Joshua Schank Discusses the Gondola P3 to Dodger Stadium

InfraStrategies' Joshua Schank, former CIO of LA Metro, was quoted extensively in today's Los Angeles Times article on the planned gondola to Dodger Stadium and the public benefits to allowing a private funder to build it.

Joshua Schank, senior fellow at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and Metro’s former chief innovation officer, said projects like these are too often derailed by “parochial interests.”

“From that perspective of people in the region, it’s absolutely a great project,” he said. “Very rarely do you have a project that has the potential to be iconic, serves a transportation purpose and is privately funded. That’s a very unusual set of circumstances.”

Schank ran an unusual department in the agency: the Office of Extraordinary Innovation, which first accepted the gondola proposal. The department takes unsolicited proposals and can turn them into Metro projects.

It created Metro Micro, the agency’s Uber-like local service. And it ushered in a new way of seeking bids by allowing private firms to compete to design the Sepulveda Transit Corridor connecting San Fernando Valley to the Westside. Among the ideas being considered is a monorail.

The gondola was one of the unsolicited private-sector proposals that came through the office.

“Is this a project that we should allow a private funder to build? And are there some public benefits to that?” Schank said. “I think absolutely, there’s a public benefit to it. And it’s very hard to deny from from a larger, broader perspective, the public benefit is huge.”

You can read the full article here: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-01-09/challenges-loom-for-gondola-to-dodger-stadium-planned-for-the-olympics