Late last week, Torched’s Alissa Walker broke a story about LAX getting construction underway on a massive roadway expansion. When complete, it will send even more cars into the already gridlocked central “horseshoe” roadway. Widening the roads leading into an unchanged horseshoe will, you guessed it, worsen congestion in the horseshoe.
The brand new $5.5 billion SoFi stadium opened in 2020, and has a brand new $2.2 billion light rail line opened in 2022 (the same line that the LAX people mover is connecting to) that passes 1.6 miles away, but it also doesn’t have a station. My understanding is the stadium owner used their political power to block it because they charge $140 to park per car for NFL games. Recently because of the upcoming Olympics they were going to spend $2 billion on a people mover to the stadium.
Think about that, the original metro line was $2.2 billion, they then spent $3.3 billion fixing the mistake of not actually connecting to the airport, and then they tried to spend another $2 billion fixing the mistake of not connecting to the stadium. $5.3 billion on people movers, trying to correct the shortsighted mistakes from the original build. And if they had done it the obviously right way the first time you could just get off the metro and be at your destination instead of getting off, navigating a connection, waiting for the next people mover…
https://laist.com/news/transportation/la-metro-crenshaw-lax-rail-line-opening-what-to-expect
https://labusinessjournal.com/special-reports/infrastructure-los-angeles-international-airport/
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-18/rep-maxine-waters-sofi-stadium-people-mover-olympics
Jesus fucking shit that’s infuriating.
It’s more infuriating because 99% of the time when they make these bad route decisions they will cite cost. But then are ready to spend orders of magnitude more per mile on less convenient and more expensive to operate people movers to fix the route mistake later.
Pennywise, pound foolish doesn’t even begin to describe…