LAX's $3.3 Billion People Mover Slips Again, Eight Years In

Los Angeles World Airports approved its 2.25-mile people mover in 2018, broke ground in 2019, targeted completion in 2023 — and the trains still aren't running. The latest slip pushes startup into next year, roughly eight years after the project began and well past its original window.

The cost has climbed from $1.9 billion to $3.3 billion. A county grand jury investigated how the project went sideways. Litigation between the city and its contractor is pending. And the missed milestones now threaten a hard deadline that no ribbon-cutting can blur: the 2028 Olympics, when Los Angeles expects the world at its airport.

The Los Angeles Times' Steve Lopez, whose column frames the scrutiny, opened with a pointed comparison: in 1957, Walt Disney saw a monorail in Europe. Design started in 1958. Disneyland had one running by 1959.

"Tell me about it," said City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, whose district includes Bob Gurr, the Disney imagineer who helped design that monorail. Gurr is in his mid-90s; Lopez is waiting to hear whether he'll take a call. "I'm down with that," Rodriguez said. "And we get an E Ticket ride."

What went wrong?

The grand jury report details the structure at the heart of the failure. LAWA handed design, construction and operating authority to a single private consortium, LINXS — LAX Integrated Express Solution. The panel found no criminal activity, but documented plenty that raised eyebrows.

The contractor has sued the city, blaming officials for the delays. The grand jury suggested the opposite: that LINXS itself caused the schedule slips, effectively holding out for $550 million in settlement claims. City officials, having already missed the project's intended debut in time for World Cup matches, now face pressure to have trains running before the Olympics arrive.

Mayor Karen Bass, who chairs Metro and appoints the airport commissioners, notes the project predates her administration. On the disputes that stretched the timeline, she said: "we pushed for a settlement so there would be a firm finish line."

That framing hasn't quieted critics. Nithya Raman, her challenger in the mayoral race, is campaigning on the people mover and broader transportation shortfalls.

Is this an outlier or a pattern?

The people mover sits inside a longer regional ledger. The Green Line stopped two miles short of the airport in the 1990s. The D line's promised extension toward the ocean would still end about 3.5 miles from the beach. And this week, as the Times' Colleen Shalby reported, construction begins on the Van Nuys-Pacoima light rail line — five years behind schedule, with costs up from $1.3 billion to nearly $4 billion.

The stakes extend beyond rail. The people mover would finally let train passengers connect directly to LAX terminals, replacing the shuttle-bus hop from rental lots and transit stops. Vision Zero, the street-safety plan then-Mayor Eric Garcetti launched 11 years ago, has meanwhile fallen short of its goal: for three consecutive years, Los Angeles has recorded more traffic fatalities than homicides.

"The rest of the world has seen a decrease in traffic deaths," Damian Kevitt of Streets Are for Everyone told Lopez. "There are ways to do this, and we run into roadblocks. … It's lack of leadership … at every level. … To me, the people mover is almost an indicator of systemic issues across the city."

What happens next?

James Moore, emeritus engineering professor at USC, put the engineering in context. The people mover is a sophisticated build, he acknowledged — but countless airports worldwide have delivered equivalents without an eight-year saga. "Should it have taken this long? No," Moore said. "When anything goes right in Los Angeles, that's when I'm surprised."

Rodriguez, who initially voted against the convention center expansion, said she pressed one condition on that public-private partnership: "Whatever contract language was in the people mover contract, make sure it's not in the convention center project."

With the settlement reportedly giving the city its "firm finish line," the question now is whether LINXS trains are carrying Olympic visitors by 2028 — or whether Los Angeles fields flying taxis at LAX before an airport locomotive.