[rams74]

Welcome to freeway hell

Remember the 1984 Summer Olympics.

[St. Loser Fan]

Plus once LA and Vegas comes online the Super Bowl will be there every 3 or 4 years.

The rotation should be going forward.
-LA
-Vegas
-New Orleans
-Tampa/Miami

Fuck Jerry Jones and the Dallas area.

[St. Loser Fan]

You guys had better be able to match this sort of fun in 2022.

[haroldjackson29]

Remember the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Not really. I was only 18, didn't get around

[RedAlice]

Not really. I was only 18, didn't get around

Maybe you shoulda.

[Hacksaw]

Remember the 1984 Summer Olympics.

1984: The Year of Catastrophic Traffic that Never Was
Erin Aubry Kaplan
July 1, 2011

1984 was the year of catastrophic traffic that never was. The summer Olympics promised L.A. a permanent boost in its global status while incurring no debt, but it also promised the kind of hellish, round-the-clock traffic that would make a typical rush hour look like a walk--or a drive--in the park. For all of Tom Bradley's effusions about what hosting the Olympics would mean to us, it was clear that as the time approached, people were thinking less about the deeper meaning and more about the street-level consequences of staging high-profile events in many venues that generated traffic on normal days. The idea of some giant event landing on L.A. like an alien and disrupting its unique sense of highway entitlement for two weeks was for many people as scary as the Olympics themselves were exciting.

I took all the dire predictions with more than a grain of salt and an even bigger sense of remove. Sure, the Olympics were coming to town, but were they really coming to my part of town? I had just graduated from UCLA and was living at home in Inglewood while I figured out my next move. Nobody I knew in the neighborhood or in the vicinity was too revved up about the Olympics--curiosity was as far as they went. Even though events would take place at the Coliseum and other sites in South Central proper, the general feeling was that the whole affair would be big and impressive, but it would mean very little to inner-city residents, many of whom were close enough to watch proceedings from their porches. So accustomed had South Central grown to being left out of civic good fortune, even with Tom Bradley in office (or maybe because Bradley was in office), those of us living in the shadow of a newly refurbished downtown and bustling Westside hardly expected to reap anything from one of the greatest events in the world happening in our backyard.

That meant that we didn't worry about traffic and the predicted car-pocalypse; we were not at the center of things and didn't expect to be this time. Traffic would have actually been welcome because it would mean activity and interest that neighborhoods south of the 10 didn't normally get and couldn't figure out how.

I was wrong about at least two things, and more wrong about one than the other.

The first thing was traffic: it simply never materialized, especially on the 405 that led to the Westside and to UCLA, a major Olympic site. It was astonishing to me to travel north down the freeway from Inglewood and make it into Westwood with no obstruction, especially the year after my departure from a university where I never could score parking. (When I had to drive to campus, I parked a few miles downhill from the eastern border and walked--hiked--up.)

The second thing was the assumption that the Olympics themselves wouldn't touch people in isolated places like South Central. I was wrong about that, too. Whether or not they made it to any events, residents had a baseline pride about the fact that the summer Games were indeed happening right down the street and in their own backyard, including USC and the Forum in Inglewood; for my own part, I got caught up in the summer-long craze of collecting and trading Olympic pins. In the end I was very much connected to the whole Olympic zeitgeist even though I went to just one event. I did share in the citywide surprise and pleasure at the fact that traffic turned out to be so benign; I believed that I had a part in pulling off the miracle simply by staying home and not contributing to the congestion that never happened. Ironically, that non-activity engendered a great feeling of collective accomplishment that I haven't really felt since.

https://www.kcet.org/carmageddon-la/198 ... -never-was
_______________________________________________________________________

1984 L.A. Olympic traffic miracle
Posted By: Scott Harrison
Posted On: 1:54 p.m. | July 17, 2011

Aug. 3, 1984: Traffic is light on the Harbor Freeway, left photo, next to the Los Angeles Coliseum at 8:03 a.m. on a Friday morning — right in the middle of rush hour. Light traffic was also found downtown, right, at 8:40 a.m. on the four-level freeway interchange.

The “Carmaggedon” closure of the 405 Freeway this weekend produced two days of light traffic. The 1984 Olympics had two weeks.

Officials in 1984 had predicted “Black Friday,” a day on which commuter traffic combined with track and field events at the Coliseum would produce total gridlock, only to be pleasantly surprised.

Times staff writer Ted Vollmer reported the next morning:

Years of warnings and intense preparations apparently paid off Friday as a predicted paralyzing combination of Olympic and commuter traffic failed to develop on the busiest day yet of the Games. Instead, drivers enjoyed another day of free-flowing freeway traffic across Southern California.

“Black Friday,” transportation officials smugly pointed out to reporters, had become “Good Friday.” Then, for the first time in more than a year, the experts uncrossed their fingers.

The driving public had apparently listened to the traffic congestion warnings and predictions. And the locals were not the only ones who noticed.

“Los Angeles hasn’t lived up to its reputation for traffic,” summed up Martha Orr of San Jose, who took a shuttle bus from Century City to the Coliseum Friday morning to watch the first day of Olympic track and field events ….

Traffic to Friday’s long slate of Olympic events at 19 venues had been expected to combine with normally heavy commuter traffic to produce freeway headaches. However, drivers cruised along nearly congestion-free freeways for the fifth consecutive day….

http://framework.latimes.com/2011/07/17 ... c-miracle/

[Hacksaw]

This did happen though...

1984 Summer Olympics boycott

The boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles followed four years after the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. The boycott involved 14 Eastern Bloc countries and allies, led by the Soviet Union, which initiated the boycott on May 8, 1984. Boycotting countries organized another major event, called the Friendship Games, in July and August 1984. Although the boycott led by the Soviet Union affected a number of Olympic events that were normally dominated by the absent countries, 140 nations still took part in the games, which was a record at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Summ ... cs_boycott

[St. Loser Fan]

Look at that, Dallas gets left off the list. I feel bad for Jerry.



Glad to see New Orleans host a Super Bowl again.

[Elvis]

[Rams1PlateSince1976]

Hopefully the Rams will have a home field advantage. Get your tickets now.