LA Metro’s Ernesto Chaves leads the development of public transit infrastructure designed to inspire 2028 Olympic and Paralympic spectators to leave their cars behind.
Growing up in San Jose, Costa Rica, Ernesto Chaves had to rely heavily on public transportation to get to school, visit friends or accompany his parents—owners of a small restaurant—on local shopping errands. Unfortunately, Costa Rica’s capital city had no centralized transit system.
“Various companies provided bus services but they all operated from different hubs around the city,” recalls Chaves. “It was very disorganized and traffic was always chaotic. Even as a kid, I realized that decisions made (or not made) about transportation infrastructure policy can have a lasting effect on how well a city operates.”
Rethinking Transportation Infrastructure
Today, as the senior executive officer for Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro's) Office of Strategic Innovation, Chaves is determined to make decisions about transportation infrastructure policy that will help make the LA 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games (the Games) the most successful staging yet of these quadrennial multi-sport athletic competitions.
He leads a task force that's planning, coordinating and facilitating spectator transport for the 2028 Games.
Within that construct, he’s overseeing the development of transportation infrastructure for a “transit-first” Games, i.e. one that will prioritize public transit options (buses, trains etc) over cars for transporting spectators to competition venues.
“Fundamentally, (creating a transit-first Games) is a supply and demand problem,” Chaves explains. “Since most spectators will not be able to park at the venues (due to security perimeters dictated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the demand for transit will be much higher than our transit system can currently handle.
“Our goal is to make it so easy and so convenient to use public transit that driving your car or having someone drive you to a venue will not be a time- or cost-effective option.”
Concentrating on Cities
To hear Chaves tell it, he had an unremarkable childhood in Costa Rica. He lived with his parents and studied music, art and other “normal” secondary school subjects. Keying perhaps off San Jose’s chaotic traffic situation, however, he became a voracious reader of books about cities, their histories and how they work.
“I’ve always resonated with the history of civilizations and how humans started building cities,” Chaves notes. “That may have been the first inkling that urban planning and transportation would become part of my future.”
When he graduated high school in 1998 at age 17, Chaves set his college sights on the U.S. where his older brother was living, ironically, in San Jose, Calif. As the son of naturalized citizens––his parents had lived in the U.S. and become naturalized citizens in the 1970s––he was also eligible to obtain his permanent resident (green) card.
In 1999, Chaves moved in with his brother, obtained his green card and enrolled at the local community college. A year later, he moved south to Pomona, a suburb of Los Angeles and enrolled in the local community college, where he began hearing increasingly about the concept of urban planning. In fact, he discovered that nearby California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) had an undergraduate degree program in the discipline, a relative rarity. And that’s all it took for him to “trade up” to the public university.
Discovering a Career in Transportation
At Cal Poly Pomona, Chaves also discovered that transportation had more in common with his future than he realized.
“I began to realize that transportation was not only a field of urban planning but also a distinct profession,” he remembers. “Discovering that there was something that I felt so great about doing professionally was very cool and a great relief.”
Chaves applied this renewed focus on transportation to his first college internship, an opportunity with LA Metro in 2001 to work on the agency’s I-710 Major Corridor Study.
The study analyzed traffic congestion, safety and mobility problems along the I-710 freeway that links the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach to Southern California.
Shifting His Career Focus
Chaves graduated Cal Poly Pomona in early 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in urban and regional planning. He spent the next four years working in the private transportation planning sector. And then one day, he had epiphany:
“I realized while doing the transportation plans for WSP (formerly Parsons Brinckerhoff) and Iteris that there was this whole other world, namely public involvement, consensus building and policy development, that was required to make things happen,” he says. “I’d developed solid technical skills, but I knew I’d be happier and much more effective working on the policy and communication side of transportation.”
In Nov 2008, Chaves joined LA Metro as a transportation planning manager, and he’s never looked back.
Making Public Transit the Easiest Choice
As Chaves sees it, achieving a “transit-first” Games is all about making the choice to use public transit to travel to competition venues unavoidable.
“We all give ourselves plenty of excuses for not taking public transit,” he observes, “including ‘it takes too long,’ ‘it’s too complicated,’ ‘it doesn’t go where I need to go’ or ‘it’s not safe.’ I think we can make improvements to our system by 2028 to overcome all of these concerns.”
Adding Capacity, Maintaining Reliability
To begin with, he points out, Metro will have to increase its bus capacity dramatically during the Games. The agency currently plans to borrow approximately 2700 buses from transit agencies across the country, effectively doubling the size of its bus fleet to carry Games workers and spectators.
“We don’t want to degrade or compromise our regular bus service for riders not attending Olympic competitions,” Chaves offers, “but we also need to communicate to visitors and residents the transportation options available to them.”
Chaves and Metro are also concerned about the potential impact on LA’s air quality of adding 2700 buses to the mix. That’s why they’ve set a policy to bring in only clean (zero or low-emission) buses to provide surge capacity for the Games.
Building a High-Priority Network
Of course, nothing will change the speed or reliability of riding the bus in Los Angeles without high-priority, bus-only lanes. Since 2019, says Chaves, Metro has developed about 51 miles of bus-only lanes. The agency plans to build that total out to about 100 miles before the 2028 Games..
Metro is also taking advantage of the work the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is doing to develop a Games Route Network (GRN), a network of roads and dedicated lanes for Games vehicles to travel between venues.
“Los Angeles has a commitment to the IOC to ensure that people with Olympic accreditation––athletes, officials, media, etc.––can travel safely and efficiently between venues and the Olympic Village,” explains Chaves. “The only way to ensure those outcomes is to use dedicated lanes. We’re working with Caltrans to make sure spectator buses can also use those lanes.”
Integrating Technology with Convenience
Chaves also plans to take advantage of the fact that nearly every spectator will be carrying a smartphone. Members of his team are working with Metro’s Transit Access Pass (TAP) fare payment team and others to develop an integrated app for Games visitors.
In theory, this app, still in the design phase, will allow visitors to identify a competition event (venue, time, date), and then purchase a single integrated ticket that will allow them to travel by public transit to that event, regardless of how many forms of transit are involved.
Chaves worries, however, that visitors and locals may try to skirt public transit plans by driving and parking their cars in neighborhoods just outside the venue security perimeters.
“We don’t want to replace the traffic jam we’ve avoided at SoFi Stadium by getting spectators to use public transit, for example, with a traffic jam in a community just down the street from the stadium,” he emphasizes. “That would be a real nightmare scenario.”
Making Every Commute Count
Most workdays for Chaves begin early in the home he shares in Irvine, Calif. with his wife, children, three cats and a dog. A city of 300,000+ residents in Orange County, Irvine lies approximately 40 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
After grabbing a quick breakfast and walking the dog, Chaves hustles out the door to catch the early Metrolink commuter train. His ride to Union Station near downtown LA takes just over an hour, putting him in his office at Metro headquarters before 8 a.m. It’s a routine he follows three days per week per Metro’s telework policy.
“I have a long commute, but it’s also one of my favorite times of the day,” he reflects. “I use it to think through what I want to accomplish that day, and more importantly, what kind of a colleague and leader I want to be with my team. I think it’s good to remind yourself each day why you’re here and what you’re trying to accomplish.”
Creating a Games for the People
Chaves wasn’t living in Los Angeles during the 1984 Summer Olympics, but he has heard stories about local freeways being eerily quiet, a result, many believe, of not only shifts in freight delivery schedules but also a mass exodus of Angelenos from LA during the Games. It’s a situation he hopes will not repeat itself.
“We hope traffic doesn't disappear like it did in 1984 because that would mean that people aren’t staying here to enjoy the Games,” Chaves emphasizes. “We want them to be here and to be part of the Games. Similarly, we want the region to keep moving. We don’t want the Games to harm the local economy.”
Defining a Legacy
When asked what he hopes will be the legacy of LA’s transit-first 2028 Games, Chaves is philosophical …and cautiously optimistic.
“I hope that the significant transportation upgrades we’re making––the bus-only lanes, the additions to our subway system, and the development of a public transit integrated ticketing system––will lead to fundamental shifts in the way public transit is perceived and used by LA citizens and visitors alike,” he offers.
Chaves also sees an opportunity for the emergence of community-building cultural events facilitated by Metro’s renewed focus on bicycling infrastructure, walking and mobility hubs.
“We already have open street events such as CicLAvia, and we’re planning to do a lot more of those types of events before, during and after the Games,” he enthuses. “But there are also opportunities to use Metro stations to bring people together for festival-type fan zones with big-screen TVs for Games and other upcoming sporting events such as the World Cup (planned for LA in 2026).”
Enjoying the Ride
One way or another, LA's transit-first 2028 Games promise to have a profound and lasting impact on Southern California. And Chaves is grateful to be in the thick of the planning process.
“In a mega-region such as LA, every transportation project is complex because it comes with so many inter-dependencies, which makes it both interesting and very rewarding,” he observes. “But defining new transportation options for the region is also quite rewarding because those projects make our communities more livable and our quality of life much higher. And that makes for a pretty good ride.”
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If you enjoyed this article, you might want to check out my profiles of other LA transportation experts such as Joshua Schank and Randall Winston. If you have ideas for other infrastructure innovators I should profile, please send your suggestions to me at brooks@personsofinfrastructure.com. Many thanks.
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