have been done years ago.
However, I think housing and mobility are so intimately connected, and we cannot de-emphasize the importance of mobility and transportation in the city. We're at a critical moment and can't just blindly say that the Olympics are in five or six years, everything's going to work out. We will pull it off, I have little doubt about that. However, I would like to see Los Angeles leading this revolution. We have the legitimacy to do so because we're electrifying faster than any other area of the country. There are many key EV companies based here. This is the city that birthed micro mobility in 2017, with the launch of Bird, which you can argue the success of, but it happened here.
LA is also the aerospace capital of the nation. I think the next big part of the mobility revolution is going to take place above our heads. We’re going to have thousands of these things buzzing around, and they will have an impact. Other countries are working on it rapidly. As an American citizen, I love my country, and as an adopted Angelino, I would like us to lead that revolution, but I’m worried that we might fall behind. I do really have some big concerns now, frankly.
Now the hard work is being done. We’re spending the Measure M money very wisely. Right here is the Metro Regional Connector. It's amazing. It's beautiful and I love it. We want to see that all over the city. The hard work is being done; we have the people-mover coming on stream at LAX. But I want us to be a little bit more ambitious and more visionary. I think we need to kind of weigh the words we use in talking about all of this. I’m optimistic about the next five years.
Hilary Norton on Jobs and Transportation:
Right now, the federal and state money should be back in the FDR/WPA-type thinking. Everyone should have a job because of the amount of money that's here, and we've got to start telling ourselves, we can do big things and we can do them fast. Why are we not doing them? We have the most skilled labor and great labor unions that know what they're doing and want to work. We have people at the helm who are the smartest they've ever been and committed to what is possible. We have companies that know what they're doing, and we have people who want to work.
I think what’s exciting is that if we can embrace that we don't have a skills problem but a transportation and childcare problem, we can get people to those jobs, and make that our reason for living and getting up in the morning. We're going to have done something because we are still the country that built the Hoover Dam. We're still the country that built the SR 71; Lockheed did that within six months. We know how to do things. We're a city of great, great big shoulders.
I think we've just got to talk ourselves back into that because things take too long right now, and they don't have to. Even if it's not our project, we got to say “that should get done” and ask why it isn’t getting done. Why aren't we doubling our convention center? Why aren't we building some of these great projects? We've got to get on it, and make it our business to get this done so in five years, everyone will say their lives were better and they made money. We need to make sure that people of color, women, and everyone has the opportunity to get a job and I will say that Mayor Bass is not commended enough for the work she did in Congress to make it possible to have local hiring as part of federal contracts. You used to have to watch how money got spent in your neighborhood, and you could have other contractors come in from other states. Mayor Bass made sure that you had to hire locally, and that that was part of the Prosperity Agenda. I can't wait to see that play out over and over with all the federal and state money coming to us.
Nancy Sutley on the Ports:
Yes, here’s an example: when we talk about economic engines for this region, the ports of Los Angeles, and Long Beach, the largest port complex in the US, in San Pedro, deal with almost half of the goods coming into the states. That is one of the most important economic engines and we all feel the effect of it. If you live in Wilmington, San Pedro, West Long Beach, along the 710 corridors, or the warehouses of the Inland Empire-- you're feeling the effects and economic benefits that come to the US from trade. They’re absorbed here in Los Angeles.
So thinking big, how do we decarbonize the poor? How do we reduce the smog? No matter who you are in Los Angeles, you're breathing the same smog air and you're stuck in the same traffic jam as everybody else. We have to make that system work better by using the available money, tools, and technology. It's thinking about how goods move. So the Port of Los Angeles signed an MOU with the Port of Shanghai which is the busiest Trade Corridor command to Los Angeles called the Green Shipping Corridor, trying to get zero carbon ships on the Shanghai to Los Angeles route by 2025. We need to think about sustainability through the lens of essential jobs in Los Angeles and the economic benefits of trade from markets in Asia to the Port of Los Angeles.
Public Safety Conversation Between Panel:
Hilary Norton:
I would also say on behalf of women, not that I speak for all women, but just a few… Please build a safer public realm for women. We have a transit system that we can’t always use. We have terrible parking and parking garages that are unsafe to walk in. We have copper getting stolen out of streetlights and it is unsafe to walk in so many parts of the city. If you can make the public realm safer, we will move downtown and spend more time in denser places-- think about the public realm because women, children, the elderly, and people in wheelchairs and walkers need a safe public realm with density.
Nik Karalis:
It's the whole culture of how you need density and people to create safety for all people. Then about how you deal with the curve to ensure that it's not intersected by cars crossing it for dropping off goods. Let's change those policies, and change our lane structure, and that'll lead to safety.
John Rossant:
I mean, it's not only a design issue, either. It's also how we view safety and enforcement. As the head of CoMotion, we have hundreds if not thousands of people coming from all around the world, from Europe and other parts of the country like the Middle East. They're people who care about mobility and transit and they come to LA wanting to experience transit by LA Metro. You know, it's heartbreaking to listen to some points on how the train wasn’t nice and this other part was okay but it didn’t feel safe or that half the compartment was homeless people. Thank God we have a mayor who is trying to address that. It's a tough problem but we've got to have a different attitude towards what's acceptable and what's not.
Nik Karalis:
You can't house the homeless because your policy says ‘thou shalt have this many cars…’ but the homeless don't own cars. So why put in a policy that says a homeless person has to have a car and pay for a car spot that they'll never use? That policy must change, looking at this from the outside. It's crazy, right? You want to help the homeless, but you're forcing them to own a car to be housed.
John Rossant on Policy Changes:
I think we need to have more subtle, creative, and aggressive changes in policy that happen quickly. A little anecdote; a city-based startup, Envoy Technologies, came up with this wonderful idea of community car sharing. So basically, car sharing is an immunity for developers. If you develop the new apartment building, they'll go in and put electric chargers in the parking and so then you have 10 or 15 electric cars that are then shared by the tenants.
It's a brilliant and simple idea, but we didn't get policy changes or support to do it. The result is that it was snapped up by a Miami-based company called Blank, who are here. It's being repurposed and it will happen elsewhere-- we need to see those kinds of things at scale.
Nancy Sutley on Olympics 2028:
We have a relationship with the Olympic organizing committee, LA28. I think part of the vision of this upcoming Olympics is one where we're not going to build new-- we have a lot of stuff. We have lots of sports venues and related venues that will work. The athlete’s village is going to be at UCLA, the media center is going to be at USC. I think we’re learning the lessons. London did a good job of using the Olympics as an opportunity to develop a part of the city that had been neglected. Rio didn't-- theirs was built on a lot of white elephants. So I think learning those lessons, using what we have, and building temporary facilities, comprises some goals of the Olympic organizing committee.
Hilary Norton on Carfree Olympics:
I think the fact that it's already been declared a carfree Olympics is extraordinary for LA. I also know that these federal grants were just announced to grow the grid, and we’re putting the Olympics in places where our electrical grid is the oldest. To be able to completely use these grants as a reason to restore and expand our grid, we’ll have to know what the capacity is so that this can be a zero-emissions Olympics-- very exciting. The accessibility is about how we're going to look at managing lanes so that we can bring buses onto the freeways so that we can show people; you don't have to be a single-occupant vehicle on the roads, that you can use roads differently. I think people are excited about being able to take an electric bike to an Olympic venue. These are things that we need to be able to show how we're going to transform ourselves, how our city is going to be walkable, bikeable, clean, and multimodal in ways that no one ever thought possible in California, and certainly not in Los Angeles. That legacy is going to be a multimodal city that we’re going to relate to so differently.