Perhaps unsurprisingly, L.A. Metro voted to approve the L.A. Aerial Rapid Transit project, also known as the Dodgers Gondola project, after a rowdy meeting reminiscent of Parks and Recreation on December 3.
Declarations from the uninformed aside, it was a bit of an ask for the agency working with Zero Emissions Transit, the non-profit running the Dodgers Gondola project, to kill the project.
The writing was on the wall when the vote on this project was placed on the Consent calendar at the Metro Board meeting. Consent calendars generally include noncontroversial items or those a governing body wants to vote on with little to no debate.
While the Los Angeles City Council voted 12-1 to urge L.A. Metro to terminate the project in the weeks before the meeting, there was uncertainty about whether Mayor Bass would approve or veto the resolution, given that she sits on the Metro Board. We finally have an answer as to what she did: nothing.
After the L.A. Metro vote, Mayor Bass gave a statement to the Los Angeles Times:
“The way the council feels is important to me,” Bass told The Times. “But, if a member from that district is passionate about a project, then the other members are in support of that.
“There is much more time for things to be worked out. I just did not feel that it was appropriate to stop it now.”
The above are certainly words in a sentence that would make Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Ministerproud in how incomprehensible they are.
The backers of the Dodgers Gondola project must still obtain approval from various local and state agencies before the LA City Council has the final say. The project was projected to cost $500 million in 2023; it is an open question how much it will cost now. While the Bass Compromise of 2024 states that no public funds will be used for the project, the project’s financing plan has not yet been made public.
Accordingly, it seems increasingly likely that Metro will use its bus fleet rather than the Gondola during the rapidly approaching 2028 Olympic Games, given the near impossibility of obtaining all required approvals and completing construction in time.
As it stands, the project will limp on in the background as the 2026 Spring wears on until its next reckoning at a relevant agency.
Johnson’s September Remarks to LASEC
As an aside, it is time to address comments by Magic Johnson that largely went unnoticed by the Dodgers fanbase before the recent rounds of votes on the status of getting to and from Dodger Stadium. Specifically, Johnson was a speaker at the 11th Annual Dodgers All-Access Gala, hosted by the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission (LASEC).
Senior Editor of Dodger Blue Matt Borelli first reported Johnson’s comments back in September. Unfortunately, I could find no video of Johnson’s comments to the LASEC, so we will have to rely entirely on Mr. Borelli’s reporting:
Dodgers part-owner and Los Angeles Lakers legend Magic Johnson recently conceded that the Dodger Stadium parking lots will likely always be an issue.
“There’s so many memories about coming to this stadium,” Johnson began in response to a fan’s question at the 11th annual Dodgers All-Access event.
“Thank God that we kept this stadium. You go to a lot of new ballparks, but they don’t have what we have. It’s special. You know who you’re sitting next to. We’re never going to solve the parking thing, so let’s not talk about it. We can’t solve it.
“Every minute that we’re in the car, it’s worth it when we get here and watch this game. Now, we all have the same issue going home, so we ain’t going to solve that either. Don’t ask me about those two situations. They haven’t solved it since we’ve been here, we’re not going to solve it because we’re the owners now.
“But, what would you rather have? A competitive team winning the division every year, or going home early? Getting to the park earlier, easier. I think I’d rather have the team that’s won our division 11 out of 12 years. Two World Series, been to the World Series four times. I think I’d rather have that and I’ll deal with the other things.
“But when we go to other cities like New York and Atlanta, that traffic is bad too. Everybody thinks we’re the only ones that have bad traffic. Like I said, I’m going to take that as long as we’re winning.”
[emphasis added.]
For starters, even in the most charitable light, Johnson’s statement about the parking lots is wrong and borders on nonsensical. By that logic, Johnson’s statement, if hypothetically applied to other aspects of running Dodger Stadium, amounts to learned helplessness (and arguably negligence), which is unacceptable regardless of the circumstances.
- “Ope – some concrete fell on someone – better not talk about it because there is nothing we can do about that.”
- “Ope – Dodger Stadium security beat someone up again – better not talk about it because there is nothing we can do about that.”
While I vehemently disagree with what Johnson said, if forced to play Devil’s Advocate, I can see where he is coming from on a single point.
Dodger Stadium has certain traffic issues inherent to its location and construction. When you build a stadium on a hill next to a residential neighborhood, with various bottlenecks of traffic on the hill, with freeway layouts that would not even pass muster in the computer game SimCity in a major metropolitan area, traffic is a given.
However, simply saying you cannot solve it or saying fans and ownership should not talk about it, while implicitly supporting the Dodgers Gondola project by having a gondola car on stadium property for nearly three years now, is laughable.
In the above hypotheticals, ownership would likely be pilloried by the press and the fanbase, and rightfully so. Moreover, we have a concrete example to the contrary; ownership implemented subsequent remedial measures to prevent further falling concrete, and, by all accounts, even with how loud Dodger Stadium was during the 2025 postseason, there were no additional incidents.
Short of herculean and borderline impossible efforts by the City and County of Los Angeles, not to mention using multiple state and federal agencies, while Johnson does have a point about there being issues getting to and from Dodger Stadium, things can be done, provided there is buy-in from multiple stakeholders, including the citizen neighbors of Dodger Stadium.
If this series of essays has had a fault, it has been being too focused on why the Gondola Project is generally a bad idea and less on alternatives or conversations that the city and team should be having. While the City of Los Angeles waits for the Gondola Project to reemerge into the public sphere, the next series of essays on this topic shall focus on certain unsaid truths, alternatives like Dodger Stadium Express, and what could and should be done about what most would say is the worst part about being a Dodgers fan: getting to and from Dodger Stadium.