Los Angeles Stares Down a $150 Billion Transit Crisis — and Other World Cities Are Watching

Los Angeles Metro is sitting on a $150 billion infrastructure deficit — a figure that encompasses crumbling rail infrastructure, bus fleet replacements, deferred station upgrades, and the massive capital demands of expanding the system ahead of the 2028 Olympics. That number, drawn from Metro's own long-range planning documents, represents one of the largest transit funding gaps of any single agency in the United States. And with the Games now just over two years away, the clock is loud.

The timing matters for a specific reason: LA has committed to the International Olympic Committee that the 2028 Games will be a car-light event. Athletes and spectators are supposed to move between venues — Crypto.com Arena, SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, and the Sepulveda Pass corridor — primarily by public transit. Metro's current daily ridership sits around 900,000 boardings, roughly half of what it carried before the COVID-19 pandemic hollowed out the system in 2020. Closing that gap, let alone doubling capacity for an Olympic surge, requires money the agency does not have locked in.

What LA Is Actually Doing

Metro is pursuing several parallel tracks. The agency's 2025 state budget ask included $4.2 billion in accelerated federal formula funds under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins has made repeated trips to Washington to press the case. Locally, Measure HLA — the Healthy Streets LA initiative passed by voters in March 2024 — is pushing the city to reprogram street space along corridors like Vermont Avenue and Figueroa Street to prioritize buses and bikes, effectively trying to make surface transit faster without waiting for tunnels to be bored.

The K Line, which finally connected Crenshaw to Expo in 2022 after years of delays and cost overruns, still lacks the full Crenshaw Northern Extension that would link Leimert Park to Hollywood. That extension's price tag has ballooned to roughly $6 billion, and a construction start date remains fluid. Meanwhile, the Sepulveda Transit Corridor project — a proposed subway or automated rail line between the Westside and the San Fernando Valley — is still in environmental review, with competing private bids from companies including Bechtel complicating an already bureaucratic process.

How LA Compares to Paris and Tokyo

The contrast with cities preparing for, or recently hosting, major global events is instructive. Paris poured €35 billion into its Grand Paris Express project — 200 kilometers of new automatic metro lines — beginning construction in 2016, a full eight years before the 2024 Olympics. Ridership on the Paris Métro now exceeds 4 million daily boardings. Tokyo's metro system, rebuilt around the 1964 Games and substantially expanded for 2020, carries over 8 million passengers daily across 13 lines with an on-time rate that regularly exceeds 99 percent. London used the 2012 Games to justify the Crossrail project — now the Elizabeth line — which opened in 2022 and carries roughly 700,000 passengers daily on its own.

Los Angeles has none of those cities' transit histories, population densities, or political cultures around rail spending. California's environmental review process under CEQA can add years to project timelines that Paris or Tokyo would complete in half the time. A single station addition on the Purple Line Extension through Beverly Hills took more than a decade from approval to construction. The agency is also contending with homelessness on the system — Metro launched its Transit Public Safety Task Force in 2023, deploying over 300 additional officers and outreach workers — which has suppressed ridership recovery among commuters who have the option of driving.

What comes next is largely a political question. Metro's board is expected to revisit its long-range Transportation Improvement Program in September 2026, where staff will likely present options ranging from a new county sales tax measure to a public-private partnership framework for the Sepulveda corridor. Riders in Boyle Heights and Watts — who depend on the system because they have no alternative — cannot wait for that political calculus to resolve. For them, the crisis is not abstract. It shows up as a 45-minute gap between buses on the 111 line on a 95-degree afternoon.