Boston 2024

^ Then would you care to amend this statement:
Equilibria said:
That's probably because they've been told that they can host for very little money and effort. That's not true, and they're going to find that out.
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Your statement appears correct as constructed, but I don't see that "little money and effort" accurately describes what's been promised Angelenos.

Boston said its olympics were $4.6b. LA says its Olympics are $4b. (is the $600m difference the cost of the stadium vs re-use of the Colosseum?)

They know it takes money and effort, but they also know they're way less at risk than Bostonians/Metro Boston.

1) $4b is *half* the proportional effort for LA that it was for Boston
- Boston's annual city budget is $2.7b, LA city alone is $5b (County is more)
- LA metro GDP 2.2x the size of Boston
- LA city/county that unifies most of that GDP
- Metro LA GDP is even nearly 2x all of Mass state
- Garcetti "speaks for" 3.8m people, Walsh? only 650k
- Per capita, $4.6b/Boston City's 650k = $7million per person
- Per capita, $4.0b/LA City's 3800k people = $1 millon per person


2) And have "capitalized" prior effort
- A Colosseum (is that the $600m difference in bid price?)
- Plenty of '84 venues they can refurb (less risky)
- Reputation & know-how

Looking at how LA Metro is committed to infrastructure spending you could amend your statement to "very little [additional] money and effort" (given huge transit pushes already under way),

Or per city GDP or city inhabitant, I'd amend your statement to "[between half and 1/7th] the money and effort"

then what's left to be "not true" that they're going to find out?
 
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Garcetti sketched the LA bid budget to the editorial board of the LA Time two days ago. They expect costs to be $4.1 billion, have a $400 million contingency, and seem to be expecting revenue of about $5 billion. Venue costs of about $1.5 billion.

We'll have to wait whether the Coliseum is included in the venue cost estimate. USC is spending around $600 million (latest speculation) to renovate the Coliseum. If USC does that, LA has a modern Olympic stadium at no cost to the organizing committee or the USOC.
 
Equilibria said:
That's just another way of saying "LA doesn't see the Olympics as something that they need to invest in." The same argument could have been made in Boston, and it was. Boston 2024 spent six months arguing that committed projects like Red/Orange Capacity and GLX were all that was required transit-wise, and that proposed and likely projects like SSX and Beacon Yards would only make things easier. Also, Massachusetts did the road diet for ped/bike thing years ago. https://www.massdot.state.ma.us/Portals/0/docs/GreenDOT/DirectiveHealthyTransportation.pdf

In LA, you have investment (in LRT, which is second-rate rail transit for a city that big) and Olympics, and I don't believe that people connect those concepts. They just assume that LA can handle it because, well, "it's LA". I think you're right when you say that no one is calling the Olympics a catalyst. I just also think that few people truly believe that the quality of LA's infrastructure will affect a bid in either direction, USOC included.
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Only the people that wanted to piggy back their pet infrastructure projects on the Olympic bid ever thought that Boston's transportation system was any less adequate than most other cities. Boston's planned projects and existing transportation system are every bit as good as LA and would have been fine for the Olympics. Although specifics are a bit hard to consider since a fair number of venues were probably going to change which would have impacted the transportation mix at and between those venues.

The key to the transportation plan for the Olympics is surge capacity at venues which is a combination of rerouting usual traffic, demand management in the form of telling people to avoid the city or particular areas around venues, and extra trains and buses at the venues before, after and during the events.

The LA bid will simply be a billion and a half cheaper than the Boston bid would have been because they are offloading the expense of the main stadium on an already planned half billion dollar upgrade to the existing Olympic stadium (and they don't have to build a $1.2 Billion dollar deck, although that cost and many others were offloaded to an unknown developer in the Boston plan). LA will probably spend just about as much on all the other venues though and by making an open ended commitment cost controls are going to be... challenging.
 
Arlington said:
Looking at how LA Metro is committed to infrastructure spending you could amend your statement to "very little [additional] money and effort" (given huge transit pushes already under way), then what's left to be "not true" that they're going to find out?
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I'm just not seeing what separates their "commitment" from Boston's. LA will probably be receiving public funds for their $4B operating budget, while Boston likely would not have for a $4.8B budget. Beyond that, of course, was the rub. Boston 2024 estimated something like $5B in needed infrastructure (it kept changing) that was mostly assigned to projects already in the pipeline. Total projected cost was about $10B.

How much does LA need to spend on Olympic infrastructure? That's my question. It's not in the $4B, and a general "commitment to build infrastructure" doesn't make the issue go away any more than it did when Boston 2024 cited the CIP. I suspect that to many Angelenos, the number is zero dollars. LA, in their minds, can simply absorb the project.

Maybe it can, but I don't like its odds. The LA Coliseum site is served by transit, in the form of one LRT line with 2 stations. If Boston 2024 had proposed such a location for multiple venues (including the biggest one), it would have been laughed off this message board. LA is the opposite of walkable, so everyone is moving on trains or, more likely, in coach buses and rental cars. Where do they all park, if the stadium lots are covered in venues?

Moreover, what pre-existing projects will be graced with the title of "Olympic" once the bid exists? London has shown how this works. You start with a $5B bid, and then it becomes $15B once all the extras get thrown into the pot. It's why no one knows whether a Games makes a profit, and LA is not immune from that thinking.
 
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The reality is that both Atlanta in '96 (and I'm assuming LA of '84) simply transitioned from being car-dependent to being bus-dependent for 2 weeks and it mostly worked (Complaints in ATL focused on an inability to sustain reliable bus service, not bad car traffic)

"Cars" during the Olympics (and Dem/Rep nominating conventions) are a completely different animal than the regular SOV-commuters.

First, SOV-commuters are 1-per car (Olympic-goers are probably 2 to 5). Second, the Os don't synch their start at 9am and synch their end to 5pm. And third, venues are not concentrated in the CBD, except for Opening & Closing ceremonies, which everyone knows they have to use shared mode for for the last mile.

So SOV-commuters flee the city and inadvertently eliminate "rush hour" and replaced with freely-scheduled HOVs, and a mix of circulator bus and satellite parking for 2 weeks. It was never going to crush Boston (Boston was right that GLX+RL/OL Fleet = Sufficient) and there's no reason to think that LA can't come up with a reasonable transportation plan using the kit of parts it has.
 
Arlington said:
So SOV-commuters flee the city and inadvertently eliminate "rush hour" and replaced with freely-scheduled HOVs, and a mix of circulator bus and satellite parking for 2 weeks. It was never going to crush Boston (Boston was right that GLX+RL/OL Fleet = Sufficient) and there's no reason to think that LA can't come up with a reasonable transportation plan using the kit of parts it has.
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True. All true. My point isn't that LA can't host an Olympics. My point is that LA is conceiving of doing so very differently than Boston did, in regard to roughly the same investment.

In Boston, the Olympics were presented by all sides as a generational effort to enhance and rehabilitate the city. That meant that many pre-existing infrastructure and development projects were pulled into the Olympic orbit. The debate in Boston wasn't really about the Olympics at all - it was about whether the City is "world class" and if not, how it should be getting there. It was a crucible of provincialism and self-doubt and cynicism and very little positive or constructive thinking that thankfully hasn't resulted the type of humiliation that we all richly deserve (because the IOC is so, so bad and everyone's enjoying hating them).

In LA, this is just something that happens. The private sector (and the CA legislature, and the City) will throw in their "$4 billion", while the billions being spent to upgrade LAX, to extend the LRT tentacles across the region, to build HSR, etc. all remain independent in the public mind. Someday, though, they'll all be accounted, and we'll find that the $4B Olympics is really $10B, or $15B, or $20B, depending on what you include. That's what happened in London, and I think it would happen in Paris or LA. In London, public opinion proved resilient despite all of that uncertainty. We'll see about LA.

Also, I'm not arguing that LA would experience gridlock. They wouldn't, for all the reasons you outlined. The issues of parking and getting everyone from the parking locations to the venues are legitimate ones, though. Boston assumed those people would be staying Downtown, taking our (far superior) transit system, and walking. Not safe assumptions in LA.

And none of this resolves whether Eric Garcetti will sign the HCA.
 
LA was able to successfully host the 1984 Olympics and USC draws big crowds to the Coliseum, -- without a LRT line. The city and the university have decades of experience with large crowds at that site. There is no mass transit that I know of to the Rose Bowl. LA is not advertising/promoting itself as a walkable Olympics.

LA County voted to raise its sales tax by half a percent in 2008 to pay for $40 billion of transit-projects over 30 years. By 2024, LA will have perhaps spent about $15 billion of that. I believe the $40 billion represents local monies only, no state or Federal funding.
Massachusetts voters rejected an increase in the gasoline tax.

Doesn't the once-upon-a-time Boston parking lot tycoon still own the lots next to Dodger Stadium? Don't the Dodgers pay him $14 million annually to rent the lots? No mass transit to Dodgers stadium.
 
stellarfun said:
LA County voted to raise its sales tax by half a percent in 2008 to pay for $40 billion of transit-projects over 30 years. By 2024, LA will have perhaps spent about $15 billion of that. I believe the $40 billion represents local monies only, no state or Federal funding. Massachusetts voters rejected an increase in the gasoline tax.
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No. Massachusetts voters rejected an index of the gas tax to inflation. The one-time increase to pay for transportation is still in place. Los Angeles County has about 130% of Massachusetts' population in about half of its surface area. According to: http://www.massdot.state.ma.us/Portals/22/Docs/WMM_Planning_for_Performance.pdf, MassDOT is projected to spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $40B on highways and transit by 2040 (the report has only annual numbers that I could find quickly). I'm not counting Boston's spending (and that of other cities, towns, and Massport, since LA owns LAX. You aren't counting Caltrans' spending.

Again, I'm still looking for why LA is going to have an easier road than Boston. All I've heard so far is a summary of money LA is going to be spending on transportation, presented as if all of that money will benefit the Games without diversion, compared to Boston and Massachusetts spending what? Nothing?

Bottom line is, you're willing to credit LA with being forward-thinking and capable when you were unwilling to extend that courtesy to Boston. LA is capable - it's been the better choice for an Olympics all along. I agree with you both that in the eyes of most people, all the problems of selling an Olympics in Boston (which was a capable host as well) magically disappear once we're talking about sunny Southern California, without any of the facts changing all that much (except for the stadium). I'm just pissed off that that's the case.
 
equilibria, if Boston had pretenses about using the Olympics to become a world-class city, it wasn't willing to spend a plugged nickel to achieve that.

If decking Widett was a such a great development idea, why wouldn't the city/state bond for doing that, and then sell the finished site to a developer to build on? And if the city/state wasn't willing, why not Suffolk? Doesn't Fish build anything on spec, or is that only folks like Skanska? (I know Fish said he's not a developer. My point is, nobody, but nobody, in Boston was stepping up when the financing went south on B24.)

The final realization that the Boston bid had no clothes, so to speak, was when B24 dropped the cost of the press and broadcast centers out of the budget. By dropping those, the budget was brought into theoretical balance. Davies put on a game face and speculated maybe the 2024 Olympics wouldn't need such centers, that the media could use their smart phones and tablets. That's the equivalent of saying sportswriters should cover games by watching their televisions.

Aside from the village, if any Olympics-related facility could be converted into having lasting economic value to its owner, it would be the press and broadcast centers. And while there was no fallback site after the parcels near BCEC got tossed, this subsequently wasn't even tagged as a Master Developer project, even though I think it would be quite financially attractive to a private developer.
 
stellarfun said:
equilibria, if Boston had pretenses about using the Olympics to become a world-class city, it wasn't willing to spend a plugged nickel to achieve that.

If decking Widett was a such a great development idea, why wouldn't the city/state bond for doing that, and then sell the finished site to a developer to build on? And if the city/state wasn't willing, why not Suffolk? Doesn't Fish build anything on spec, or is that only folks like Skanska? (I know Fish said he's not a developer. My point is, nobody, but nobody, in Boston was stepping up when the financing went south on B24.)

The final realization that the Boston bid had no clothes, so to speak, was when B24 dropped the cost of the press and broadcast centers out of the budget. By dropping those, the budget was brought into theoretical balance. Davies put on a game face and speculated maybe the 2024 Olympics wouldn't need such centers, that the media could use their smart phones and tablets. That's the equivalent of saying sportswriters should cover games by watching their televisions.

Aside from the village, if any Olympics-related facility could be converted into having lasting economic value to its owner, it would be the press and broadcast centers. And while there was no fallback site after the parcels near BCEC got tossed, this subsequently wasn't even tagged as a Master Developer project, even though I think it would be quite financially attractive to a private developer.
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All good points. I'm not taking issue with them, I'm taking issue with your characterization of LA's commitment. The bare fact that LA is spending money on infrastructure doesn't mean that it's more committed to improving itself for the Olympics than Boston is. If it did, wouldn't the fact that Massport is paying to fix Terminal E and add A380 gates count? Wouldn't the Beacon Yards realignment count?

You and Arlington are looking at two things - LA is saying they Olympics will cost $4B and LA is spending $40B on infrastructure - and linking them together. Fact is, LA is spending $40B on projects that nobody is relating to the Olympics at all. LA will, at some point, have its Widett, a project that's only for the Olympics that costs a ton of money, and that will be when we find out how serious their commitment is. Where will their IMC be, and who will build that? How is their Olympic Village being developed, and how at-risk will the public be for the whole thing? These are unanswered questions.

We know more about Boston 2024, so we have way more to say about it. Reduce it to what we know about LA, and it would be "Boston says the bid will cost $4.8 billion in private money, that it will make $5 billion, and Massachusetts spends $2 billion per year on infrastructure so we know the system will be up-to-snuff." That's essentially what Boston 2024 had in January.
 
Equilibria said:
The debate in Boston wasn't really about the Olympics at all - it was about whether the City is "world class" and if not, how it should be getting there. It was a crucible of provincialism and self-doubt and cynicism and very little positive or constructive thinking that thankfully hasn't resulted the type of humiliation that we all richly deserve (because the IOC is so, so bad and everyone's enjoying hating them).
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Oh.
 
equilibria, I agree that details of the initial LA24 bid are very sketchy, I cannot find any bid documents on-line. Presumably, if LA, or a combination of LA and San Francisco, is chosen by the USOC as the candidate city, much more will be revealed, a clearer comparison between Boston and LA can be drawn, and a fuller understanding gained of whether LA's cost projection is reasonable.

This is from 2014.

LA_2024_Map.jpg


From the list, the only new venue is the Aquatics Center. In the months since that map was done, there is talk of adding the new NFL stadium as a venue, and I think rowing would move to the U.S. Rowing Association training course. And they may have moved kayaking off the so-called Los Angeles River. If baseball is a competed sport, they would be set for that with two stadiums. They would need a softball venue. The Olympics Village would be built by a private developer, supposedly on a site near the Los Angeles River.
 
stellarfun said:
equilibria, I agree that details of the initial LA24 bid are very sketchy, I cannot find any bid documents on-line. Presumably, if LA, or a combination of LA and San Francisco, is chosen by the USOC as the candidate city, much more will be revealed, a clearer comparison between Boston and LA can be drawn, and a fuller understanding gained of whether LA's cost projection is reasonable.

This is from 2014.

LA_2024_Map.jpg


From the list, the only new venue is the Aquatics Center. In the months since that map was done, there is talk of adding the new NFL stadium as a venue, and I think rowing would move to the U.S. Rowing Association training course. And they may have moved kayaking off the so-called Los Angeles River. If baseball is a competed sport, they would be set for that with two stadiums. They would need a softball venue. The Olympics Village would be built by a private developer, supposedly on a site near the Los Angeles River.
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USC is planning up to a $600 million renovation to the LA coliseum which allows LA 2024 to keep that expense off their plan. And for some reason they don't even plan on taking a wrecking ball to it two weeks later.

The Olympic Village is the major venue risk, but recent experience indicates a net loss of about $500 million would be a reasonable projection as long as the site is reasonably well chosen rather than some pork barrel Superfund site.

As much as I hate to admit, LA 2024 might only end up in the red less than a Billion
Compared with Boston's $2Billion likely deficit. Still the guarantee makes it harder to impose cost controls, so there is a substantial risk of big $B overruns.
 
It was hired and was due to come out on this date. The bid died before it reached it. Technically there wasn't suppose to be that decision date, but that's how it developed. It seems if the bid survived that "vote of confidence" it would have reach here and the bid would have gotten punched again.
 
Arlington said:
I must have missed something with respect to the timing & importance of this report:

- Why is it coming out "late" vs the decision to drop Boston's bid?
- Were its contents leaked before Boston dropped its bid?
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It isn't coming out late. It came out just two months after the Boston 2024 2.0 plan was released. And the report is coming out when they said the report would come out.

The question is what prompted USOC to drop the bid back in July before giving the state and city a chance to assess the 2.0 bid and for Boston 2024 to mitigate the risks further in a 2.1 or 3.0 plan.

Even if a draft wasn't technically leaked they worked with Boston 2024 to prepare the report so they had to have some idea of what was coming based on the questions being asked about the 2.0 plan. Plus, many of the risks were discussed in public, so it was likely the risks were pretty well known soon after the 2.0 plan came out.

The combination of known risks and the further hit to public support likely when the risks were highlighted and it doesn't take much analysis to figure out why the USOC voted to drop the Boston bid before the report came out.

And before the official September deadline for a go-no-go decision on a US bid.
 
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