Building the Olympic Subway: How LA Metro Is Racing to Be Ready for 2028

Two summers from now, on July 14, 2028, the Olympic cauldron will be lit somewhere in Los Angeles and the largest peacetime logistical event in the region's history will begin. Thirteen to fifteen million ticket holders will fan out across a metropolitan area famous for freeways, spread among venues from SoFi Stadium in Inglewood to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to a rowing course in Long Beach. And for the first time in the city's Olympic history, a substantial share of those spectators is expected to arrive by rail. That is a very new sentence to be able to write about Los Angeles.

The last time LA hosted the Games, in 1984, the Blue Line was still six years from opening. Angelenos moved themselves and their guests by car and bus, aided by a Soviet Bloc boycott that thinned the crowds and by aggressive demand management that emptied downtown offices. The 2028 organizers have said, plainly, that they do not want to run the 1984 playbook again. What they want is a functioning rail network — one that connects the airport to downtown, the beach to the ballpark, and the Coliseum to Westwood. LA Metro has spent the last decade racing to build it.

The Subway That Took Forty Years

The centerpiece of the effort is the D Line Extension, formerly known as the Purple Line — a 9.1-mile heavy rail subway pushing westward from Wilshire/Western through Miracle Mile, Beverly Hills, Century City, and Westwood, terminating at the West LA VA Hospital. Total cost across three sections is roughly $8.2 billion, funded by an unusually well-diversified stack: FTA New Starts grants, a TIFIA loan, and the foundational local match from LA County's voter-approved Measures R (2008) and M (2016), the two half-cent sales taxes that quietly make LA Metro's capital program one of the most stable in the country.

Section 1 opened on May 8, 2026, adding three stations — Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax, and Wilshire/La Cienega — and 3.9 miles of new tunnel bored by TBMs christened Elsie (for Elsie Eaves, the first woman member of the American Society of Civil Engineers) and Soyeon (for Yi So-yeon, the first Korean astronaut, honoring the Koreatown community near the eastern end of the line). In its first month of service, D Line ridership jumped 62% year-over-year — a six-year high for the corridor. Trains run every 10 minutes at peak. Sections 2 and 3, projected to open in 2027, will add four more stations: Wilshire/Rodeo in Beverly Hills, Century City/Constellation, Westwood/UCLA, and Westwood/VA Hospital. Tunneling for both sections was completed in April 2024 by TBMs Harriet, Ruth, Aura, and Iris — a naming convention that has, refreshingly, become an LA Metro tradition.

The 22-Year Ban

None of this was supposed to be possible. In 1985, a Ross Dress for Less store in the Fairfax methane zone exploded when trapped underground gas ignited. The neighborhood's congressman, Henry Waxman, responded the following year by attaching a rider to a federal appropriations bill that banned any tunneling with federal funds through the methane zone. It was a specific, targeted, and — as it turned out — durable ban. The subway extension died on the drawing board. For 22 years, from 1986 to 2007, the most direct path from downtown Los Angeles to Westwood could not be tunneled.

What broke the impasse was, of all things, a change in geology's relationship with engineering. A 2005 expert panel commissioned by LA Metro concluded that modern earth-pressure-balance tunnel boring machines could safely tunnel through methane-bearing soils that had been unthinkable in the 1980s. Waxman, to his credit, lifted his own ban in 2007. Construction broke ground in November 2014. It took eleven years from shovel to first riders on Section 1, and it will have taken fourteen years by the time trains reach UCLA. That is fast for American subway building. It is also two Olympic cycles.

Beverly Hills, Reluctantly

Section 2's alignment runs beneath Beverly Hills High School, which the city of Beverly Hills fought in court for years, arguing safety concerns about tunneling below active school buildings. LA Metro's engineers, backed by peer-reviewed geotechnical studies, prevailed. It is the sort of fight that is easy to caricature — wealthy suburb versus regional transit agency — but it also revealed how thin American cities' patience is for any construction disruption, and how much of subway building is fundamentally an exercise in political endurance rather than engineering.

The Airport Problem, Solved (Almost)

For decades, the most-repeated indictment of LA transit was that you could not take a train to LAX. Every world city rival — London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, even Denver and Washington — had done it. Los Angeles had not. That changes with the LAX Automated People Mover, a 2.25-mile elevated electric rail line connecting the central terminal area to a consolidated rental car facility and to Aviation/96th Street Station on the K Line. The APM cost roughly $5 billion and is in final commissioning as of mid-2026, with passenger service expected between late 2026 and 2027.

The full trip from Union Station will require two transfers — A or D Line to the K Line, then K Line to the APM — but it will be, for the first time, a fully rail-connected journey from downtown to the terminal curb. Compared to the direct one-seat rides on Paris's CDG Express or London's Elizabeth line, it is still a compromise, but it is a functional one, and it will be more than enough to move Olympic visitors who arrive with luggage and no rental car.

The K Line's Quiet Importance

The K Line, which opened October 7, 2022, is the connective tissue that makes the airport link work. Its 8.5 miles run from Expo/Crenshaw down through Leimert Park, Hyde Park, and Hawthorne to Aviation/LAX. It also happens to be the rail line that serves SoFi Stadium, the venue for the 2028 opening and closing ceremonies. And it happens to run through historically Black neighborhoods — Crenshaw, Leimert Park, Inglewood — that had been systematically bypassed by earlier waves of rail investment in Los Angeles.

That is a story with two edges. The K Line is a genuine equity win: rapid transit finally reaching corridors that had waited decades for it. It is also, according to housing advocates and researchers at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, contributing to displacement pressure. Rents in Leimert Park and Hyde Park have risen since 2022. The pattern echoes lessons from Denver's light rail expansion and Seattle's approach to equitable TOD — namely that new stations reliably drive up land values, and only proactive affordable-housing policy prevents that value capture from pushing existing residents out.

Contactless, Just in Time

On May 28, 2026, LA Metro flipped a switch that most transit riders in London have taken for granted since 2014: system-wide open-loop contactless payment. Any Visa, Mastercard, or American Express contactless card works. So do Apple Pay, Google Pay, and pretty much any wearable that supports NFC. No TAP card required. It was, by the numbers reported at launch, one of the largest single-day open-loop activations in US transit history.

The timing was not coincidental. LA hosted FIFA World Cup 2026 matches at SoFi Stadium starting in June, and the contactless rollout was explicitly designed to make the system usable for international visitors who had no reason to obtain a TAP card. This is the exact model Transport for London pioneered ahead of London 2012, when the Oyster card was gradually complemented and then largely replaced by contactless bank cards. It works because it removes the friction of a proprietary card from the visitor experience.

The Cash Backstop

The TAP card still functions, and cash loading remains available at retail partners. That backstop matters. Equity advocates at the USC Price School and TransitCenter have pointed out, correctly, that a payment system optimized for iPhones is a payment system that can quietly exclude riders without banking access. LA Metro's data on TAP reload locations shows fewer of them, per capita, in lower-income neighborhoods than in wealthier ones. The cash system needs to be actively promoted and, in some corridors, expanded. Building a great tourist payment experience is not the same thing as building an equitable fare system, and the agency should not confuse the two.

The World Cup Dress Rehearsal

The 2026 World Cup was, in effect, a live-fire test of what LA transit will need to do in 2028. The scorecard is mixed. SoFi worked well: K Line service to the stadium moved crowds efficiently, Metrolink added match-day service, and the SoCal Day Pass at $15 ($10 reduced) proved a workable regional product covering multiple operators. Contactless adoption exceeded internal projections. Park-and-ride demand spiked in ways operations planners had underestimated, but the trains ran.

What did not work is a preview of what won't work in 2028 unless something changes: the Rose Bowl. Pasadena's iconic stadium has no direct Metro rail connection. Access requires shuttle buses from the Memorial Park A Line station, and on match days those shuttles became the bottleneck. The Rose Bowl will host Olympic soccer and other events in 2028. There is no realistic path to a rail extension by then. LA Metro and the LA28 organizing committee are going to have to solve this with a very good bus operation — likely dedicated lanes on Colorado Boulevard, aggressive signal priority, and a lot of NACTO-style street reallocation that Pasadena has not historically embraced.

Multilingual wayfinding also showed uneven performance during the World Cup, particularly outside downtown. That is a fixable problem and one where Paris 2024 offers a straightforward template — RATP's temporary Olympic signage was consistent, pictogram-heavy, and rider-tested with non-French speakers.

Realistic Expectations, Honestly Set

Here is where LA transit advocates need to be careful. Paris 2024 was, by nearly every measure, a transit success. RATP reported record ridership, with metro loads running 120–140% of normal peak on the busiest days. Central Paris was substantially closed to private cars. Free transit was included with event tickets. The venues were geographically concentrated in a way that played to the strengths of an already-dense rail network.

The London 2012 benchmark — cited by the IOC and repeated in most Olympic transit planning documents — is that roughly 80% of spectators arrived by public transit. That number reflects London's network density, its restrictions on Olympic Park driving, and, frankly, the fact that Britons expect to take trains.

Key Stats at a Glance

Los Angeles is not London and it is not Paris. Its venues are spread across a metropolitan area the size of a small country. Its transit network, while dramatically better than it was in 1984, is still substantially smaller and less frequent than the systems that hosted the last two Games. Transit advocates who have looked at the numbers privately suggest that a 30–40% transit mode share for LA28 spectator trips would be a genuine, historic success. Anything close to Paris's numbers is not credible for a metropolitan region this dispersed.

That framing matters because it protects the wins. If LA Metro moves a third of Olympic ticket holders on rail, that is roughly four to five million rides that would otherwise have been car trips. It is a transformational number for a city whose Olympic memory is car-shaped. Setting the expectation at 80% invites failure. Setting it at 30–40% invites achievement.

Equity, Displacement, and Who the Subway Is For

The D Line's route is one of the most economically diverse corridors in America. It begins in Koreatown — working-class, immigrant-heavy, some of the highest transit ridership in the region — and ends at UCLA and the VA, passing through Miracle Mile, Beverly Hills, Century City, and Westwood along the way. That geography is why the line was worth building. It is also why the displacement risk is real.

Older, rent-stabilized apartment stock near Wilshire/La Brea and Wilshire/Fairfax is exactly the sort of housing that gets pressured when a subway opens under it. LA Metro and the City of Los Angeles have adopted TOD policies with affordability requirements, but the enforcement track record is mixed, and the pipeline of new market-rate development around the stations is substantial. Whether the D Line ends up being a subway for Koreatown transit users or a subway for luxury-tower residents is a policy choice, not a market inevitability.

Fare equity is the other piece. Post-COVID ridership on LA Metro sits at roughly 800,000–900,000 average weekday boardings, well below the pre-pandemic peak of about 1.2 million. Rebuilding that base means holding onto the transit-dependent riders who never stopped riding while attracting back the discretionary riders who did. The contactless launch helps the second group. It does not, on its own, help the first. Cash TAP reload access, fare capping equity, and service frequency in low-income corridors — these are the levers that determine whether Olympic-era investment reaches the people who need transit the most.

What Two Years Buys

By the summer of 2028, if the current schedule holds, LA Metro will have a rail network that includes an operational subway to UCLA, a functional airport connector, a stadium-serving K Line, and a payment system that works with any tap-enabled card in the world. It will not be Paris. It will be a version of Los Angeles that Angelenos themselves have been told for forty years was impossible.

There is still work to do that is entirely within the agency's control: finishing Sections 2 and 3 on time, commissioning the APM without a public botch, dialing in the Rose Bowl bus operation, hardening multilingual wayfinding, and — quietly, unglamorously — running clean, safe, frequent trains in the two years between now and the opening ceremony so that the network the world sees in 2028 is one Angelenos already trust. The subway that took forty years to build is finally arriving. The interesting question is no longer whether it will be ready. It is what the city chooses to do with it after the flame goes out.