Salida Reynolds

There are a lot of other really interesting things that happened during the 84 games to make it such a success.

But if you ask anybody who was here at the time, they will say, wow, they really solved traffic.

And sort of famously, when the games were over, the mayor at the time, Tom Bradley, at the closing sort of press conference said, the games are over, let the traffic begin.

So, you know, there was this sort of feeling that everybody had kind of made it work for the period of the games.

And now we were going to be back to our old ways.

I think the engineers at the time were very excited by the improvements that they had seen.

And they were real and measurable.

They had reduced people's delay by about 30%, 35%, which in turn improved emissions, right?

Because you didn't have as many people idling because you were just moving the most efficient way possible.

And there are traffic engineers, transportation engineers and planners and other folks that are sitting in an office in downtown Los Angeles.

They have hundreds of cameras that give them basically a 360 degree view of the city at any time.

And they also have a landscape view of what's happening with every single transportation signal at all of the 5,000 plus intersections that they're monitoring at any given time.

They can do that in extraordinary circumstances.

So when I first got to Los Angeles, there was actually a giant sinkhole there.

that opened up in the ground over by UCLA.

Less dramatic than that, there's spontaneous protests or other things happening.

At that point, they're making decisions about, okay, we're going to leave this light on green for longer and clear people out of a space when they need to be redirected or rerouted.

Yeah, think about the way that we're managing movement through a city, you know, we're managing it in space and time.

And the space is limited, right?

We have 7500 miles of streets in the city of Los Angeles.