Festival Trail 2028: A New Mobility Culture for LA

Public transit

County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit)

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

Despite having declared plans for a car-free LA28 Games, they are not currently set to benefit the city and residents in the long term with legacy public space investments and mobility improvements. This lack of vision will cost lives. Our streets are some of the most dangerous in the nation: pedestrian fatality rates in Los Angeles are 4x the national average. Furthermore, most transit users in LA are low-income residents, who cannot afford to purchase a personal vehicle–78% of LA Metro riders report not having a personal vehicle, while only 11% of households in the county do not own one (Manville et al., 2022). The Festival Trail addresses these daunting safety and equity challenges by refocusing the heightened attention, planning, and infrastructure brought on by the LA28 Games, to ensure that LA's public transit systems and public spaces are navigable, universally accessible, safe and sustainable to benefit visitors and residents alike.

The 28 mile Festival Trail of existing and planned transit projects, promotes safe, accessible non-vehicular mobility options throughout LA County. The route stitches LA County together with bike, rail, bus, and sidewalk infrastructure, serving people of all abilities.
The Trail includes constructing 28 resiliency hubs: community designed spaces for cultural celebration, providing crucial resources such as water, restrooms, and shade. The hubs will connect social infrastructure to encourage car-free mobility. We have taken these plans to our charrettes – community driven planning efforts hosted at key sites along the Festival Trail corridor – gathering feedback and local partners. Future charrettes are scheduled, and this empowering community engagement technique serves as the model for Festival Trail planning.
The Festival Trail anchors 20,000 units of affordable housing through the heart of LA. We are promoting innovative policy and building solutions with housing experts to ensure that the Trail addresses the profound interconnectedness of transit and housing availability in LA.
The Festival Trail uniquely tackles traffic fatalities, housing instability, and limited access to public space and transit by using the LA28 Games to catalyze permanent region-wide investments. Most importantly, we are addressing infrastructure challenges holistically and ground-truthing our work community by community—anticipating the LA28 Games’ impact while creating lasting positive benefits.

The Festival Trail will foster collaboration among diverse communities through activations and outreach, delivering universally designed, safe active transportation and transit infrastructure, and new affordable housing.
During the LA28 Games, Festival Trail Hubs invite the world to celebrate the rich diversity of our LA communities.
Post-LA28 Games, each community will have a corporate partner, local designer, and kit-of-parts for resiliency hubs – building community identity and climate resilience through public art and events, economic development, and regional mobility. 
The Festival Trail is a transit-oriented corridor for affordable housing: a “spine” along which underdeveloped land is converted to homes which don’t need a vehicle for residents to thrive.
Long term benefits are bridges to mobility and place-keeping in underserved communities, creating a new social infrastructure, appreciating our interconnectedness while celebrating the cultural uniqueness of LA’s communities.