Ten million people live in Los Angeles County, and the region’s Metro rail system carried 300 million riders last year. Los Angeles International Airport is one of the world’s busiest and most important, with more than 76 million passengers in 2024. But try taking a train to or from any place in that county to that airport. They don’t link up and never have — though, that may at last be about to change.
Why there is no train to the airport is anybody’s guess.
Did the taxi industry maneuver to block it many years ago? Did nearby neighborhoods quietly object? Did land-use planners simply not think of it? Everyone has a theory, but the failure to bring a train to the airport is one of those municipal mishaps whose rationale is lost to time.
Even the region’s most deeply rooted leaders are at a loss to explain it.
Take Janice Hahn, for one. Not many people have a richer political history in Los Angeles than Hahn, who is both a county supervisor and the chair of LA Metro, the regional rail authority. Hahn served on the Los Angeles City Council and in Congress before being elected to the county board. Her father was a council member and legendary supervisor. Her brother was the mayor. Even she doesn’t know how LA’s train system managed to bypass an international airport.
Former County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, another of the region’s political veterans, acknowledged that the decision to route the Green Line just beyond the periphery of the airport “made no sense at all.” In his memoir, Yaroslavsky calls the project “the Moses Line” because a traveler can see the Promised Land from it but can’t quite enter it.
Kenneth Hahn, Janice Hahn’s father, helped spearhead the region’s first light rail. He imagined it someday reaching the airport. That was in 1980.
Forty-five years, tens of millions of dollars and countless neighborhood and government meetings since, the rail network has expanded, sweeping across Los Angeles County. But not to LAX.
It’s not like there’s no demand for such a connection. Traffic at the airport has been a dreaded fact of Los Angeles life for longer than most people here have lived. The horseshoe that connects the terminals backs up at all hours of the day, and trips to and from the airport grind to a standstill as soon as your car enters the loop.
Years ago, Hahn was dedicating a project at the airport, and she jokingly reflected on President Reagan’s famous observation that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
The equivalent in Los Angeles, Hahn said, were, “Hey, can you give me a ride to LAX?”
Local officials have devised a host of stop-gap solutions over the years. Passengers can link up to fly-away shuttles that connect the airport to downtown and the San Fernando Valley. The airport has a special lot for rideshares, and buses connect LAX to different parts of town.
But for any passenger used to traveling the world — anyone who has walked from the terminal to the Metro stop at Reagan National in Washington or experienced the ease of transit access in airports from San Francisco to Paris to Hong Kong — LAX is an outlier.
Why not just extend the train? The obstacles range from cost to local opposition. LAX has strained to expand its traffic while keeping the neighborhood around it pacified. Noise restrictions, quieter jets, traffic controls have all helped, but the managers of the airport have waged a protracted campaign to keep some people happy — even at the expense of the larger region’s convenience.
For years, officials were paralyzed by the fear of litigation, afraid of even uttering the words “airport expansion.” They would talk instead of “airport modernization.” Running a light rail through the area generated reflexive opposition.
And so, airline passengers step off flights, collect their bags and schlep across the airport to the rideshare lot. Or hop on a bus to take them to a train, as they have for generations.
That may be about to change. Soon. Probably.
Two major projects are underway that together should end the mysterious gap in the transportation network of America’s second-largest city. LAX is constructing a so-called People Mover intended to whisk travelers around the airport, and Metro is extending the K Line to connect with a newly built LAX/Metro Transit Center just outside the airport.
Together, they are designed to finally close the gap in the region’s transit network, so that a person could board a train in, say, Hollywood or the Valley or Pasadena and ride it to the new LAX transit center and board a people mover to take them to their terminal.
This would happen all without transferring to a bus or hailing a cab or hitting up a friend for a ride.
It’s tempting — but slightly premature — to declare this long struggle over. The twin project was scheduled to open in December, but Angelenos know it hasn’t. The construction in and around the airport continues. Now the target date is December 2025, and Hahn is optimistic about hitting that one.
Even with the delay, it would plug the hole in the transportation donut well in time for its international coming-out party, the 2028 Olympic Games. “This is a big one if you really want to showcase the city,” Hahn said.
International travelers expect to be able to move about a city on public transit, and that starts when they land. The train service to the airport, she added, will “put Los Angeles International Airport into the international airport club.”
And so construction continues, winding closer and closer to the day that has eluded generations of transit leaders in this city. It’s fallen short so often and for so long that it will be hard to believe until it actually opens. But Hahn is allowing herself a flicker of optimism.
“I do think,” she said last week, “this long nightmare is going to come to an end.”
By Jim Newton. This article was originally published by CalMatters.
