Los Angeles hopes to woo the world in 2028 when millions of people pour into the second-largest U.S. metro region to attend the Olympic Games, but it faces an uphill battle to reach its goal of becoming a zero-emissions transportation city by then.
In 2018, the city launched a 10-year plan to make the region’s cars, buses, and trucks emissions-free by the 2028 Summer Olympics and is now more than halfway to the finish date, but officials involved admitted to attendees at the South by Southwest Conference on Tuesday afternoon in Austin that they have much to do.
“It’s no small challenge,” said Matt Petersen, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, which is heading up the county and city effort. “Billions of people are going to be watching the games around the world and millions of people coming to Los Angeles.”
The goal goes 25% beyond existing California state law and Paris Climate Accord greenhouse gas emissions goals for the transportation industry, which were already major hurdles to achieve. California set a goal of getting 5 million electric vehicles on its roads by 2030.
To reach that goal, the city and county are shooting for at least 80% of vehicles sold by 2028 to be electric, which do not rely on gasoline for power but renewable electric energy. Los Angeles also wants to convert taxi, ride-sharing, and public transit to be electricity-dependent.
Heather Repenning, executive officer for sustainability policy at LA Metro, said the agency provides 1 million rides per day, an example of how massive an overhaul it is embarking on. All 2,200 of the city’s buses are in the process of being replaced by electric buses, which she said is even more challenging, as only two companies exist that are qualified to fulfill that large order.
“[For the] Olympics, we’re expecting 10 to 15 million tickets to be sold,” Repenning said. “It’s going to be like seven Super Bowls per day throughout the county — 3 million unique attendees.”
Although the city has the stadiums to accommodate the events, the problems are mobility and temporarily adding buses that are as low-emission as possible.
“We’re talking about a car-free Games,” Repenning said. “We’re talking about creating bus-only lanes. We’re talking about mobility hubs, and we’re going to have to borrow somewhere around 3,000 buses. Everyone here would certainly want to make sure that we can get as many of them to be zero emissions as possible, but then we have to add the temporary charging and things like that, so there’s just an incredible amount of dynamic activity happening within the space around sustainable transportation.”
Patty Monahan of the California Energy Commission said the top barrier to getting electric vehicle sales to where the state wants to see them has been the lack of reliability in infrastructure and charging stations.
Los Angeles hopes to overcome that problem in the remaining four years by adding 130,000 charging stations, including in single-family houses, apartment complexes, grocery stores, and religious sites, in places accessible to the entire community, not just wealthy or middle-class pockets of the county.
Petersen said shifting the types of public transportation vehicles is critical, as well as the cars and trucks that residents get around in.
“You can’t get to the greenhouse gas emission reduction target with no shift,” Petersen said Tuesday. “You have to get people out of their cars.”
The move would have a significantly positive impact on the skyline, which has some of the most polluted air in the country, mostly due to the heavy amount of vehicle traffic.
“We can’t turn the tide on the climate crisis until we work across sectors and city limits to put the brakes on dangerous pollution and kick our zero-emissions transportation future into high gear,” then-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, said in 2019. “The roadmap charts a course toward a cleaner transit network and draws up a blueprint for cities worldwide to follow.”
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Repenning was hopeful that Los Angeles’s overhaul of its transportation infrastructure would communicate to the world that big changes are possible, even on a time crunch.
“One of the things that I’m hoping for is that this game will become a way for Los Angeles to permanently change some of our travel habits,” Repenning said. “Last Tuesday, we actually had an election, something like two-thirds of voters in LA city voted on on a measure that said that we will build out LA’s mobility plan. … So for those of you that think that LA doesn’t want these things, I have this for you, we do want them and a system that is going to work for everyone.”