Frank McCourt won a court battle, but it doesn’t mean his gondola project to Dodger Stadium is reaching home base.
The bases are loaded with arguments for and against a first-ever Los Angeles aerial gondola to carry passengers and baseball fans above Chinatown and other neighborhoods in northeast L.A. on a route between Union Station and Dodger Stadium.
The California Endowment, a nonprofit situated along the proposed gondola’s route, claimed Metro was acting illegally and the project should be put out for competitive bidding. But Beckloff ruled that the project falls under Metro’s parameters for new, innovative projects and therefore could proceed without competitive bidding.
The court ruling doesn’t silence the project’s critics, nor does it erase other potential problems such as financing and Metro’s future role. ARTT initially said the gondola project would cost $125 million, but in 2020 ARTT and its partners raised the price tag to $300 million, Click said. Jennifer Rivera, a spokesman for McCourt Global, declined to answer questions about the project or McCourt’s motivation, referring all inquiries to Click and Climate Resolve.The gondolas would take 5,000 passengers per hour on a sky-high, Disneyland-esque, 1.2 mile ride that would last 7 minutes, according to ARTT.
But the UCLA study found that 4,690 people, in total, would take the gondola to the stadium, and 1,380, in total, would use it to leave the stadium, said John Christensen, a professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability. It is possible that traffic would actually increase or remain the same if fans drove to the Alameda Street/Union Station gondola station, or to the station at the edge of Chinatown at the south entrance to the Los Angeles State Historic Park, where there would be parking lots, concessions and restrooms.
“The gondola will likely pass over my property. I have no issue with this. I am in favor and happy to support this proposed solution for traffic reduction,” wrote Chinatown resident Alexis Readinger. In order for a project to be sole-sourced by Metro’s Office of Extraordinary Innovation, the project must demonstrate extraordinary technical and financial merit. Beckloff lauded the project’s uniqueness, quoting Metro’s argument that the “proposed project would be the first urban aerial gondola system in the country to employ a tricable detachable gondola system, the most advanced technology currently available.
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