Name: Why Los Angeles International Airport’s Traffic Is So Bad and How to Fix It
Uploaded: 2025-03-12T04:00:00Z
Duration: 7 min 12 s
Description: Los Angeles International Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world, and now it’s getting $30 billion in renovations. An airport transit expert explains if it can fix its notorious traffic.

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Los Angeles International Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world, and now it’s getting $30 billion in renovations. An airport transit expert explains if it can fix its notorious traffic. Photo Illustration: MacKenzie Coffman

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Los Angeles International Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world, and now it’s getting $30 billion in renovations. An airport transit expert explains if it can fix its notorious traffic.

Why Los Angeles International Airport’s Traffic Is So Bad and How to Fix It

Narrator: These are the 10 busiest airports in the world, but these nine airports are all hub and spoke with lots of connections, and only one airport on the list, Los Angeles International, is an origin and destination airport. Most LAX passengers start or end their journey here, ultimately leading to one thing: traffic.

See all these planes everywhere around the terminal? Those planes all have hundreds of people, but a car maybe has one, two, three, four, five people. So you have a mismatch between the number of people that need to get in through here and the number of people that are gonna be getting on planes.

Narrator: This mismatch is limiting LAX's ability to expand, but the airport is on a $30 billion mission to modernize. So we asked an airport transit expert to explain what it would take to fix LAX. This is a core problem for LAX: its shape.

The horseshoe, as it is known, is what people tend to dislike most about LAX.

Narrator: The airside, with all the planes and runways, is over here, and everything before security, with people getting to and from the airport, is on the landside. LAX has a landside capacity problem.

LAX, in many ways, is the worst of both worlds because it lacks a good public transit alternative, and it does not have sufficient roadway space to accommodate demand.

Narrator: About 95,000 vehicles enter LAX every day.

LAX essentially has three access points by vehicle. First thing you notice about these, right, is that they're all kind of running into each other pretty quickly.

Narrator: And once you're in the horseshoe, the type of traffic movement exacerbates congestion.

People are not just moving forward; they're constantly going from side to side to try to get to the curb, to drop people off, and then out of the curb, and they're parked at the curb or double parked at the curb.

Narrator: And while these shortcuts here were meant to expedite the route for travelers going to the farther terminals, they can also exacerbate that side-to-side traffic.

So you see there's two lanes of traffic that are coming in on this crossover route, and those lanes are feeding directly into the lanes of traffic on the horseshoe that are the least congested in a relative sense. Now you're slowing down all these cars, and that's one of the reasons that the crossovers actually wind up hindering traffic probably as much as they help it.

Narrator: And because of the side-to-side traffic movement, adding more lanes wouldn't do much to alleviate congestion. So, instead, the goal is to stop cars before they get into the horseshoe with something like the roughly $3 billion people mover. Opening in 2026, LAX's people mover is essentially a train to move passengers in and out of the horseshoe.

Let's say you came in and were dropped off at this station by vehicle. You then get on the people mover, and it will go this way. And you can have a stop here for those terminals. Stop here. Stop here.

Narrator: The people mover will run straight down the center rather than around the horseshoe with pedestrian walkways on either side connecting to the terminals.

So the question is, how many people are gonna choose to drop off here versus taking people all the way in.

Narrator: To incentivize passengers to take the people mover, Joshua would implement congestion pricing on the roadway.

And that, in turn, reduces the demand for traffic within that area, and that means that the cars that do go in have a much smoother and faster ride.

Narrator: But construction for the people mover reduced LAX's roadway capacity, so the airport needed a stopgap solution. That's why it turned this parking lot near the entrance into a rideshare lot called LAXIT. Travelers can take a rideshare or taxi into the airport.

But when you leave the airport, you have to somehow get to this area to pick up a rideshare vehicle or a taxi. Hence the name LAXIT.

Narrator: The idea was to move almost all of the arrivals rideshares out of the horseshoe entirely. Travelers coming from the end terminals can walk along these paths.

Not the greatest experience. A lot of these pathways aren't well marked, and sometimes you're walking along construction sites, but you can get there.

Narrator: But for travelers coming from any of the other terminals.

It becomes a much more cumbersome effort especially from these guys right here, right, because these are the furthest away, and there's no clear path to them.

Narrator: Shuttle buses with dedicated lanes help shorten the trip. LAXIT has reduced traffic in the horseshoe by 15% compared to 2019. But LAXIT was not meant to be a permanent feature. Ultimately, the lot may become a new concourse, and Joshua says you'll only really reduce traffic in the horseshoe if there's another viable transit option, like if LAX expanded its bus service to drop off at key places around the city, or something even bigger.

My dream scenario would be multiple access methods by mass transit into the central area that are all a short walk, therefore, to the terminal.

Narrator: Making it easier for more people to get here will also help as LAX looks to increase its capacity on the airside, like with that new concourse that could replace LAXIT.

If you add more flights to LAX, even though you can accommodate them with the runway space and taxiway space that you have, you're adding to the congestion on the landside.

Narrator: Some airport layouts are more flexible. Take Atlanta International Airport. Its new international terminal here didn't impact landside capacity too much because.

If you're going to Atlanta airport, you don't have to, and no one can in fact, drive up to each of these terminals and drop someone off. It's not actually possible. This is all on the airside. You have to take a people mover that goes underneath here to get from one terminal to another.

Narrator: So while the airport had the space to add another roadway over here, it didn't need to impact the main access road at all. LAX's horseshoe layout, however, restricts how the airport can even expand. In 2021, LAX opened a satellite concourse to its international terminal and connected it with an underground walkway. But continuing to build in this direction would likely require another people mover, so LAX is mainly limited to extending the end of the horseshoe, like its proposal to build concourse 0 here and terminal 9 here.

Which you can do. And those planes can still access the runways from there, and you can have roadway capacity to be able to bring people in there.

Narrator: In 2024, LAX saw more than 76 million passengers, but more places for planes means more people flying in and out of LAX and driving in and out of LAX, something the city expects to happen with the 2028 Olympics. The last time LA hosted the Olympics, in 1984, LAX added a new terminal and doubled its roadway capacity by adding a second level. This time around, Joshua says adding another level would just disrupt operations and only temporarily fix the problems. But the goal doesn't have to be indefinitely increasing LAX's capacity. Instead, Joshua says you could expand other nearby regional airports. But its central location and sheer amount of airside capacity will keep LAX on top. And these solves, Joshua says, will help the landside capacity match that airside capacity.

The airside capacity is the jewel that makes LAX as great as it is. People love to hate it, but they love to hate it because so many people are using it. That actually shows that it's doing something right.

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