No-car Games: Los Angeles Olympic venues only accessible by public transit | Hacker News Reader

No-car Games: Los Angeles Olympic venues only accessible by public transit

apnews.com

43 pointscwwc27 comments

Wouldn't it be amazing if the organizers were to commit to ensuring everyone - VIPs included - were going to be forced to use public transit? Might even provide incentives to make sure the transit options work :)

Otherwise this smacks of the elites jetting to Davos to discuss how the rest of us need to cut back on our emissions :/

What this sounds like to me as someone from LA: pay $50 per hour to park in a lot and take a shuttle from there, because of course no one will consider pedestrian infrastructure between the venues and the parking lots.

I've visited and that sounds exactly like how it will work out.

Say you live in Long Beach and you're going to some venue on the other side of town. Are you going to take a bus the whole way? No, you'll drive close by, find parking... then do the last few miles somehow.

Four years is enough time to figure this out, but I still wonder whether it will actually be enough time for Los Angeles to figure this out.

Why not start today on making Los Angeles less car dependent and more mass transit oriented?

> Four years is enough time to figure this out,

you mean 4 years + 4 decades that it hasn't figured it out already? if LA was going to figure it out, they would have already done it. they've just never had the spotlight on them to this effect

It was figured out a century ago, they really just need to go back to how they used to do it. SF wasn't the only town with a trolley

"Bass does not yet have a commitment from LA-based businesses to allow their employees to work from home during the Games."

I guess LA area companies have a couple more years of culling the workforce with RTO policies before they show yet again they are not necessary

If no cars are a priority, why on earth would you pick LA then. I can't think of a more car dependent location, maybe Dallas?

I am happy to hear this, but where I am public transit is real bad (we have subways, not just busses). You can walk faster than how fast the subways go. I hope LA's PT is much better.

But the Olympics is 4 years away, I am sure that requirement will be changed. This is the US after all.

They'll need to figure out how to keep Uber and Lyft out or you'll have endless roving cabs.

They don't look like a bus, so im sure it won't be hard.

My pessimistic take is that a city in the US will briefly prioritize public transit over private vehicles and learn nothing from it.

What is the point of "No-car"? Better to focus on actual outcomes like safe, efficient, fast, cheap transportation instead of pre-determining the implementation. If the emphasis were on outcomes it's unlikely that 100% private cars or public transportation would be the solution. A blend of self-driving cars, personal mobility, and busses might be the best mix.

Ideology, rather than rationality is the basis for this kind of decision making.

That said, go for it; ensure it’s a dud. Make sure it’s the last useless waste of US taxpayer money for the Olympics.

Idiots were concerned about the “authenticity” of breakdancing. Are they also seeking authenticity for any of the other sports, judo, martial arts, skating etc? Maybe they even go back to turn of previous century equipment to ensure authenticity. Actually, I might enjoy truly retro Olympics without space age materials, etc.

Cities and people are more prosperous when they have better access to resources. Families spend more money on their local economy when they aren’t spending it all on road taxes, car payments, and gasoline.

Self-driving cars aren’t real.

> Cities and people are more prosperous when they have better access to resources.

Definitely. Existing public transportation is a major hinderance to many people finding good work, quality groceries, and other necessities of life.

> Self-driving cars aren’t real.

I'm not sure what this means. Waymo does 50K paid trips every week including in Los Angeles.

> What is the point of "No-car"?

I really don't understand that, especially seen the more pressing issues that cities are facing: insecurity, people defecating in the streets (yup, it is an issue), "zombies" under the Tranq drug, homeless people, etc.

My car happens to isolate me very well from all that. Before you'll get me to use public transport, you better first create a safe and clean city.

Cars aren't clean or safe, so that's step one.

As long as I don’t have a passenger high on fent who is waving a knife at me, a car is already a step up from the D line (a bus). I still take the bus anyway (parking is tough in downtown Seattle), but I can’t really deny the issue.

I get what you're saying, but every instance where I've felt physically threatened in my neighborhood is from malicious or incompetent drivers -- I often yield my right of way when walking because I feel I'll be injured otherwise. Drivers really are the greatest menace in the city as far as I'm concerned.

The other issues are both rarer and don't make me feel physically threatened. Though of course nobody wants to see human suffering.

Seattle has been going through a rough spot with its drug addiction/homeless problem, which has basically ruined a lot of things that we took for granted a decade or two ago. It also doesn’t really make sense: it doesn’t take a lot to just remove people from a bus if they take out a knife, yet the city/county has deprioritized public safety, which tips the safety advantage back to car travel. You are lot more likely to get murdered on a bus (or on Link or in a Link station after you get off the train) than in your own car, even if the risk of accident is higher.

Because 4 years is a short time. At this point, the organizers need concrete solutions, not abstract goals. They need a good enough solution that is guaranteed to work on the specific dates, not something potentially better but uncertain and at a risk of being delayed.

If you have a mass event and most people arrive by car, you need much more space for parking than for the event itself. If you don't have that space, you need strong incentives against driving. The last thing you want is more people arriving by car than there is parking space.

Street capacity can also be an issue. If you have tens of thousands of people arriving/leaving a venue at the same time, repeated several times around the city, you don't want to waste capacity on small vehicles carrying only a handful of passengers. You load the people in public transit, drop them off anywhere else, and let them figure out how to reach their actual destinations from there.

Would be cool to see a list of events/locations accessible by (even the limited) Metro line.

And then map out hotels on the line and you’ve got a pretty decent Olympics experience.

Bookmark their ticket prices and then compare them to the ticket prices that the Games.

Now if only they had public transit. Renting buses seems like not much of a plan.

The people renting out the buses will be building Scrooge McDuck money pools, though.

So you are saying [takes off sunglasses] and parentheses It’s not the athletes who are really bringing home the gold from the Olympics

I'm curious about how much time skillful, trained, smart people need to realize that collective transit (improperly named public, since it's essentially all private tapping public fund plus tickets and co from the merchandise they carry) are just speculation, practically unsustainable and dollar green, definitively not grass green.

Downvotes probably will be the answer.

Ladies and gentleman's mass transport works, it efficient and effective, where there are enough people who want to go from A to B, let's say for the purpose it was born, bring workers back and forth slums/factory. It can't be generalized. There are countless A and B 24/7/365 we simply can't much most of them, yes, we can match some, but needing anyway private transports aside, making the overall design inefficient because or you keep moving nearly empty, wasting much resources, or you keep under-utilized transport means en masse, again wasting much resources.

The city is the topmost of inefficiency model with their offices and high rise condos where people use both for less than 12h/day commuting between them just to be exposed to physical ads (shop windows), in the past was needed because we haven't efficient enough transportation, TLCs and ITs, meaning we need paper and being at short range. Not the costly tradeoff it's simply too expensive and not anymore needed anyway, except for finance capitalism who need that scale to profit from poor (impoverished) masses who own anything.

Try to imaging how NY can go green new deal. Try to estimate the natural resource costs and a hyper-generic outline of how to make it real. Now try to estimate the natural resources needed by a spread society of small buildings, properly using current tech, desktop-centric instead of mobile+cloud for IT. If you do such game you'll discover that modern smart-city narrative is the old Fordlandia one, a fascist distopic society who can't not only work but even being built with Earth resources. The ruling class today is a timocracy, so finance, so they need that model at all costs, but the society need to avoid it at all cost.

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