At NYC Climate Week, the Clean Mobility Collective brought together advocates from Los Angeles, Kansas City, Paris, Mexico City and São Paulo. Their shared finding: mega-events accelerate what a city had already been doing, with very different consequences for the people who live there.including leaving its residents behind.

In July 2014, Rodrigo Faria G. Iacovini watched Brazil lose 7–1 to Germany in the World Cup semi-final, sitting next to his grandmother. He laughed through most of it. By then, he had spent seven years working on the impacts of Brazil’s mega-events, much of it on housing, and he was helping a family facing eviction while trying to find out who could be held responsible. Next to that, a football scoreline was hard to take seriously.

Iacovini, Executive Director of Instituto Pólis, told that story on 23 September at Fans, Fanfare and Transit Fares, a Clean Mobility Collective panel at Civic Hall in New York. The timing was deliberate: the World Cup has just been played across North America, and Los Angeles has less than two years before the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The question for the panel was how host cities can make sure transport investments still serve residents after the crowds leave.

MEGA-EVENTS CAN ACCELERATE CHANGE, BUT WHOSE PRIORITIES DO THEY SERVE?

Paris is the example that all others want to imitate. As Tony Renucci, Executive Director of Respire, points out, the city had no need to wait for the Olympics; measures such as school streets, cycling on the Rue de Rivoli and the new development along the Seine were already part of a broader strategy for transforming the city, and the Games simply set a strict deadline to an agenda which was already in place.

The Games left concrete changes behind: the Olympic lane on the Périphérique is now used for carpooling, the speed limit on the ring road has been reduced to 50 km/h, Metro Line 14 now extends all the way to Orly airport, cycling capacity has increased, and the Seine is once again swimmable. The Games also acted as a testing ground for temporary traffic-restriction zones and night-time deliveries.

Renucci admitted that not all the plans succeeded, with some not coming to fruition because of infrastructure constraints or the COVID-19 pandemic, and several Grand Paris Express lines now have opening dates spread between 2026 and 2031. Respire has also studied the level of air pollution around open-air sports grounds throughout greater Paris and discovered that most of these sites are located in areas of poor air quality, a risk which host cities rarely measure. He argued that this kind of mapping should be part of planning for every future Olympics.

Rio shows the opposite outcome. More than US$6 billion was spent on mobility in Rio alone, Iacovini said, concentrated around venues and tourist areas rather than the neighbourhoods where most residents live, and research found that higher-income groups benefited most. Mapping of the period shows evictions of people from favelas took place near the Olympic areas, with displaced families moved to peripheral Minha Casa Minha Vida housing estates in areas the new mobility investments did not reach.

Some projects are still listed as “coming soon.” In São Paulo, the Linha 17-Ouro monorail was only scheduled to open in March 2026, after a 12-year wait. Once Brazil was selected as host, the city also prioritised investments for the Games over mobility projects that had already won funding. Acceleration, in Iacovini’s view, only helps a city that already knows where it is going.

THE MIDFIELD ONLY RUNS ONE WAY

Jorge Macías, Environmental & Urban Economist at SUR Institute, described this summer’s World Cup in Mexico in football terms. The goal is access to opportunity. Governance is the goalkeeper, and it let in plenty: little transparency, essential infrastructure started too late, and poor contracts paid for by taxpayers. Amenities are the strikers, and they played for corporate profit. Living near a stadium did not mean working-class residents could get into it. Mobility is the midfield, and it focused on moving tourists toward downtown. Housing is the defence, and it failed. Macías cited increases of around 40 percent in housing prices and rents across Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey, along with rising displacement and evictions.

He did not dismiss the tournament, which, against a backdrop of racial and socioeconomic inequalities, also brought communities together on a global stage.

Iacovini also mentioned the question of who the attendees are. If planners assume that the spectators come from outside the area, then investment follows the tourists; but if a city expects its own residents to be in the stands, then its commitment to mobility becomes widespread. Macías pushed back on the premise itself: people move everywhere, yet planning still tends to assume that tourists are different from locals.

BUDGETS SHOW WHO COUNTS

In Kansas City, Beto Lugo Martinez, Executive Director of Rise4EJ and Founder of SciCAN, described a city that cut public transit funding while receiving federal money for the World Cup, with a large part of the budget intended for transit being directed towards law enforcement instead. The immigration raids increased residents' fears, and people experiencing homelessness were removed from the urban centre. At the same time, the economic benefits the city had expected never materialised since the number of fans who came to Kansas City was not as high as had been anticipated.

His central argument is one transport planners often leave out: public transit is a public health intervention. Many people rely on buses to reach medical care and other essential services, so a cut to service is a cut to that access. Involving communities in planning, he argued, is what lets investments, including emissions reductions, outlast the event.

LOS ANGELES 2028: THE TEST CASE

Candice Youngblood, Senior Attorney at Earthjustice, put the scale of LA28 in numbers. The Games are expected to draw more than 5 million visitors over 28 days; during the 16 days of the Olympics alone, that is the equivalent of seven Super Bowls a day. Around 700,000 bus passengers will need to travel to and from more than 40 venues, there will be no spectator parking, and these are billed as “no-build” Games, with no new infrastructure.

Los Angeles has been here before: in 1984, officials took measures to clean up the air for the Games, and it worked for the duration. Youngblood wants clean air that lasts beyond the closing ceremony, and the legacy she sees as most lasting is electric buses. LA Metro has committed to a 100 percent zero-emission fleet by 2030, yet it stands at about 6.5 percent today, and a new staff proposal targets just 12 percent by 2028. Other hosts have moved much faster: Beijing had 10,000 electric buses by the 2022 Winter Games, and Paris around 1,000 by 2024.

The LA County Electric Truck & Bus Coalition is pushing the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) to close that gap by mobilising residents and workers, working directly with LA Metro staff, and partnering with athletes and influencers to make the case to the public. With federal transit investment under pressure, California’s state legislature is trying to step up, Youngblood said.

WHO ANSWERS FOR IT?

Accountability was the hardest question of the afternoon. Who is responsible when transport investment displaces residents, when promised infrastructure arrives years late, or when public money is redirected toward projects designed around the event?

The panel's answers pointed to different levels of power. Renucci argued that public authorities must be held accountable for impacts such as displacement, while Macías placed responsibility with those who make the rules and hold the power. Iacovini argued that accountability cannot stop at national and local governments. International bodies whose requirements shape host cities share it too, FIFA among them, an organisation that profits heavily from hosting arrangements.

Accountability only means something if communities can exercise it. In Brazil, organised civil society saved thousands of homes. Iacovini argued that the next step is to give residents a formal say in which mobility projects get built, backed by human rights compliance mechanisms that can actually be enforced.

That leaves a more useful question for any city bidding to host the world: what should residents get in return?

Renucci's answer was the standard the panel kept returning to. A transport legacy should be judged by whether residents' quality of life is better after the Games leave. In practice, that means asking whether the investments leave people with better ways to move around their city, cleaner air, and easier access to work and services than they had before.

For Los Angeles, the clock is already running. The city has less than two years to decide what it wants the 2028 Games to accelerate, and who that acceleration should serve.