Everybody calm down

Randy Newman had barely started singing "I Love LA" on Sunday when the warnings about tonight began to appear. Prepare for a "traffic nightmare." "Don't leave your house." "Pray for every driver."

The first game of the World Series starts at 5:08 p.m., in case you hadn't heard. But what really started to trigger the social media SigAlerts was the sudden realization that LA might have made other plans around town tonight: a Laker game at Crypto.com, a USC game at the Coliseum, the Garfield High vs. Roosevelt High football game known as the East LA Classic at SoFi, plus a bunch of mostly boomer musicians playing shows around the region. (Although I'd say seeing ELO live, as you can do at the Forum, is worth getting stranded in Inglewood for.)

Clout posters reached deep into local calendars to find more LA County events to add to their scare lists. Will anyone survive the traffic nightmare at Disney Hall, capacity 2,265? Pray for John Williams. Even including the Garfield-Roosevelt game in this lineup is a stretch — it's 12 miles from Dodger Stadium and 13,000 tickets have been sold. SoFi normally seats 70,000 for NFL games. So today's actually a light day for the Kroenke-Ballmer Sportsplex™!

In an attempt to tamp down on the hysteria, LA Mayor Karen Bass held a press conference Thursday morning to "announce a suite of coordinated actions." The plan is to turn this weekend into a public dress rehearsal for 2028, with park viewing parties, cultural itineraries, and small business promotion. I'm not sure how exactly the execution will go, but this is the correct attitude overall. Because LA is a big city where many things happen in our multimodal, multitudinous region every single day. The message should be not to stay home, but to get the hell out there and enjoy all LA has to offer — this is what Friday night should always look like! Actually, as LA's chief tourism officer Doane Liu pointed out at the press conference, Saturday will bring four major league games to LA: a Kings game at 1 p.m. at Crypto.com, then the Lakers playing the Sacramento Kings at 7:30 p.m. at Crypto.com, the LA Galaxy playing game one of the MLS cup at 8 p.m., plus game two of the World Series — not quite the "sports equinox" of 2018, but almost! "We do it on the regular," said Liu. YES, THANK YOU, WE DO.

But tonight is not actually a test for 2028, when we'll have solutions like augmented bus networks and no parking at venues. Traffic tonight will be bad; it always is! What we might see, however, is if more Angelenos will voluntarily take transit to what is an extremely normal lineup of events. In fact, this is already happening naturally. Metro ridership has been going up for 21 straight months, with the growth largely attributed to special events. That was the main takeaway from Bass's remarks yesterday. "There's a fast, easy, and affordable way to avoid traffic," she said, "and that is to go Metro."

But these venues, whew, they really don't make it easy. After reporting this week on how over one-third of ticketholders now ride transit to the Hollywood Bowl — one of the few venues that does not have a show tonight — I tried to compare that experience to buying tickets to a Dodger game, where parking is aggressively foisted upon you at every turn. Even if you wanted to get more details about your options, Dodger Stadium's truly embarrassing public transit page has no maps, bad directions, and incorrect information.

The rail directions are nonsensical: why would you walk from the Chinatown station to get on the Union Station shuttle instead of taking the train one stop? There are no directions for that 3/4-mile walk to the stadium. And what is the "Broadway stop" a half-mile away? The bus directions are comically vague and severely outdated; the 2 bus no longer stops here on Sunset. And there's no link to information about the Dodger Stadium Express shuttle from Union Station; those details are on a completely different page. In fact, both of these pages are clearly written by someone with no grasp of how LA's buses or trains actually work. No wonder more of the 56,000 fans don't ride transit to the stadium!

The situation is much worse in Inglewood where it's not unusual to see events at three major venues — 70,240-seat SoFi Stadium, 17,505-seat Kia Forum, and 18,000-seat Intuit Dome — on the same day. And all three venues basically force you to buy parking before you have a chance to consider the alternatives. Just poking through SoFi's transportation directions — DIRECTIONS WHICH ARE SPONSORED BY SHELL, THE OIL COMPANY — it's difficult to get past the parking instructions. To find transit information, you have to visit Metro's site for the actual details. And if you're not going to an NFL game, it's extremely difficult to find out if shuttles are running for your event. (They're usually not.)

The Forum tops that by not having any transit directions at all, only parking. Maybe this should not surprise me as the Forum's naming rights have been sold to a car company. But come on, it's only a one-mile walk from the Downtown Inglewood K line station! You could at least tell people that! The recently opened Intuit Dome, new home of the Clippers, has more options. A regional park-and-ride system similar to the Bowl has five pickup spots as far away as Union Station and Pierce College in the Valley. There are also three different shuttles: one to the K, and one to the C, and one to the new K/C station at LAX, which will open later this year. And a microtransit service is available for people who are less than six miles away. But it's hard to say that you're promoting these options unless you put out them in front of people during the ticketing process.

If you're going to pray for anyone, pray for the neighbors of Inglewood's venues who are truly living in a year-round traffic nightmare, thanks to a series of extremely shady decisions by local and state legislatures. And it's not going to get better anytime soon. In fact, the city of Inglewood is still trying to gain support for its ludicrously expensive one-mile people mover which we have learned, as of last night, Inglewood's venue owners do not support. Now it really seems like the whole people mover thing might not be happening at all. Hey, I've got a wild idea, you guys. What if we try some buses?

Some venues do get it right. Expo Park venues BMO Stadium (capacity: 22,000) and the Coliseum (capacity: 77,500) really push transit — case in point: in 2022, LAFC played the MLS final on the same day as USC homecoming game, it was totally fine! But even stadiums and arenas that are a block from a train station could do a better job with directions. Then again, maybe I'm hoping for too much when we have billionaires with $70 parking spaces to sell. AND DIRECTIONS WHICH ARE SPONSORED BY SHELL, THE OIL COMPANY.

The bigger question is why the people organizing the "transit-first" games haven't started working with these venues now to ensure the most basic information about how to get there without a car is accurate, updated, and easy to find. Doesn't getting Angelenos into the right mindset of riding transit to sports now make their job easier as we warm up for 2028? It seems like something LA28 might have required as part of its commitment to "sustainability."

Oh well, yet another missed opportunity. Go Dodgers! 🔥