Future of Regional Mobility: LABC Sustainability Summit
VX News publishes transcript of "Future of Regional Mobility: Game Plan for a Sustainable LA," the closing panel of the Los Angeles Business Council's 20th Annual Sustainability Summit hosted on October 1. Moderated by Phil Recht, partner at Mayer Brown, the panel brought together Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts, Metro Chief Planning Officer Ray Sosa, Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka, Tom Ashley of Voltera and George Kivork of Archer. They examined how the region can expand transit, goods movement and emerging mobility while decarbonizing transportation, with the 2028 Olympics as a near-term test and a longer horizon beyond. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. The recording is available on LABC's YouTube channel.
Announcer: Please welcome our final panel of the day, Future of Regional Mobility: Game Plan for a Sustainable LA, moderated by Phil Recht, partner at Mayer Brown.
Phil Recht: Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the final and hopefully the best panel of the day. I appreciate you staying around for it. As you heard, the title of the panel is The Future of Regional Mobility: Game Plan for a Sustainable LA.
As background, I think we all know that August was the hottest month on record. The effects of climate change seem to be all around us. We have been losing seashore in California. We saw glaciers crashing in Nepal just this morning. If you watched the news, there were flash floods in Texas. As I think you know, transportation accounts for 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions. So if we are going to tackle climate change, we need to continue to decarbonize the transportation system. It's also critical to keep reducing particulate emissions, particularly in this region, where we've traditionally suffered from poor air quality, especially in areas close to the ports, the airport and the freeways.
At the same time as we need to clean up our system, we need to expand it and improve its efficiency, on both the people-movement and goods-movement sides. On the people side, we're facing the 2028 Olympics, with hundreds of thousands of folks coming in from around the world who will need to move around our region. And while our population is declining a bit right now, SCAG forecasts indicate that by 2050 it will be on the rise, and 2050 is not too far away.
On the goods-movement side, despite the impacts of tariffs and the war in the Middle East, the LA ports have seen an increase in container traffic this year. While volumes may fluctuate in the near term, most projections indicate they will increase over the long term, and the ports of LA and Long Beach are both planning to expand capacity to handle that additional traffic. So the question is how we accommodate two goals simultaneously: expanding our system and making it more efficient, while making it cleaner at the same time. That's what we want to discuss today, and we have a terrific panel to do so.
Let me do brief introductions. I'm going to introduce the panelists not in the order they're sitting, but in the order I'll ask questions. Let's start with Inglewood Mayor James Butts, whose city has become the region's most prominent sports and entertainment destination, where the World Cup games took place and where many of the Olympic events will take place. As you'll hear in a moment, the city is in the midst of a major transportation and planning initiative.
At the other end is Ray Sosa, chief planning officer at Metro, which is also in the midst of an extraordinary expansion of both our transit and highway systems. Metro just managed the traffic for the World Cup, and it's going to manage it again for the Olympics.
Next to him is Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of LA, the nation's largest and busiest port, where major investments have been and will continue to be made, not only to expand the system but to decarbonize it. You'll hear about that in a bit.
Tom Ashley, next to the mayor, is vice president of government and utility relations at Voltera, a company that develops and operates charging stations for zero-emission commercial fleets, including the autonomous robotaxis we've increasingly seen operating in our region.
And last but not least, in the middle, is George Kivork, general manager of the LA region for Archer. Archer is developing an electric air taxi system. It's going to be headquartered at Hawthorne Airport, and if all goes well and it gets its necessary approvals, it will be operating in time for the Olympics and will help get people to the mayor's facilities. So that's our panel.
Recht: Let's get started with Mayor Butts. Mayor, as I mentioned, you have built the largest sports and entertainment center in the region in Inglewood: SoFi Stadium, Intuit Dome, the Kia Forum and the Hollywood Park complex. On the plus side, this has really transformed your city. It brings visitors and employees to about 400 events a year, it has generated a lot of new revenue, and property values have skyrocketed. A lot of good things have happened. At the same time, it creates challenges. By my count, there are at least a million additional trips every year, on top of the trips of the 100,000 residents who live there. And this is a city that, historically at least, was environmentally challenged by its location near freeways and the airport. So perhaps more than anybody else on this panel, your city faces the dual challenge of moving people better and more efficiently, but also more cleanly. With that buildup, what do you see as the mobility and sustainability challenges in your city, and how are you planning to address them?
James T. Butts: To give context, you first need a little history of the city. I was an Inglewood police officer from '72 to '91. We used to be home to the three-peat Showtime Lakers and the Kings hockey team, and the Hollywood Park racetrack drew about 43,000 people a day, six days a week. The city was challenged crime-wise; we were known for gangs and violence, and we'd have years with 50 murders. So what happened? People would come in, bet their horses, see the Kings or the Lakers, and go home. They wouldn't spend money there.
I left to become chief of police in Santa Monica and was chief there for 15 years. Then I was appointed assistant general manager of Los Angeles World Airports, in charge of public safety, counterterrorism and emergency management. In 2010, the police union approached me and asked me to run for mayor, because the city had lost the Kings and Lakers to Staples Center downtown. The racetrack crowds had dropped to about a thousand people a day because of off-track betting. It used to be that if you wanted to bet a horse, you had to go to that racetrack. Now you could bet from anywhere, and with the city's public safety challenges, people stopped coming to Inglewood to bet. The one hotel we had, the Airport Park Hotel on the Hollywood Park property, was bulldozed because nobody came anymore.
After running in four elections in one year, two for the temporary seat and two for the permanent seat, I was victorious and took office on February 1, 2011. The only things of significance left in Inglewood were the Sizzler, the big donut and an $18 million structural deficit. We were not going to make payroll by June. Things were pretty bad.
We negotiated with Madison Square Garden and used our last $18 million of redevelopment money, alongside their $140 million, to rebuild the Forum. People said no one would ever come back to Inglewood for entertainment because of the gangs, the poverty and the crime. Within 18 months, the Forum was the number one concert venue in California, number two in the country behind Madison Square Garden in New York, and number three in the world for booked events.
So we proved our viability and began negotiations with the NFL. Three sites were in contention for the Rams' hoped-for return to the LA market: Carson, AEG's Farmers Field downtown, and our Hollywood Park site. After a year of media wars and two NFL votes, the NFL chose Inglewood, and we obtained not one but two teams, the Rams and the Chargers. From there we began negotiations with Steve Ballmer and the Clippers. We had 40 acres of noise-impacted land that the FAA had allocated for us, and that's where the Intuit Dome would be housed. So now we have three professional sports teams.
But what I'm most proud of is that we talked to the Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles, headquartered in Marina del Rey, and convinced them to move their headquarters, 35,000 strong, to Inglewood. If the Girl Scouts are in your city, nobody can say you're not safe anymore. That was the most important acquisition.
Then we talked to the LA Philharmonic and convinced them to purchase a building we had land-banked 50 yards from City Hall, an old Security Bank building. They moved their Youth Orchestra Los Angeles program there, and they tutor about 300 children every session. The children are taught by the greatest orchestra musicians in the world, and the agreement is that at least 200 of them are Inglewood students. NFL Network migrated from Culver City to Inglewood. YouTube built a 6,000-seat theater on that property. And finally, about six weeks later, ESPN came and moved its headquarters to Inglewood. So we're pretty solid when it comes to desirability.
But with that, of course, came the transportation problems, and that's all people talk to you about. That's it. Market Street, for those of you who have been there, used to be downtown Inglewood. That's where all the shops and shopping were, and with the challenges of crime, it died. So those are the two big things left for us to take care of: mobility and Market Street.
We've obtained $782 million in grants for a mobility hub that we're going to place at Market and Florence, right across the street from the K Line stop at Florence and Market. Part of the project is a bridge across Florence so people don't have to cross traffic, plus more than 1,000 parking stalls and a mobility hub for electric buses for phase one of the Inglewood Transit Connector project. The ultimate project is a people mover that starts at Florence and Market and takes people overhead, over Market Street, Manchester and Prairie, with stops at the venues.
The first phase is this transportation hub, and we expect it to handle 3,000 daily riders, 6,000 riders on event days, and 60-plus SoFi events a year on bus lanes. The electric buses running out of there will run along our surface streets. By putting the mobility hub at the mouth of Market Street, we accomplish two things. It brings thousands and thousands of people to games early, and they can shop on Market Street. One of my most important goals has been to make sure Inglewood residents and small businesses benefit from the 5 million people coming to 400 events a year in Inglewood.
One of the ancillary benefits is that every major construction project has a 35% local hire goal. When I came into office, our unemployment rate was about 18%, the highest in California. It is now between 5% and 6%. More people are working in Inglewood in prevailing-wage jobs than ever in the history of the city. This is a city no one wanted to come to or be associated with. Now, when you hear the weather reports on channels 2, 5, 7, 11 and 9, you'll always hear something like, "It's 78 degrees in Inglewood." Think about that: people care what the temperature is in Inglewood because they plan to come there sometime soon. The other big barometer of success is that when they sell real estate in Westchester, Ladera Heights, Baldwin Hills, View Park and LA-adjacent areas, at the bottom of the flyer they put "Inglewood adjacent." Before, they would never have wanted you to know you were buying property near Inglewood. Our crime rate has plummeted.
Our total project has about a $782 million budget. At the same time, we haven't forgotten local transportation. We have an I-Ride program and trolleys for local residents. You put all of this together, and that's why we picked the site for the transit hub at the mouth of Market: so it benefits local businesses, the local economy and local residents.
Recht: Thank you. That was very comprehensive.
Butts: I'm just getting started.
Recht: Just warming up. Let me ask one small question. Electric buses have been a bit of a challenge, as we'll hear in a minute from Metro. How many do you need, and do you see any problem getting them? There's been talk of shortages in the market.
Butts: There would be a problem getting them if we didn't have the money. We already have the money secured, and I know a lot of manufacturers, like BYD. I think we'll be just fine.
Recht: And the charging will take place at the hub?
Butts: The charging will take place at the hub. We'll have extra charging stations because we plan to use autonomous vehicles, Waymo and so on. So there are definitely going to be plenty of charging hubs for automated transit.
Recht: You're a member of the Metro board—
Butts: We were talking about this. I'm the longest-serving member of that board as of yesterday, when [name unclear] had his last meeting. Yes, I'm the longest. I've been there for 12 years. I represent the Southwest Corridor, from Rancho Palos Verdes along the coast to Santa Monica.
Recht: Let me ask a question about transit from the airport. If I fly in for the Olympics or some other event, and if the people mover gets fixed there, which we hope it does one of these days, I'll ostensibly be able to get to your facilities without ever getting in a car.
Butts: It's not ostensibly. The K Line comes in right by the Consolidated Rental Car Center. You can take the K Line back east to the Florence and Market Street hub, go over the bridge and come to the transit plaza.
Recht: That is great. Along with your mobility plans, my understanding is you're also engaged in a broader planning effort to link together infrastructure, housing, business and so on. It's called Next Level Inglewood. Can you talk about that a bit?
Butts: Everybody's heard of a general plan, but nobody's ever seen one. It's that document people talk about and no one ever looks at. But our general plan is actually predicated on integrating housing development with the interconnectivity of our entertainment venues and our downtown area. That's a really great question. The Next Level plan is about complete right now, and we're rolling it out to the public.
Recht: One last question on the mobility plan. You have the money, which is great. That's usually the biggest challenge.
Butts: That's a pretty good thing.
Recht: That's a good thing. So what's the next biggest challenge to getting this plan implemented?
Butts: Actually, we have our groundbreaking for the transit plaza on October 12, I believe. I don't see any other impediments, because once you have the money and a plan, and we've already selected Swinerton, we're ready to go.
Recht: Well, we'll look forward to it opening.
Recht: Let me turn to Ray at Metro. Metro is in the middle of perhaps its largest buildout of the transportation system ever. We've talked in the past about the D Line going up and down Wilshire Boulevard. The Sepulveda Transit Corridor project has at least been approved. The K Line goes into Inglewood, and there are north and south extensions. Can you give us the headlines on the buildout and where things stand in terms of the systems you want in place for the Olympics?
Ray Sosa: Absolutely. Metro is number one in infrastructure building right now, while also leading the industry in safety, customer experience and major sporting event service. We've been on a roll, with a number of projects opening over the last four to five years. You mentioned several. The Regional Connector and the A Line extension to Pomona just had their one-year anniversary. The K Line, of course, is now waiting for the people mover.
We're in construction on the East San Fernando Valley light rail line, about six and a half miles on Van Nuys Boulevard. It will be the first rail transit service in the Valley, something the communities have been waiting for for some time. It would likely open in the early 2030s; I'll say 2031. We've also started construction on the North Hollywood to Pasadena bus rapid transit line, which is anticipated to be open and in service before the Games.
This summer we received the last bit of funding for our Vermont Transit Corridor bus rapid transit service. We'll start construction, and we've received about $149 million from the federal government out of the Capital Investment Grant program. That was the first CIG grant agreement from the current administration in the last two years, so we're hoping it will open the door for more of our projects to be funded.
We're ready to start major construction on the Southeast Gateway Line, which extends to cities in the southeast of Los Angeles County: Huntington Park, Bell, Artesia and a number of others. We're also ready to start construction on a four-and-a-half-mile tunnel alignment for phase two of the Eastside extension, now the E Line, extending it further east. We opened the first segment of the D Line last year, and we're looking to have the next two segments open by the Games. So far, that looks good. The Vermont Transit Corridor is also to be open by the Games.
All of this is the result of Measure M passing, and its predecessor, Measure R. These are investments that LA County voters made happen, passing Measure M with over two-thirds, and they were to be implemented whether we had the Games or not. This is an investment the voters wanted to make, and we continue to see that passion as we plan other projects like the Sepulveda Transit Corridor, the Crenshaw/K Line North extension—I always switch the letters, and that makes things confusing—and the downtown segment of the Southeast Gateway Line. There's still more to come. These are really exciting times at Metro.
Recht: I think so. This is a conference about sustainability and environmental benefits, so let's talk about that. It seems to me that every time you get somebody who drives a car to ride a Metro line, you've taken a car trip off the road. So talk about ridership. I know it's been going up on the rail side, less so on the bus side. Where do you see ridership going?
Sosa: Post-pandemic, we've seen extraordinary growth. On the weekends we're at pre-pandemic levels, and overall we're probably at about 80% of the levels we were experiencing pre-pandemic. We see year-over-year increases of about 10% to 15%. A majority of the growth has been on the rail side, likely because we've been opening so many extensions and connections, and as people get used to the new rail lines, we expect that to continue to grow. At the same time, on our bus lines we're implementing a number of improvements, including bus-only lanes in highly constrained segments where buses need that extra dedication to be more reliable. We're doing a number of fixes like that to help our buses move and improve dependability and reliability.
Recht: We've discussed this before, but your actual ridership is about two-thirds on the buses, something like that. So if you're really going to make significant environmental improvements, it's on the bus side. One thing Metro is planning is to move from CNG to a fully electric fleet. How's that going, and what are the challenges? You heard Mayor Butts say he's not having problems getting electric buses, but I know Metro has faced some challenges in the past. Where does that all stand?
Sosa: We run over 2,000 buses in our fleet. We do have a CNG fleet, and we've been moving toward electric on a number of lines. We're trying to do it strategically, in areas where we know we have the capacity and might already have chargers in place. But we made a big leap in that effort, thanks to the board, by awarding a contract for 220 battery electric buses just this last month, and they're going to be built in Los Angeles. We're excited about that. So we're making strides to increase the number of electric buses in LA County.
Recht: Two quick questions on the Olympics. One, what did you learn from the World Cup experience that might inform your operations for the Olympics? And two, a big part of the Olympic mobility plan is to lease or rent 1,800 or 2,000 buses from outside the state or region, but you need about $2 billion to do that. How's that going?
Sosa: We'll build off the success of the World Cup; I'll answer that question first. We were really excited about what happened with our transit service during the World Cup. Sports brings people together, and I think it brought agencies together. We worked with 13 other transit providers to create an entire overlay transit system on top of Metro's and the regional providers' existing bus and rail network. We called it the Games Enhanced Transit Service, or GETS. It was point-to-point service: people could drive to a park-and-ride location, board a bus and be taken directly to the venue, SoFi Stadium, or Los Angeles Stadium as it was called during the World Cup.
That went very, very well. Of the eight games we had in Los Angeles, the less popular ones didn't draw as much fan participation, and we carried about 15,000 to 20,000 riders. The stadium holds about—what, 75,000?
Butts: 70,000; 100,000 standing room only.
Sosa: And on the more popular games, we were up to 30,000 to 35,000 riders using our transit system. We believe that demonstrated that people knew they needed an alternative way to get to the venue and that they trusted us and our system. We not only provided that system; we took our office workers and put them out on the front line, helping riders know where to go and how to access the system. Our parking lots actually weren't always full. We realized a number of folks were using transit to get to the GETS system, using on-demand services, or being dropped off by family and friends. It was really exciting to see the transit community come together, get out of our offices and help folks through our ambassador program. You may have seen them in the pink and blue jerseys, which are actually going for quite a bit of money online nowadays, which is really interesting.
We look to implement a lot of that same level of service as we move toward the Games. But we're going to need the support to operate it. We've heard a lot of good things in D.C. and in the state, but we need, really by the end of the year, a real commitment to pay for the operators, the mechanics and all the folks who will be supporting the extra buses we're borrowing from agencies across the country. Right now, I think we have commitments of up to 700. A lot of folks are ready. We're going to a public transit conference in Chicago this coming weekend, and we'll continue to spread the word. A couple of weeks ago, at another conference, I spoke with Sound Transit, and they were ready to start making that commitment as well. As we get closer to the Games, I'm sure we'll feel that Olympic spirit more and more and have people participating and supporting us.
Recht: Mayor Butts, you had some thoughts.
Butts: Quick fun fact: whenever Beyoncé or Taylor Swift appears at SoFi, ridership on Metro is up 35%. So we've insisted that they can only have Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.
Recht: That's a great idea.
Recht: Let's switch to Gene Seroka. Gene runs the Port of LA, which, as I mentioned, is certainly the busiest port in our country. Gene, despite all the headwinds—tariffs, wars and the like—container volumes have been up lately, and you're planning for expansion. Most would agree the port has done a terrific job decarbonizing where it can. You've got ships, stackers and all kinds of cranes working on the docks, but you've also got trucks and rail. Can you talk about where things stand on your expansion plans and on decarbonization?
Gene Seroka: Yes, Phil, and I think it parallels where we are here today. To the Los Angeles Business Council and Mary Leslie, congratulations on the 20th Sustainability Summit. Not coincidentally, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are also celebrating the 20th year of the landmark Clean Air Action Plan, implemented in 2006 with the help of a variety of stakeholders in the port community. It was an answer to the question of how we continue to drive the economic engine while making our harbor community much more livable, safe and easier to work in.
Flash forward to today: we have the lowest pollution footprint per shipment since we began measuring two decades ago, and cargo volume has grown more than 35%. So we found a way to be a much better neighbor, driving down pollution, while still knowing our role as a driver of economic prosperity for the country. It was former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who coined the term "America's Port." It sounds flashy, and it's really cool, but the idea is that the cargo moving through the Port of LA reaches not only all 50 states but all 435 congressional districts. We feed, house and clothe America.
An awesome responsibility comes with that, across the country but also right here at home. We have a harbor enclave of about 260,000 residents, which basically mirrors Council District 15, led today by Tim McOsker. Millions more live around and along the key commerce corridors where the trucks and trains go so we can get this cargo out to America. Back then, we set out to look at exactly those categories: how do you reduce pollution from ships, trucks, locomotives, harbor craft—the rest of the boats that move around the port complex—and all the cargo-handling equipment?
And by the way, we're the only port in the nation to move 10 million containers in a year, and we've now done that three times. We're about to embark on our fourth month of moving a million containers in a four-week period, and we're the only port that has been able to do that. Unquestionably, that's because of the institutional knowledge and skilled workforce we have with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and so many others out on those docks moving cargo every day. That economic engine means jobs for families, from my street to Main Street and across the country. Every four containers that come through the port create a job, and that is the most sacred line of all that we go to work with every day.
On the sustainability front, we tried to figure out how best to reduce pollution by pushing the envelope on technology requirements and investment. What we found, Phil, is that for every dollar we invest as government—we're a municipal agency in the City of LA, working with the county, the state and the federal government—it's followed by 2.5 times that from the private sector, and that continues to creep up. When we as government give confidence to the customers, tenants and other investors that work at the port, they get really jazzed and start putting their money, technology and strength into this marketplace as well.
Recht: It seems you've made great strides with the ships, hooking them up to electric power when they're at the dock, and with the equipment on the docks. But the biggest challenge seems to be the trucks: drayage trucks and long haul as well. The last time you and I talked, an electric drayage truck cost about half a million dollars, somewhere in that range, and the owners and operators of these trucks are often small businesspeople, sole practitioners. I know you've been doing everything you can to address this. Can you talk to that issue for a while?
Seroka: There are real complexities, but the desire and the resolve have never been stronger. We know what the responsibilities are, we've got years of discipline behind us, and sometimes you have to fail forward as you learn. The ships are the most difficult: they have the highest level of pollution, and they're outside our jurisdictional control. But relationships drive not only this business but the sustainability plan. So we've created eight green shipping corridors. All that was, was putting cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles together and saying, "Look, if our two city governments, two of the top three municipalities in the world by GDP, can convince our private-sector partners, let's see if we can do something with ship fuels." Maybe they'll come to the table and listen, and they sure have. So we'll do more and more of that. We have to produce more fuel, synthetic and renewable, have it in the right places and get it to the shipping lines at a reasonable cost.
The trucks are a lot closer to home, and we see them every day. We've reduced diesel pollution by 90% over those two decades. It's that last 10% that's going to be really tough to get after. The technology is still in fairly nascent stages, pre-production costs are super high, and the industry has not yet settled on where it's going to go: battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell. If it's battery, you have to plug these things in for a long time, and our tech isn't there just yet.
I'm going back to China next Saturday, and we've been looking at battery-swapping facilities. Phil, in Shanghai, 50% of the cars on the road are now battery electric, in a city of 28 million people. They've had a very aggressive municipal policy of putting charging at residential, commercial and public facilities, so both families and commercial entities can charge. But the key is that if you can take a battery out of one of these heavy-duty trucks, swap in a fully charged one and put the old one in a rack to get juiced up, you can keep these trucks moving much faster. In our business that's called sweating the assets. If the truck is going to be so expensive, you have to keep it running on the road: revenue miles, switching drivers from the day to the evening to the overnight shift in order to recoup that very high expense.
So we need a combination of strong investment—we have vouchers and grants that aren't quite covering the entire program—and technology moving forward. And we need a little policy change. Even if we did everything to match a diesel price with one of the cleaner technologies today, you still have a federal tax of nearly 9.5% on the sticker price of a truck. Then you have to build infrastructure across a vast region of 20 million of us who live and work in Southern California. So why not focus on those key commerce corridors and take big chunks of pollution out of the air while we catch up on investment, cost efficiency and technology?
Recht: Let me give you one minute on an issue that's somewhat of a pet issue for you, but a really important one: raising the height of the Vincent Thomas Bridge. You've explained to me and others that the bridge isn't tall enough to accommodate the larger ships. It's not just a question of getting more containers in; these are also in many ways the most fuel-efficient ships, so there are environmental benefits as well. What are your thoughts?
Seroka: That's right. The Vincent Thomas Bridge connects our harbor enclave of San Pedro, where many of us live, to Terminal Island, where many work, and continues on to Long Beach and back. About 54,000 vehicles a day cross it. This is an extremely painful point for a lot of us, because we're about to see a major 16-month project, beginning in November, to redeck the existing bridge. As with potholes or sidewalks, you have to keep it in a state of good repair, and with 54,000 vehicles crossing every day, that's extremely important for the safety and security of everybody going across. It's a Caltrans bridge, not the port's, and not the city's or county's.
So we started looking at it. You've got really big ships, cruise ships and container ships, that can't fit under the existing bridge, and you're going to have a project anyway. What do you do? Let's not impact the workforce, who have to be on time every morning and come home safe every night. So we started calculating. There are about a thousand new ships in shipyards in Asia today, and they're being built with two fuel tanks. One uses traditional bunker fuel, which isn't the best kind in the world by our standards. The second can use renewable and synthetic fuels, and you can switch tanks, work off them and not strand a crew in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We've already tested these types of ships with newer fuels, and they work. But these ships need clearance about 40 feet higher than the Vincent Thomas Bridge has today.
So the State of California and the Port of Los Angeles, with the help of many stakeholders including our dock workers, got together and said, "OK, port, you now have the ability to go out and market this." After several trips back east to Wall Street, I believe we can get this bridge privately funded and industry supported for operations and maintenance, without tolling John and Jane Q. Public, and get bigger ships in. The key is that not only will these ships be cleaner, using better fuels and, in my view, zero-carbon fuels, but 40% of our port's capacity is on the other side of that bridge. If we're able to do this, it will mean the preservation and growth of jobs for generations to come.
Recht: Thanks. Let me turn to Tom Ashley with Voltera. This is an important issue, because we've been talking about all kinds of electric vehicles, and Voltera is in the charging business, which is relevant to everything we've heard so far. It's a relatively new venture that provides EV charging infrastructure for autonomous fleet operations. It initially included autonomous trucks but is now focused on robotaxis. It's perhaps best known for operating the Santa Monica charging station for Waymo's autonomous fleet. Tom, can you tell us more about Voltera's business plan, the types of operations it seeks to serve, where it's operating and where it plans to operate in the future?
Tom Ashley: Sure. The starting point is that even though Voltera only turned four years old about a month ago, we've evolved our business significantly in those four years, because the market has changed, industry dynamics have evolved, regulatory drivers have changed and the economics have changed. Where we're focused right now is serving what, from my standpoint and I think many others', is one of the fastest-moving, lowest-hanging-fruit opportunities to improve decarbonization and safety in the urban environment.
The scope for Voltera is ultimately enabling our customers to provide their services to the general community. What we do is the real gating item for them, the true governor on timing, process and scale for going live or scaling up in new markets, once the enabling policy exists for them to be on the road with their services. That scope means providing a place, or many places, for the vehicles to be charged and for workers to clean the vehicles and make sure they're ready for riders. Importantly, we have to support the workers doing that work. We don't just build charging stations. It is charging infrastructure, but we think about it as facilities, and those facilities support the vehicles but, just as importantly, the workers who work on and support the vehicles.
To level-set: our average charging facility has about 50 charging stalls. It operates 24/7, because our customers' services operate 24/7. Depending on the customer, we're talking 5 to 7.5 megawatts of power. One of the biggest tasks Voltera and our customers have isn't just finding the real estate where this can happen. It's working with our utility partners to figure out the pathway to power, and with our city partners to figure out land use and permitting, and ultimately lining all of that up. Voltera brings the capital, but we have to line it up in a way that lets our customers meet their commitments. They're often publicly committed to when they're going to go live in a new geography or scale up in one.
Recht: You actually answered, to a great extent, my next question, which was about the challenges: power, zoning and all that. What about neighborhood issues? Maybe that's part of the location question, but is it an issue, and what other challenges do you face?
Ashley: Again, I mentioned real estate, power, land use permitting and capital, which is the least of the problems. But everything has to line up, and that's a very high bar to clear in a time frame that works for our customers. What the industry is increasingly learning is that the bar may be even higher than we thought. Our customers are looking for sites that let them minimize what we call deadheading: the time it takes to get from where they're charged and serviced to where their customers are, and back again. The vehicles don't live at these facilities; they just visit them to charge and get cleaned up. The ridership is in urban centers, around sports venues, airports and so on. So our task is to find the sites, power, land use pathways and so on in close proximity to all that ridership, and the industry is increasingly cognizant of how difficult that is.
We've had some success working with a number of cities to figure out what that looks like when you're dealing with different zoning and different neighborhood or community dynamics. For Voltera, we don't actually manage these charging facilities. We effectively hand the keys over to our customers once we've built them. Then we have an ongoing responsibility to make sure all the chargers work, make sure there's toilet paper in the restrooms, quite frankly, and make sure the lights are on. What we're increasingly stepping into is a role of proactive community engagement to support our customers, who have had a range of experiences out there. My expectation is that there's going to be more and more need for this as technology continues to change, as our world continues to evolve and as people better appreciate, value and access the services our customers provide.
Recht: Let me ask you this. Autonomous robotaxis, with Waymo as the best example, seem to be here to stay, even though a lot of competitors are flooding into that market. They've got a toehold, and they seem to be making it work. But Voltera started on the truck side and then pulled out. Can you tell us why, and is there a chance the AV market in the truck world will really materialize?
Ashley: Voltera's very first project, in its pilot phase, was pretty small scale but a great proof of concept. But the first project we finished was, at the time, the largest truck charging facility in the country, in Lynwood. We went live with an initial phase in fall 2023 and the full phase, 65 truck charging stalls, in spring 2024.
The market has changed a lot, and the regulatory signals have changed a lot. We have a very good pathway to capital, but a very strong return on investment is required to leverage that capital. So yes, we've evolved our business. My hope, speaking for myself, is that the economics continue to improve and evolve in some other market segments, but I'll just say TBD.
One big component people don't necessarily appreciate about what we do, and it's key to unlocking the capital, which is otherwise a real challenge for so many other types of infrastructure investment, is that we buy the real estate. That's a very significant cost component, and it's really this customer set that has economics supporting it without material incentives. So from my standpoint, it's a question of what the economics look like and whether there are opportunities to increase utilization of charging equipment and facilities that support other segments. These are truly 24/7; the load factor is the highest our utility partners see for any form of transportation electrification.
Recht: I'm going to move on, but I'll give you an idea. Someday all of these electric buses at Metro, and the mayor's too, may be autonomous. That might be another opportunity for you, and they're going to need a lot of charging as well.
Recht: Let's turn to George Kivork, our last panelist, and then we'll have a couple of quick questions after that. George, Archer is one of the principal companies seeking to operate air taxis in the U.S., including here in LA. You've established Hawthorne Airport as your base of operations, but operations are still a way off. Tell us how air taxis work, what your plans are for their reach and when, realistically, you think you can start operations.
George Kivork: Thank you, Phil. What's exciting is seeing all the modes of transportation we're talking about, and I like that you end with the air taxi, the flying cars we were promised decades ago that we now get to work on, because it brings all of those pieces together: the port, the entertainment district, Metro. How do you complement this existing network? What I've enjoyed at Archer is that we think of it as reimagining the existing infrastructure we have and how we can use it.
What does that mean? Airports and ports may not be ideal places for you to go right now, but we created an aircraft that can move four passengers. It's a piloted aircraft. It has a 100-mile range and goes up to 150 mph. That means you get an incredibly quiet aircraft: no emissions, no fuel, no noise. We essentially took out some of the ills of aviation and unlocked the ability to say, there's significant existing infrastructure out there in airports and helipads. The aircraft is as light as a Tesla Model 3 and takes about the same charger as a Supercharger. So we're not bringing a massive load or a massive weight to a lot of these places.
So whether it's an existing Metro park-and-ride, a helipad at USC that was being decommissioned [site unclear], or Santa Monica, Burbank, Van Nuys, Whiteman, Palmdale, La Verne, Long Beach, Fullerton or Santa Ana airports, it provides a whole nexus we can connect. And what do we bring? Not just an incredibly quiet, incredibly sustainable aircraft, but a way to connect you incredibly rapidly. We're not going to replace thousands of passengers moving on Metro. We talk about this in terms of New York: you can get from Harlem to Tribeca for a buck fifty on the subway, and we're not replacing that. What we're giving you is an option. Tonight I will not make it to soccer practice in Granada Hills at 4:30, where I coach. It will not happen, because it isn't possible when I leave here at 3:00. So this is about unlocking the potential of those transportation options using existing space, minimal investment and minimal charging, in a phased, scaled approach. What's exciting is that it's changing aviation.
Recht: Tell us about the hurdles to becoming operational. You need FAA type approval for your vehicles, and you need route approvals, particularly in pretty congested airspace. And there was the incident in D.C. with the helicopters, which I think has chilled the environment a bit for air taxis and helicopters. What do you have to get approved to become operational?
Kivork: It is a lot. As the mayor, who has done incredible work in Inglewood, and Ray at Metro know, these things take years and decades. We've been approaching this with the FAA for the last seven years. I'd say there are three pieces, the three Ps: the product, the policy and the people.
The product is there. The science and the amazing engineering have happened. They've developed this electric propulsion technology, the newest aircraft in 50 years of aviation. You had the creation of flight, then the jet age that connected us across continents, and now you've got the electric age. So the product is there.
The policy is almost there. This federal administration has leaned in to make sure the U.S. dominates electric aviation implementation. The FAA, Secretary Duffy and the deputy administrators have all essentially put a marker down that they want to see this aircraft by 2028. They actually launched the program two weeks ago, and the aircraft have started flying across the country. We've started our "No Roads" tour, where you'll see some of these aircraft flying around.
The final piece is the people: making sure folks are ready to see where these things land and take off and how they integrate into your neighborhoods in a way that complements what's already there. So those are the three Ps.
Recht: Let me talk quickly about LA. I assume out of Hawthorne you may not want to take people to the airport. You're going to want to take them downtown, and you're really going to want to take them over here to Inglewood, right?
Kivork: Exactly. That's right.
Recht: Have you offered the mayor—
Butts: Oh, yeah. First ride on this thing.
Recht: He's taking you up.
Kivork: We've already had talks. That's a great example of getting folks moving. Look at the Rams: they have their training facility in Woodland Hills. I don't know how they get to Inglewood, but they get it done. That's another opportunity: you could possibly fly into Hawthorne and turn that route from a two-hour drive into about 10 minutes, moving four to five passengers every 20 minutes. That's the goal: a service that isn't getting you from here to Palm Springs, but from Inglewood to Woodland Hills, or from downtown LA to LAX in about 8 to 10 minutes. That's the value proposition. And it's what makes bringing folks to Hawthorne work: then maybe we can use an autonomous bus or vehicle to get you into the stadium. You spend more time there; you're not rushing out. Thank you to all of you who stayed through rush hour, I appreciate it. The goal is to let people spend more time with the people they love at the places they are, make it easy to get in and out, and give them as many options as possible.
Butts: But the ideal combination actually isn't to fly people from LAX to Hawthorne and put them in another car. The ideal solution is to combine it with Boring underground. We have a four-acre parcel that was part of our deal with the construction of SoFi. You could bring air taxis from LAX to Hawthorne, into a tunnel, up into our station, and then you add no more cars.
Recht: Sounds great. Can I follow up on that? This is the Boring Company. Is that project still alive?
Butts: Everything's always still alive. But they actually built—
Kivork: Pardon me, Mr. Mayor. Just on the airport side, they actually built a full tunnel underneath the airport as a test case to prove out the capacity of their technology. So it's absolutely alive.
Recht: I think it's great.
Recht: On that note, we have 9 minutes and 42 seconds left, so let's do two quick questions, and I'll ask each of you to answer them. We'll go down the panel this way and then come back. The first has to do with the Olympics. Each of you has ambitious and somewhat complicated plans with many moving parts. If there were one or two elements of your plans that you really want done in time for the 2028 Olympics to improve mobility and sustainability, what would they be? Let's start with Mayor Butts and go down the line.
Butts: The transit mobility hub will absolutely be done by then. But the real added tasty side order would be if the underground transport from Hawthorne Airport were to manifest itself. That would take a lot of vehicles off the road between the two.
Recht: Interesting. Sir?
Ashley: I'd just acknowledge that the Olympics are a huge north star for Voltera and our customers in this geographic market. Voltera has been working very actively with our customers and key partners, including the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, the City of LA, the mayor's office, DWP, the Bureau of Engineering, City Planning and a lot of other stakeholders, to figure out how we can best accelerate investment and deployment of charging infrastructure to enable maximum transportation electrification. For Voltera specifically, we're about to go online with a facility about a mile from here that will start supporting our customers' services within the next few weeks. But we have a whole list of sites we're trying to land ahead of visitors landing for the Olympics. It's a huge task, and we're really excited about it. I think this is one of the largest opportunities to unlock zero-emission transportation for Olympics visitors.
Recht: Thanks. George?
Kivork: Our goal is to get charging installed at the top six airports in the county, from Santa Monica all the way down to Santa Ana; unlock a couple of helipads, maybe at the port, maybe at the Queen Mary, a couple downtown and maybe a couple on the east side; and ultimately connect all of that to the central core of entertainment, where the focus of the 15 million viewers will be. Then figure out how we get them from the plane to the train to Metro to the Crenshaw line, and maybe even underground into Inglewood. That's the vision.
Recht: Gene?
Seroka: Make sure the redecking project on the Vincent Thomas Bridge is complete by March 1, 2028, and make sure there's a very comprehensive discussion of how we move cargo compared with what we did in 1984. Since then, the Alameda Corridor has been put in, a 22-mile grade-separation project that lets train traffic move unimpeded in and out. You didn't have that in '84. We've got on-dock rail at all of our facilities at the port, which also wasn't the case then. Making sure we can manage shift work, keep cargo moving for the country, keep everybody at work and not impede the traffic, the buses and the flows to and from the venues is going to be key. But it has to be a discussion that includes the broader community and the people with the institutional knowledge to get the work done.
Recht: Thanks. Ray?
Sosa: We have to take what we learned from the World Cup with the Games Enhanced Transit Service and apply it. For the World Cup we had eight events at one location. For the Games we have over 100 events at a variety of locations throughout LA County. The only way to do that is to have the buses, and the only way to have the buses is to have the funding for the mechanics and the operators. So we definitely need the funding before the Games.
Recht: Talk to the mayor. He's obviously the expert on getting funding.
OK, last question. We often focus on 2028, as we just did, but honestly, that's just a moment in time. The real question for the region's mobility and sustainability is what the system will be like once the circus leaves town and it's just us again. With that in mind, looking beyond 2028—pick a date, 2030, 2040—if there were one change in our mobility system that would demonstrate we're really moving people and goods around in a cleaner, better-connected transportation system, what would it be? Let's start with Ray and come down, and give the mayor the last word.
Sosa: I think it's the perception people have of transit right now. Being able to understand that it's reliable, dependable and safe, and that it can be used for a variety of things, not just getting to work and home, but getting to the grocery store, to events, to the beach, to parks. It would be a great legacy after the Games for everybody to have in mind that they can depend on and trust Metro, like they did for the World Cup.
Recht: Thanks. Gene?
Seroka: Phil, it's a confluence of events that can get all of these modes of transportation to our goal of zero emissions, but you can't do it alone. These trucks, ships and fuels are all really expensive. And yet we're the only two ports with a written strategy to go to zero emissions. We need better policy and better commitment from others to really help drive the market toward the cost structures and availability levels that let this thing unleash its power.
Recht: Thanks. George?
Kivork: I'm going to piggyback on that: it's better policy to help us implement the innovations we all have, whether they come from the private sector or from government. Implementation is sometimes the obstacle, not the innovation.
Recht: Sir?
Ashley: I think part of the vision for the Olympics from a transportation standpoint is making it as simple as possible for visitors. That effectively creates a cohesion of all the different modes of transportation we're talking about. You heard the mayor speak to it a little earlier. That's the great promise and opportunity in a place like LA, where transportation is such an integral part of who we are and what our community and geography look like. So it's really about connecting the dots between the different modes of transportation that exist today.
Recht: Thanks. Mayor, last word.
Butts: Well, you quaintly put it as the circus leaving town. The circus is never going to leave town, not in Inglewood. The venues are less than eight years old. They're the most modern, sophisticated stadium and arena in the world. Seventy thousand people coming for the Olympics is no different from 70,000 people coming for Beyoncé or Taylor Swift. We're already doing 5 million people a year. This is what we do.
But the one thing we didn't discuss is that most people, and definitely elected officials, see cities as squiggly lines demarcating 88 different cities. The reality is that people who travel and want entertainment, dining and lodging don't know about those squiggly lines. They know what they want. What Inglewood has done is create a great incubator for the circulation of money. It's estimated that over the two weeks of a Super Bowl, $1 billion circulates through the county of Los Angeles. So this circus isn't leaving town. Transportation just has to be here forever, or we're going to choke ourselves with emissions and cars.
