The long-awaited people mover at Los Angeles International Airport has been delayed, delayed, and delayed again. It was originally supposed to open in March 2023, and at last check, the posted date is now October 2026. That probably won’t happen either. This isn’t just your regular “construction project has delays” kind of issue. It has devolved into a terrible, vicious battle between the airport — Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) — and LINXS, a group of contractors that formed a joint venture to bid on the project.

Now that the first lawsuit has been filed, there is more public information available on what exactly has gone wrong. I will post about that soon, but first, it’s time to set the stage about what exactly the plan has been for the so-called SkyLink train and why it is so important.

Anyone who has driven in the infamous horseshoe that carries cars around Los Angeles International Airport’s (LAX) central terminal area knows just how miserable it can be. Gridlock is common, rogue car rental buses dart out in front of you — I’m not kidding, I had one sideswipe me several years ago, curse you, Enterprise — and travelers are constantly playing Frogger to get to and from the parking garages.

But fear not, the LAMP is underway and it will solve all your problems.* That stands for the Landside Access Modernization Program, and I’m pretty sure it was launched in 1963 shortly after the central terminal area opened. That’s only a slight exaggeration. But the idea is to make it easy for people to avoid the dreaded horseshoe. After years of discussion, this is the plan that was settled on.

^{*Or at least some of them}

It is hard to explain in words just how much of an undertaking this was. See the rental car center at the upper right? That used to be an entire neighborhood from the post-WWII period called Manchester Square. As you can see below, in 2005 it was still a crowded neighborhood with homes and even a school. By 2015, it had been largely abandoned as the airport kept buying up property for expansion, many of them having been knocked down. And today? It’s a gigantic rental car center.

Maybe the scale still isn’t clear. The rental car center is the second largest concrete building in the US behind the Pentagon. And that’s just the upper right corner of that map showing the entire project’s scope.

The next stop to the west is the LAX/Metro Transit Center which finally, after many years, brought light rail (in pink) to the airport with the K (Crenshaw) line going north-south and the C (Green) line heading east. Previously, C line travelers had been forced to get off at a station south of the airport which isn’t even on this map. It had a slow and infrequent bus into the terminal area. The opening of the K line and the eventual SkyLink will change the game here, especially since this is also where buses from all over the LA Basin will park.

Still further west, we have the Intermodal Transportation Facility – West, which is going to be generally referred to as the economy parking stop. But this is also where hotel shuttles will go along with a park & ride area for people to drop off passengers. In other words, the horseshoe will be rid of car rental buses and hotel shuttles, and travelers will have the option of being dropped off remotely and then taking the train in. This is going to make a huge difference. It may eventually mean the ultimate demise of the hated LAXit lot for rideshare as well. We’ll see how that goes.

Inside the central terminal area, there are three stops. They opted to go with a train running right up the spine instead of around the horseshoe, and that’s a good thing. It means getting to United in Terminal 7 will be a lot quicker than it otherwise would be. There are bridges that take people from the train right into each terminal area. Well, ok, close enough. Terminal 1 doesn’t appear to have a bridge. I think that’s supposed to go into Concourse 0 when it’s built, but it probably won’t be built. So there will be a bit of overshoot to get in there.

And that’s just the train itself. There’s more to this project, including making 98th Street go all the way through to take some of the pressure off of the main artery, Century Blvd, which people take to and from the east of the airport today.

There are other projects which will reconfigure Sepulveda Blvd to try to make traffic flow more smoothly, but I’m not even getting into that. Suffice it to say that the LAMP alone is a massive undertaking with an incredible result… when that SkyLink opens. Because until then, shuttles still flood the horseshoe and those on Metro still need to take a slow bus to the terminals. The SkyLink solves all those problems, and we are all just waiting for it to open.

As I mentioned up top, this has turned very ugly, and now, it’s lawsuit time. I’ve read through this first suit so you don’t have to, and I’ll have more on why we still can’t take the train next week.