Goodbye, LAX horseshoe — Metro's long-awaited airport train station opens

Your friend from out of town is flying into LAX. “No problem,” you say, trying to be a good friend. “I’ll pick you up.”

Regret sinks in while sitting in traffic in the congested “horseshoe,” the U-shaped road that connects to each of LAX’s terminals. But what else could you do, tell your friend to take the train?

With the Friday opening of the LAX Metro Transit Center, getting to the airport entirely via train is almost possible, offering travelers an alternative to using their cars or ride shares.

“[This is] a major step forward in how people move into, out of and through our city,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said Friday at a ribbon cutting event for the nearly billion-dollar station.

The station opens to the public at 5 p.m.

L.A. County Supervisor and Metro Board chair Janice Hahn said the station serves as the “welcoming mat” for the millions of people projected to visit L.A. for upcoming mega events, including the 2028 Olympic Games.

Riders can take the C or K Metro lines directly to the LAX Metro Transit Center. The final rail connection to the airport, known as the Automated People Mover, won’t open until early 2026, according to Los Angeles World Airports.

“LAX will become one of the most accessible airports in the nation, if not the world,” Harold Samms, a deputy executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, said about the people mover.

Until then, free shuttles running every 10 minutes will serve as the link between the LAX Metro Transit Center and the airport. The shuttles will stop at the lower level of each terminal at the pink columns that say “Free LAX Shuttles.”

To celebrate the opening, Metro is offering free train, bus, Micro and bike rides through early Monday morning.

About the station

First approved by the Metro Board in June 2014, the LAX Metro Transit Center is located east of the airport on Aviation Boulevard and 96th Street.

In addition to the two light rail connections, the station also serves several Metro and partner agency bus routes. There’s a 16-bay bus plaza on the north side of the station where the buses will drop off and pick up passengers.

Travelers can catch the shuttle to the airport from the bus plaza.

The station doesn’t have a pickup or drop-off area for personal vehicles, ride shares or taxis. Metro said this is to “minimize traffic disruptions for buses and maintain smooth operations at the transit center.”

A storage facility holds 50 bikes.

Inside the station, travelers will have access to a waiting area, restrooms, ticket vending machines and a Metro customer service desk. A sculpture made by Los Angeles-born artist Glenn Kaino hangs from the ceiling in the center of the station.

A long road

The first proposal to build a rail connection to the airport came in the early 1960s. It involved constructing monorails with a terminus at LAX. But the plan never came to fruition because of “political turf wars and lack of consensus," Metro said in a blog post.

Another idea that gained traction was adding an airport stop to the then-green line. Funding issues and a lack of political will, two common foes of public infrastructure development, as well as safety concerns from the Federal Aviation Administration halted that idea, according to Metro. 

Movement on the station that opened Friday started picking up in 2008, when Metro announced plans for the now-K line, and L.A. County voters approved a half-cent sales tax for rail projects.

The Metro Board decided on the current location in 2014.

Two years later, voters approved another sales tax increase through Measure M, providing Metro the reliable funding stream it needed to build the airport station.

Construction on the $900-million station began in 2021.

“It took decades of determination,” Hahn said at the ribbon-cutting event.

Airport travel habits

On an average day in 2024, nearly 96,000 vehicles traveled through LAX, according to data from Los Angeles World Airports.

Since at least 2015, the earliest year for which data is publicly available, personal cars have made up the majority of vehicle activity at the airport. The share of vehicles that are personal cars increased from around 54% in 2019 to nearly 65% in 2020. That proportion has remained relatively steady for most years since then.

Between 2015 and 2016, the volume of rideshare vehicles, including Uber and Lyft, traveling through the airport increased nearly 21,000%.

Last year, rideshares made up the second-largest share — 21%— of all vehicle activity at the airport.

Jacob Wasserman, a transportation researcher at UCLA, said the new station won’t totally change how people are accustomed to getting to the airport.

“I don’t think that the issues of people seeing driving as the only way to get to the airport are going to go away, even with a transit connection,” Wasserman said.

He brought up the example of going between Hollywood and the airport, which would involve three different trains and wait time at each of the stations.

“If you’re new to L.A., you don’t know how to navigate the system, you don’t have a TAP card ... you’re still going to take an Uber, even if it costs a little more, because of the frustration of that,” Wasserman said.

Additional rail links to the airport, such as those planned for later phases of the Sepulveda Transit Corridor, could make using the train to travel to and from the airport easier, he said. Those ideas, if fully realized, are still decades away, though.

For now, it’s probably worth trying the train, at least once, if just to avoid the horseshoe.