Image: Santa Monica Mayor Phil Brock at the LA28 viewing of the Paris closing ceremony.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass made international news when she promised a car-free Olympics in 2028. But as Santa Monica will be host to the beach volleyball portion of the games, we thought we would help our beachside city prepare to do its part to meet that goal. Below are some long- and short-term ideas that the city should do to get ready for a car-free Olympics.
The good news for Santa Monica is that it is well ahead of Los Angeles when it comes to providing multi-modal options including safe areas to walk and bicycle. The key to making a car-free Olympics possible will be expanding what is there and just making it easier and faster to get to and ride on the existing bus and rail systems.
And it goes without saying that these improvements are good for the city everyday, not just for a couple of weeks four years from now.
So let’s start with making the buses and trains work better. Santa Monica should move quickly to give signal preemption to the E-Line (Expo Line) trains. If the temporary stadium is going to be built just north of the pier, then making it easy, and increasing train capacity, to the Downtown rail station is a must.
A positive side effect of people arriving by Metro light rail is that they’ll also be close to two major retail and entertainment attractions: The Promenade/Santa Monica Place and the Pier.
There should also be signal priority given to buses, if not permanently at least during the games, on Santa Monica’s major streets. A lot of people will be coming from south of the city (South Bay, Long Beach, even some of the beach cities in Orange County), so Olympic Boulevard and PCH should be timed so that it’s easier, and faster to make that trip on the bus than in a car. Bonus points if the city gets creative and works with one of those beach cities and Metro to create a parking hub and rapid bus service to the city to keep those cars out of the local grid.
With the Olympic Village in Westwood, which should have its D Line subway station newly open in 2028, Santa Monica should assume that there will be a steady demand for transportation from the greater UCLA area to the beach area. A very high quality connection to the D line should be a top priority, both in terms of bus frequency and speed/dedicated lanes. The city should be involved in the conversation that Metro and LADOT will be having as many trips that begin in Westwood will end in Santa Monica.
While giving bus priority at signals is great, the city should use this attention to finally connect to the bus only lanes on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. If that proves to be too big a lift politically, there’s more space on parallel running Santa Monica Boulevard.
Paris had great success increasing bicycle traffic to attractions by painting bike lanes that headed towards Olympic destinations bright pink. It’s a good, low cost, idea and Santa Monica should work with L.A. and Long Beach to create a universal color palette to direct bicyclists towards Olympic hot spots.
It’s only a five-mile ride from Westwood to the pier, a very bikeable distance for most people – if (and it’s a big if) there’s a safe, comfortable bikeway.
Perhaps a bikeway combined with plentiful bike-share, like Paris. L.A. City and Metro have a federal grant to expand bike-share westward, so maybe the Olympics would be a good time for Santa Monica to revisit and greatly expand municipal bike-share.
But where will people ride? From Westwood? The heavy lifting will be outside the city borders, but perhaps Santa Monica can collaborate with L.A. to fashion some sort of olympic-branded bike trails, including:
- Protected bike lanes on Broadway connecting L.A. City’s approved Ohio Avenue protected bike lanes
- The E (Expo) Line bike path – give it a new coat of paint, add some pop-ups
- Both Broadway and Expo could feed into a Colorado Avenue bikeway trunk (the city is adding a new protected bike facility there now) which will need a smooth connection to the volleyball venue
- A parallel route could feed the California Incline, perhaps upgrade and extend California Avenue’s basic bike lanes
Back to transit, NASCAR has been including transit passes with the costs of race tickets at certain races for over two decades. As such it should be an easy lift (and Metro is indeed already planning) to include TAP cards with Olympic tickets. To make sure it’s easy and quick for visitors to get on the bus and train, I’d include them with hotel rooms too.
Last, we shouldn’t forget that having the Olympics in Santa Monica isn’t just great for the tourism industry; it’s a chance for residents to celebrate that they won life’s lottery…they live in Santa Monica, one of the great small cities in the entire world. As such the city should make it easy for residents to access the games and to celebrate in their own neighborhoods so if one doesn’t want to mingle with the city’s visitors they can party in their own neighborhood.
It goes without saying that DTSM Inc. is going to program the Promenade and the Pier Corporation will do the same. But that’s not enough on its own. The city should work with its neighborhood groups to create Olympic parties, viewings and other special events in all of Santa Monica’s neighborhoods.
Not many Santa Monicans will get to attend actual athletic competitions, so the city should bring the Olympics to where people are. Like many cities around the world, Santa Monica should host at least a couple of public viewing locations. Think maybe a farmers market type street closure with a big electronic screen broadcasting the games. Where? Perhaps Tongva Park, the 17 Street E Line park-and-ride lot, Santa Monica College, Goose Egg Park, or use the comments to suggest where you’d like to see this.
I’m sure there are plenty of great ideas we missed, so let us know your thoughts and we’ll include them in a follow-up article sometime soon. You can respond in the comments, on social media, or by emailing damien@santamonicanext.org
Streetsblog LA Editor Joe Linton edited and contributed to this article.
