The World Cup soccer matches held in Los Angeles could have been a showcase for Los Angeles International Airport’s new automated people carrier, which promised to reduce airport congestion and ease access. Years behind schedule and over budget, the project is a painful example of megaproject megaproblems.
As thousands of visitors arrive, “the long-awaited SkyLink Automated People Mover remains unfinished and has yet to transport its first passengers,” stated a post on the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs website. The system, renamed SkyLink, was due to complete testing on June 30.
Delays have been a major reason for the $880 million cost overrun.
That number was the central focus of a public investigation completed last year by an LA County Grand Jury that evaluates controversial issues.
Michael S. Shapiro, a consulting engineer who is an expert and author on megaprojects, says that automated people movement is “an example of how large projects can find themselves in a second layer of risk beyond engineering, involving governance complexity, contract structure, diffusion of responsibility, and delayed public benefit.”
The 2.25-mile elevated guideway, part of a major airport-wide renovation, has three stations inside the airport and three outside. There was an original completion date of 2023 and a budget of $1.03 billion in construction cost and another $918 million financed by a private concessionaire.
The design-build-finance-operate-maintain consortium contracted to build and run the system, LINXS, consists of Fluor, Balfour Beatty, Dragados USA, Flatiron, Hochtieff PPP Solutions, HDR and HNTB. Alstom is the manufacturer and operator of trains. The works started in 2019.
A year ago, Fitch, which rates bonds issued for the project by the California Municipal Finance Authority, noted that while the consortium and the airport have demonstrated their ability to successfully negotiate claims for time extensions and cost relief, “the history of contentious disputes creates further risks to the timely completion of the project.”
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The tensions in the project may not be completely over. In a progress report presented in May, LINXS noted that the airport still had some “roadblocks” to the start of passenger service related to the approval of some design documents and the completion of some gardens.
The biggest current delay on the critical path, according to the consortium’s report, is the airport’s delay in making a pact with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for “customer utility accounts” and solar interconnection agreements for the project.
The status of these issues is unclear. Nor is it known whether they are a reflection of the project’s controversial past.
The design work got off to a rocky start in 2019. The LINXS design was done according to local and state bridge construction code, but the project team later learned that the design had to meet the building’s seismic code. The fault of this error was the first great conflict.
A second area of dispute opened up over delays in responding to requests for information. According to the 2025 Los Angeles County Grand Jury Assessment, the consortium bombarded the airport with more than 200 RFIs, and while the consortium awaited responses and responses to change order requests, work slowed considerably.
Construction work on an initial phase of SkyLink automated passenger transportation at Los Angeles International Airport. Photo: Courtesy of Los Angeles World Airports
The grand jury did not find the project to be mismanaged, or the outcome to be the result of fraud or abuse. He faintly suggested that some of the consultants involved could have done a better job.
Instead, it frames the project as a case of public accountability and governance, centered on the $880 million cost overrun, Shapiro says.
The grand jury suggested that the consortium, aware of the time pressure the airport was facing to ensure the system was up and running in time for the 2028 Olympics, continued working on its contract but at a slower pace. The contracts with LINXS, in retrospect, the grand jury stated, should have been better written to ensure that continuing work pending the contested issues did not allow for just “one worker with a shovel.”
Conscious of its “leverage” through time pressure within the terms of the contract, the grand jury suggested that the consortium’s experience with these matters gave it an advantage.
Fitch also noted a slowdown in construction, but it’s unclear exactly who was to blame and the details of the activity on the job sites.
Fluor Corp., the main party building LINXS, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the end, the grand jury wrote, the airport accepted $252 million in pre-code compliance change orders, another $97 million to pay for code-compliant redesigns and another $550 million for amounts covered by what it called a “comprehensive settlement” that included work delays caused by the airport. That was the basis, more or less, of the $880 million increase.
Excessive deadlines and change orders
In responding to its report, the City of Los Angeles agreed in part with the grand jury to implement several recommendations. He agreed to consider on future projects whether event-related deadlines could lead to excessive change orders, coordinate all code issues related to a project, and that a “showcase” schedule should be implemented to prevent city departments from being overwhelmed, a practice the city said was already the policy.
The city also agreed it needed to exercise more diligence when selecting a contractor, including how it would interact with city departments.
Clearer contractual language is also needed, the city agreed, about how progress on a project is maintained while disputes are resolved. For larger projects, more than one person was required to act as a “project neutral”.
In general, the city and the grand jury agreed, disputes should be resolved more quickly. Consider tying in recovery provisions that would apply to the losing party in litigation to avoid slowdowns during litigation, the grand jury recommended. You might also use “baseball arbitration,” where both sides submit final monetary offers and the arbitrator chooses one, the grand jury advised.
“It will apply,” was the city’s response.
There is still one more game to be played at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, between Spain and Belgium tomorrow, July 10. It’s too late for people movement, but for the Olympics the SkyLink system will carry thousands of people every week. Then the lessons learned from this will hopefully be well absorbed by everyone, including the contracting companies hoping to work on future Los Angeles megaprojects.
