One of the commitments that Paris made for this summer's Olympics was ensure that every single competition venue was served and accessible by public transport. In fact, if you look on their website, it clearly says "no venues in the Paris region are accessible by motorized vehicles."

For those who attended, this seems to have worked out quite well. So much so that Los Angeles just made a similar commitment for the 2028 Olympic Games (excerpt from the New York Times):

L.A. mayor Karen Bass said Saturday the city is working on expanding its public transportation system to hold a “no-car Games” in four years, which means spectators will have to take public transportation to all Olympic venues. To accomplish this, she added that L.A. will need more than 3,000 buses and plans to borrow them from around the U.S.

Of course, the built environment of Los Angeles is slightly different than that of Paris'. One was built around the car, and the other was not. And I think the success of Paris 2024 shows how a robust public transport system is uniquely equipped to absorb significant demand shocks when needed.

Here's an excerpt from Le Monde talking about transit during the games:

Not only was the audacious gamble of organizing the first Olympic Games completely accessible by low-carbon public transport, on bicycle and on foot successful. Not only was transportation to the many competition venues scattered around Paris and its surrounding region fluid. But the transit network and its agents also proved their ability to ensure, thanks to planned initiatives and adapted resources, fast, reliable and even pleasant travel. What's more, the Paris Olympics offered the pleasing spectacle of a large city mostly freed, for a time, from the clutches and nuisances of automobile traffic.

But regardless of built form, both of these examples represent one of the positive externalities associated with hosting the games. They force cities toward massive positive change, and that's always a good thing.

Sometime before the Paris 2024 Olympics this summer, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is expected to announce who will host the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games. Right now, the two frontrunners are thought to be the French Alps and Salt Lake City/Park City -- I think respectively.

Obviously these are two fantastic winter locations. But one of the things that the local committees need to do before they can secure the games is show the IOC that they have enough hotel rooms on hand. More specifically, they need 24,000 rooms reserved for 33 nights. This covers 17 nights during the games, 14 nights before, and 2 nights after.

Most of these rooms, about 10,000 or so, will go to journalists.

I didn't fully appreciate -- or I just didn't think about it -- that this was something that needed to be done 6-10 years out. Because right now there is a human running around try to lock up these rooms in advance of the decision this summer.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, they're already at 85% of the requisite 24,000 rooms. Though some of these rooms have yet to be built and some of them reach into neighboring Wyoming, which apparently isn't an atypical distance when it comes to meeting this accommodation requirement.

For obvious reasons, I'm rooting for Utah here. I really want them to get the Winter Games.

There is an ongoing debate about the value of cities hosting the Olympic Games. And that's because this is usually how it works: You, the host, spend a lot of money (Tokyo 2021 was over $25 billion), it feels really good during the games while the world is watching you on TV, and then everyone leaves and you have a big bill to pay.

As I understand it, this has generally been the case for almost all of the games. One rare exception is Los Angeles in 1984, which supposedly managed to make over $230 million from hosting. In pretty much every other case, the rough value was, at least in theory, things like exposure, ego, and hopefully a bunch of assets that will remain useful to other people once the games are done.

But as I have argued a few times before, perhaps the most important hard-to-quantify benefit is this: Hosting the Olympics creates an immutable city-building deadline. Because, what could be worse than not being ready when your global guests show up?

A perfect example of this is what Paris is now trying to do with the Seine ahead of the 2024 Olympics. The goal is to clean up the Seine so that it's actually safe enough for the athletes to compete in it. That would obviously be really cool for the games, but it would also be a wonderful legacy for Paris.

Would Paris still be doing this if it weren't hosting the games? Perhaps. Paris has a habit of doing some obviously good things. But I bet it wouldn't be moving nearly as quickly.