A Shockingly Positive Review Of World Cup Public Transit In Los Angeles

Expectation is everything. Considering the public transit price-gouging SNAFUs in New York New Jersey and Foxboro that dogged World Cup transit public relations prior to the event, some heat was taken off cities historically hostile to the concept of “public” and “transit,” such as Los Angeles. Together, all three cities compose the “Doable But Miserable” tier of Aaron Gordon’s breakdown of World Cup stadium transit access, which also elaborates on how the new Los Angeles stadium and its surrounding area, despite proximity to a great deal of transit options, fails to directly connect to many of the most convenient ones. Unlike New York New Jersey and Foxboro, however, Los Angeles was only charging $1.75 for direct service to and from the stadium.

This posed some interesting questions. How easy and efficient would it actually be to take public transit—specifically the special shuttle service—in Los Angeles to a World Cup game? Would it be better or worse than “Secaucus Junction”? And so amidst threats made by my beloved colleagues to force me try walking to the Meadowlands for journalism’s sake, I fled to the West Coast to instead answer a question that was less likely to result in immediate death and/or severe bodily harm.

Here was the situation. I was planning on going to, though not directly attending, the round of 32 game between Spain and Austria in Inglewood. I was staying with a friend in her hotel room in downtown Los Angeles, right next to the Los Angeles Sparks’ arena. This is one of the more transit-accessible locations in Los Angeles, with access to four separate Metro stops within a 15-minute walk. Without the direct shuttle, the commute from the hotel to the stadium would, in an ideal world sans traffic, take approximately 25 minutes by car, an hour by transit, and three hours and 40 minutes by foot. (This last point would not be relevant, if not for the fact that as my friend and I were breaking this down, we discovered that one could walk across the entirety of Munich in that same three hour and 40 minute timeframe.)