The LA28 Olympic cauldron i(Photo by Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

The L.A. 2028 Olympics are billed as the largest peacetime gathering in history.(*) Moving everybody between the venues and other parts of the city will be a major task, and the city’s Dept. of Transportation and the LA28 committee are both hard at work on the problem. LA is known as a car city rather than a transit one, but they also have handled other big events, including the 1984 Olympics, last year’s World Series and soon, their part of this year’s World Cup.

This was the subject of the opening session at this year’s “Curbivore” conference in downtown L.A. Curbivore’s name comes from the importance of the curb to many new transportation technologies, like ride-hail, delivery, robotaxis and transit. The curb used to be about parking and bus stops. Now it’s also about ride-hail, PuDo, deliveries, scooter and e-bike parking, outdoor dining and more.

It’s too bad that the event is so soon, though. We’re on the verge of a bunch of new transportation technologies which might be able to make a big difference in an event like this. Unfortunately, there’s no way to have them tested and deployed in just 2 years.

For now, it will be conventional transportation with some additions like shared scooters and bikes. Robotaxis will be there, and more companies than Waymo, but they’ll mostly be operating as they do today, like taxis, though Waymo, Uber and Lyft could all implement ride-pooling (again for Uber and Lyft) to handle more people. While the trains and buses will do what they can–many of the stadiums do not have Metro stops, though the DTLA/crypto Arena area does, and a few others as well.

The main approach being promoted by LA28 is to try to levelize demand. When a big event starts, or in particular ends, there can be a huge swell of demand for transportation, and that means overloads and jams. For the big events, LA28 is researching ways to incentivize people to leave or arrive earlier or later, including financial incentives, with things like tickets and parking that are more expensive if you want to arrive and leave at prime times.

Robotaxis, and some robotic shuttles and buses, will be ready in time for LA28. Those are good, though they don’t on their own do a lot more than human driven vehicles. They can save a bit of money (though they don’t today) and they are more willing to sit and wait in important locations than humans, who must be compensated for waiting around.

Uber is the official Olympic partner for “rideshare, bikes, scooters and delivery,” and promises to provide last-mile transit service, but surprisingly, there has not yet been talk of reviving their UberPool service (which is actual ride share, not the taxi service that gets incorrectly called rideshare.) Pooling is particularly easy for tasks like moving a group of people from a stadium to a transit stop or other major destination, as there are no stops and detours. But even with stops and detours, pooling can make a lot of sense, and is easy to incentivize both with price and priority. Just offer shorter wait times for those who pool over those who don’t, as well as lower prices.

Pooling with robotaxis and robovans can be even better. Not only does the robotaxi have one extra seat for the same sized vehicle, but you can coordinate multi-robotaxi trips. If 5 pooling riders leave a venue they can be taken to where their routes diverge, and with a large crowd that can be pretty far, and it can be a staging lot where other robotaxis are waiting to take some of the passengers nonstop to their destinations, with no detour. Robotaxis don’t mind waiting or doing short trips the way human Uber drivers do.

The real win is if you have van and mini-bus style vehicles To empty a major venue, it’s likely you can find 10-20 people all going the same direction, and take them to a staging lot where they can then be dispersed to their nearby final destinations. This can even be done with human driven vans and buses. If most people leaving a venue go in vans, you can empty a venue quite quickly, you don’t even need to flatten the demand. The main problem is that such pooling systems for robocars don’t exist today, and you would want them to be well tested before applying them to a big event.

There are only a few e-VTOL electric aircraft today, and they are all in very early stages of deployment if deployed at all. In 2028 there will be more, but not enough to make a big dent in traffic. They could, however, help bring VIPs like officials, press and some athletes quickly between locations when needed. The press pay for the Olympics, after all, so they are the biggest VIPs there. e-VTOL companies all know that to really scale, they need new systems of air traffic control. Those won’t be fully tested by 2028, so we can’t really exploit this new technology.

Uber is going to be involved in the design of the pickup/dropoff spots and flow to them, but it’s not said if the official partnership is exclusive. One thing that’s certain is that the many international visitors to the city will be very keen to try their first robotaxi, be it from Waymo, or the services Uber plans to launch or other new services which may arrive by 2028, like possibly Tesla. At the same time, it’s a strong opportunity for these new services to get visibility to a very wide audience. It’s also a big opportunity to screw up, since the situations will be busy and chaotic, and right now PU/DO is one of the areas of rough edges for all services, and they need lots of practice before 2028.

Uber’s partnership requires a “transit-first” focus, so they presumably will put in work at providing good service between venues and transit stations.

The panel also had Stewart Lyons, CEO of scooter company Bird. Lyons pointed out the ability of micromobility, like scooters and e-Bikes, to handle very large volumes of people in limited road space and much less parking space. It should be noted that shared scooters of many brands have seen more and more rejection by cities in spite of their extremely low energy and space usage (much lower than any transit, often 10x lower) because of bad behavior by riders who break rules about where to ride and park them. Technology now exists to prevent much of that, and it’s getting better, and micromobility might be a pretty efficient way to move large volumes of people, at least in certain demographics. L.A. is too large for kickscooters to handle many trips, but e-Bikes could handle many trips between Olympic venues, or to and from parking.