Boston 2024

It is interesting how if you could magically combine Boston's colleges, and LA's existing venues, you'd have a competent city for hosting the Olympics.
 
tangent said:
LA ditched the rail yard and switched the Olympic Village location to house athletes on campus in existing dorms... Gee wish Boston had some college campuses:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/los-angeles-proposes-athlete-media-village-sites-for-2024/2016/01/25/c2d696de-c3a0-11e5-b933-31c93021392a_story.html
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Boston 2024 failed the moment they failed to win the enthusiastic support of Harvard and BU. It would have been a completely different story if they'd succeeded.
 
Equilibria said:
Boston 2024 failed the moment they failed to win the enthusiastic support of Harvard and BU. It would have been a completely different story if they'd succeeded.
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Boston 2024 seemed to not want the support of Harvard or BU or MIT
 
jkzjkzRe: Boston 2024

The interesting thing about the LA changes is that for Boston we were told existing dorms wouldn't work for some reason.
 
Re: jkzjkzRe: Boston 2024

tangent said:
The interesting thing about the LA changes is that for Boston we were told existing dorms wouldn't work for some reason.
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LA is now showing that it has better leverage with the USOC than did Boston. After having dumped Boston, the USOC cannot possibly dump LA without looking like utter eejits. So LA can say "plan change, using dorms instead of all new village, ok thanks see you at our next update meeting." And the USOC must go along, because they can't yank their support from LA.

LA had similar leverage over the IOC in 1984 and used it. It would not appear that they'd end up with such leverage over the IOC again in 2024 - lots of bidders still. But with Hamburg dropping out and with events in Paris and Europe more generally bringing security fears to the fore, I would not bet money on all those other bidders staying in. I'd also be unwilling to bet that they ALL drop. We'll see. Paris is the key competition.

If other credible bidders stay in, especially Paris, it will be veeeerrrrry interesting to see if LA's curt plan change on housing that they just handed to the USOC will fly with the IOC. Using available college dorms is a no-brainer from any common sense perspective, whether in LA, Boston, or wherever, and that should have been a big advantage for Boston. But common sense is not the IOC's forte, Agenda 2020 or no Agenda 2020. They are very attached to their big grand stadia and photogenic athletes' villages. Lots of idealistic chatter about athletes being able to meet all other athletes and make the world a happier place, etc, but in the end it's about glorifying the Olympic Brand, and a bunch of pre-existing dorms scattered through any city's collegiate infrastructure just doesn't bring the glory to the IOC like a shiny new concentrated village. (And athletes of the world can meet each other in dorms, too.) I don't think the IOC is going to like it. Hard to guess how much it'll matter.

But to your point: LA is indeed being judged on a different scale, because they're in a different set of power circumstances relative to the USOC (but perhaps not the IOC, that remains tbd).
 
Boston 2024 itself was focused on trying to leverage the Olympics towards those two big redevelopment projects. USOC said they expected partnerships with Boston's Universities to be more important to the bid, so I don't see the USOC or IOC standing in the way of housing athletes on a college campus or three. The IOC would have a hard time arguing against sending kids to Harvard.... Well water under the bridge... At least until Boston2028
 
Just to close the circle (or, at least, move it closer ..). For those who read nothing but this board.

This leaves Paris, France, as the only city in the running for the 2024 Olympics (tm).

Details emerge in deal to bring 2028 Summer Olympics to Los Angeles

After weeks of negotiations with the International Olympic Committee, Los Angeles officials have reached a deal to host the 2028 Summer Games under terms they hope will generate hundreds of millions in savings and additional revenues.

The agreement will bring the Olympics back to Southern California for a third time, after Los Angeles hosted in 1984 and 1932. It also opens the door for the 2024 Games to be held in Paris.

“It has been certainly a roller coaster,” L.A. bid chairman Casey Wasserman told The Times, adding that IOC officials “showed a real willingness to be thoughtful and creative.”

Initial reactions to the revised contract between the city and the IOC were mixed.
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So, basically, they've picked the 2024 and 2028 Olympics? That seems odd.

And I can't help but notice that, with the IOC happy to play ball in this arrangement, that many of the concerns that derailed our bid could have been resplved, if Boston had gotten the same deal.
 
DominusNovus said:
So, basically, they've picked the 2024 and 2028 Olympics? That seems odd.
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It is odd. But what about the Olympics is normal? Mostly bad stuff: honest well-run host cities were too-often elbowed aside by either rich autocratic hosts (Sochi, Beijing), or sentimental cities too blind to see their incompetence (Rio, Athens). And they'd already burned Chicago, New York in past bids, and made the Olympics so "extractive" that only huge metros can withstand the risks.

I'd say that LA got its deal partly because *something* had to change, and Boston's withdrawal was the tipping point. The IOC needed a new way to make hosting the games all of honest, affordable, and successful if it were to ever find a North American city again.

Giving LA until 2028 is genius--plenty of time for well-considered public works improvements (and the continued roll-out of their transit system), and they've gone too long without the extra juice of a USA network bidding for the "home continent" (live) broadcast rights.

And really hard to imagine any other North American city seriously bidding for a loooong time. They might as well get LA slotted while they could.
 
The plan seems to be pretty much what we were advocating for before Boston dropped the bid... with more reliance on existing facilities and Universities...

"Further savings would arise from housing athletes and the media at UCLA and USC rather than building expensive villages."

The issue with the Boston plan was that it was a multi-billion dollar building boondoggle. Boston already has 5 or 6 Olympic village type campuses in its universities, yet the Universities were sidelined in the planning in favor making it about real estate development.

It was a terrible mistake to try and build an entirely new Olympic village and a terrible mistake to try and build the Olympic stadium on a platform in the sky.

Maybe if LA is a success then Boston could learn something for 2048...
 
What has changed is that the IOC is once again scared shitless at the trend line of who's been bidding for what. And once again, LA hit the timing just right, as did Paris (sort of).

It wasn't just Boston that dropped it, Hamburg did too, as did Rome, and numerous other viable cities are never even getting close to a bid - the IOC brand is turning toxic in democracies, insofar as being a host city goes, which is half of what scares the IOC so deeply. If you're an authoritarian government, then it's the good old days, and that's the other half of what has the IOC scared so shitless. The situation for winter games has gotten even more dire.

So for 2024, the IOC was down to Paris and LA as fully credible bidders, with a deep and probably well-founded fear that if they sent one away empty-handed and then there were ANY dissatisfactions in Tokyo 2020 at all (and yup, there's some real "winner's remorse" in Tokyo), then the bid list for 2028 might have been empty. Or only made up of cities in authoritarian states. So the IOC could not risk only selecting the 2024 city now and then having the other get pissed and not bid for 2028.

So as was the case for the 1984 Games, when LA was the only bidder in the final round (Tehran having dropped out after the revolution), LA has again won a bid in a de facto field of one - they got an award for a 2028 Games on which there was never an open bid process. So once again, LA will be able to set terms for the IOC far more than the usual situation wherein the IOC is laying down terms for whatever city has "won" the bid. And LA gets a longer lead time from award to completion - that'll certainly help, too.

What will be interesting will be whether Paris can leverage the situation in a similar way for 2024. There's been some wobbling of public support, which made the IOC extremely nervous and hence led to Paris getting 2024 while LA got to wait. But with LA getting the 2028 award and thus out of contention for 2024, it seems to me that Paris is sort of in the same place now as LA was in 1984 - they ought to be able to push back on the IOC more.
 
Worth pointing out that the most expensive parts of the Olympics is often the infrastructure improvements, and while the projects are often things that had been proposed or were already in the pipeline, they often lack sure funding until the olympics get awarded. LA county has already committed a very significant funding source for infrastructure improvements with measures R and M.
 
West said:
What has changed is that the IOC is once again scared shitless at the trend line of who's been bidding for what. And once again, LA hit the timing just right, as did Paris (sort of).

It wasn't just Boston that dropped it, Hamburg did too, as did Rome, and numerous other viable cities are never even getting close to a bid - the IOC brand is turning toxic in democracies, insofar as being a host city goes, which is half of what scares the IOC so deeply. If you're an authoritarian government, then it's the good old days, and that's the other half of what has the IOC scared so shitless. The situation for winter games has gotten even more dire.
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As annoying as it is that Boston would have been awarded 2028 on its own terms, there's a Catch-22 here. Boston dropping out was a catalyst for discontent in the other cities...
 
Equilibria said:
As annoying as it is that Boston would have been awarded 2028 on its own terms, there's a Catch-22 here. Boston dropping out was a catalyst for discontent in the other cities...
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eh, maybe, maybe not. I've got in-laws in Germany, including Hamburg, and they're pretty vigorous in saying that the Hamburg bid was going down at the voting booth with or without the Boston example. Boston did get cited during their debate, but it's not at all clear it was even remotely influential.

Likewise, Munich and its partner city up in the Alps rejected the idea of a bid on the winter games, and Boston's actions had zero impact there.

I have no clue if Boston's actions had an effect in Rome.

So while I do agree that there is some spillover momentum from one city to another, I'm unconvinced that it's major, in any direction. I think lots of citizens in lots of places are getting to the same conclusion mostly independently.

So if Boston had stayed in, it might still be a two city situation, between Boston and Paris. No way to be sure......
 
What is sure is that the Boston plan showed a lot of "vision" and not a lot of practicality. Boston 2024 dug in on their irrational plan for Widett Circle and a boondoggle of other projects just when they needed to show some flexibility to go with more existing facilities. LA had more in the pipeline with new sports stadiums already, but Boston certainly could have leveraged our Universities and existing infrastructure much more effectively. Spending billions on infrastructure we didn't need should not have been the motivating factor.
 
If anyone still wants to talk about it, I'm curious. The mayor of LA just tweeted this out - it's an image of the proposed public transportation system to be completed by 2028. It's pretty.

How does this compare to Boston / MA in complexity, number of routes & stops, area covered, etc.?

As an opponent, my criticism about comparing this to Boston and "what could've been" is that LA / CA has this in the works already; they aren't using the Olympics (tm) as a way to get things done.

Screenshot-2017-08-02-at-3.15.48-PM.png


Original (full-sized) image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGPdWYSUMAArJTN.jpg
 
JohnAKeith said:
How does this compare to Boston / MA in complexity, number of routes & stops, area covered, etc.?
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This is the closest visual answer to that question:

http://fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/

IMO, the place where California seems to have Boston beat is that they do these big ballot questions with clear lists of the infrastructure folks are voting on. CA ballot initiatives are crap in general, but this is one place where they help clarify peoples' conception of what capital revenue goes to.

On the other hand, LA's system is new enough (or speculative enough) that I don't think they have a crippling maintenance backlog like the MBTA does. That will come in 20-30 years. LA also has a much friendlier environment for operating vehicles. No snow, no ice, no salt, no major heat or humidity. That lowers their maintenance bills, too.

I wish we could commit the MBTA to a ballot-questioned list of extensions/enhancements like CA does with LA Metro and BART, but I also wish we could stop talking about the extensions we're wasting money on (South Coast Rail, mainly) and focus on fixing what we have.
 
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