Ramans

Public transit is expected to be a top priority for Los Angeles Mayor-elect Nithya Raman, an advocate for expanding bus lanes and making the city friendlier for bicycles — and who campaigned on getting the Los Angeles International Airport people mover back on track after years of squabbles, delays and cost overruns.

As mayor, Raman will oversee the city’s transportation department and will have the power to appoint new members to the city’s Airport Commission. What’s more, she will have regional clout through L.A. Metro, the transportation agency that runs the county’s light-rail and subway lines.

Raman will take over as chair of Metro’s board of 13 voting members, a job now held by Mayor Karen Bass, whom Raman defeated for reelection this week. She will also get three appointees on the board, and can replace the current mayoral appointees — Councilmembers Katy Yaraslovsky and Imelda Padilla and community advocate Jaqueline Dupont-Walker — who all backed Bass in this week’s election.

Metro is currently in need of millions of dollars to fund a massive bus network for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Raman said that she would push Los Angeles’ congressional delegation to make this a key priority. In a statement to The Times ahead of the election, she said she will also prioritize Metro projects that “give the most benefits to the most riders and help make our network more useful” and plans to reinstate a project team in the mayor’s office to eliminate city delays on major capital projects.

Transportation analysts believe Raman, who has a graduate degree in urban planning from MIT, will be more aggressive in addressing transit issues than Bass, whose background was in healthcare and community organizing.

“I do think we’ll see a considerable amount of action on transit and multimodal transportation in the short run on a timeline that puts this work in the context of preparation for the summer of 2028,” said Juan Matute, deputy director of UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies.

Los Angeles voters also approved a charter amendment that will allow the City Council to disband the Public Works Board, a move that Matute believes will allow the city to streamline infrastructure projects. The charter change, combined with Raman’s election, will lead to “a shift in the foundation of transportation decision-making,” Matute said.

Among the transportation plans Raman has cited as priorities are the Sepulveda Transit Corridor project, which was approved earlier this year to connect the Westside to the San Fernando Valley; the East San Fernando Transit Corridor project to extend service along the E Line from East Los Angeles to Whittier; expansions of the K Line, to connect multiple communities from South Bay, Inglewood, Mid-City and Hollywood, and the D Line beneath Wilshire Boulevard; a new light rail connection in southeast L.A. County; and the Vermont Transit Corridor project.

That last project to add dedicated bike lanes along Vermont Avenue between 120th Street and Sunset Boulevard recently broke ground. It is also the subject of a lawsuit under Measure HLA that claims it requires a designated bike lane. Raman said she supports compliance with the measure, while supporting shared bike and bus lanes along narrower portions of the route.

Ahead of the election, Raman told The Times via written statements that her transit priorities as mayor would focus on safety, affordability and reliability so that people did not have to be as reliant on cars. She advocated for protected bike lanes and expansion of bus lanes during her campaign.

Raman also criticized Bass and the Los Angeles World Airports board of commissioners for not staying on top of the $3.3-billion Skylink people mover at LAX, a 2.25-mile train that is supposed to whisk passengers between the terminal and ground transportation. The project is years behind schedule and more than $1 billion over budget.

The contractor, LAX Integrated Express Solutions, or LINXS, has blamed the repeated delays on unsigned agreements between the city’s Los Angeles World Airports and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power as one cause, along with nagging technical issues.

At a news conference near the airport last week, Raman told reporters that if elected, her first-week priority in office would be to convene airport and DWP officials and the contractor to determine who is responsible for each unresolved issue in an effort to break the logjam.

“Taxpayers deserve an advocate at the negotiating table, not another bill for someone else’s failure,” Raman said.

Michael Schneider of Streets for All, an advocacy nonprofit, said he expects Raman to convene a task force to address issues around the people mover project during her first 100 days in office.

He also foresees her consolidating some departments, such as the Street Services repaving division under the city’s transportation department, and directing city departments to implement Measure HLA. It’s also likely, he said, that she will initiate a bond or a tax hike to raise money for sidewalks repairs, curb updates and other street improvements.

“I think it’s the first election where safe streets has become a campaign issue, and real money has gone behind it to try to change the status quo,” Schneider said.

Streets for All’s political action committee took out ads to elect Raman and defeat Bass, powered largely by contributions from hedge fund manager and bike lane advocate Aaron Sosnick.

Over the summer, Raman slammed Bass for pausing a bike lane and street safety improvement project near two cemeteries along Forest Lawn Drive that had come under fire by some in Raman’s district. The debate became so heated that the state Legislature ultimately intervened and set a law that would require a public hearing and approval from the City Council and the mayor’s office before moving forward.

Raman has told The Times that she supported multiple bike lane and multimodal projects including the 710 North Mobility Improvement Program along Valley Boulevard, Huntington Drive and Eastern Avenue, plans to set priority bike lanes during peak hours along Sunset Boulevard and add bike lanes and reconfigure the intersection of Virgil Avenue and Sunset and Hollywood boulevards.

It’s unclear how she will balance the push toward these types of endeavors when faced with community pushback.

Nadine Levyfield has advocated for more transparency and answers from Metro over a bus lane project through the center of Eagle Rock. The agency recently agreed to more community meetings to address ongoing concerns over how a reduction in lanes on a bottlenecked portion of Colorado Boulevard will affect traffic and parking through the area’s business district and surrounding neighborhoods. Levyfield believes the community’s asks align with Raman’s campaign.

“Running on a platform of accountability, transparency, improving efficiency, and making sure government agencies are accountable, we really hope she can help us ensure that Metro is prioritizing public safety,” Levyfield said.

Raman has said she is also committed to the city’s goal to eliminate traffic deaths and said she will treat an initiative that began under Mayor Eric Garcetti’s administration and faced significant scrutiny under Bass as a mandate.

“Angelenos look around and see faded crosswalks, busted pavement and darkened streetlights and wonder why the City can’t even take care of our basic transportation infrastructure,” Raman said in a statement to The Times before her election. “Traffic deaths are preventable and I’ll make sure we’re enforcing laws against dangerous driving, providing actual protection for people who walk and bike, and get our street lights back on and our streets fixed.”

“My priority is to make transit safe, affordable, fast, and reliable, so more Angelenos can avoid the high cost of car payments, insurance, and gas,” she said in the statement.

Nithya Raman slowly recited the start of her handwritten message to Angelenos.

Llegué de la India con mi madre a los seis años. Sé lo que cuesta empezar de nuevo.

I came from India with my mother when I was 6. I know what it takes to start over.

The mayoral hopeful was in the green room of Univision’s Westchester studios on Thursday, waiting for an interview with anchor Guad Venegas. He would ask each question in both English and Spanish, and Raman could respond in English.

But she hoped to do better than that.

Since the start of her campaign, Raman has sprinkled Spanglish into her speeches and sometimes offered whole sentences in softly accented, lightly stilted Spanish. It’s part of an effort to win over Latinos, nearly half the city’s population and a crucial swing vote , with less than a week to go before election day.

“Can you say the whole thing for me?” Raman asked Lauren Perez-Rangel, her Latino outreach senior director, who read the full message in effortless Spanish. Raman repeated it word for word, accent for accent, with no flubs or pauses.

“You got it!” Perez-Rangel told her boss.

“I hope,” Raman replied.

It was showtime.

Raman, who serves on the L.A. City Council, grinned when someone said “me vale madre” — I don’t give a damn — on the walk to the studio. She cracked in English, “I doubt that’s true!” when I told an Univision producer in Spanish that no one likes my work.

A cameraman proclaimed “¡Muy bien!” when Raman rattled off an “uno, dos, tres” mic check. Venegas responded in English, “It’s always like that” to Raman’s comment in Spanish that her pronunciation is better than her comprehension.

During the interview, Raman raised her eyebrows when Venegas talked about streets filled with “basura,” the word for “trash” that became an insulting pun on Bass’ name hurled by then-candidate Spencer Pratt during the primary. Raman answered questions in English even when Venegas only asked them in Spanish, fully understanding what he said. And she kept saying “sí” to acknowledge Venegas’ points, as a native speaker would.

She never got a chance to read her Spanish-language statement, but that was OK. I saw enough to know that while she isn’t going to write the next “Don Quixote,” she isn’t limited to ordering at Casa Vega.

Supporters have praised her efforts en español. Critics dismiss them as pandering. I see something more interesting at work.

Raman spoke Tamil and Malayalam in India before moving to the U.S. as a child. If she wins, she would be the first immigrant mayor since Canadian-born Frank Shaw in the 1930s. She’d also be the first mayor whose native tongue wasn’t English since Bernard Cohn, who grew up speaking German in Prussia and served as mayor for two weeks in 1878.

Having a non-native English speaker in charge of a world capital such as L.A. — and one who wants to express herself in the city’s second tongue — wouldn’t just be symbolic. A person who’s earnest about learning a language is forever trying to decipher something new, failing far more often than succeeding in the early going — yet always working to master the task.

Isn’t that what we want from any politician, especially in a city where 56% of residents live in a household that speaks a language other than English?

Los Angeles mayoral candidate and city councilmember Nithya Raman prepares to speak at a “Latinos Con Raman” rally at La Cita Bar in downtown Los Angeles on Sept. 18.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Familiarity with Spanish has become a prerequisite for L.A. mayors. Antonio Villaraigosa famously took classes to improve his assimilated Spanish. Eric Garcetti described his fluency as “good community meeting Spanish” and often delivered remarks in Spanish. Bass, who was married to a Chicano and treats her ex-husband’s children as her own, isn’t fluent but has a robust Spanish-language outreach for her campaign, complete with ads, mailers and websites.

For Raman, though, learning Spanish isn’t just a way to reach out to constituents. It’s a reminder of “what it means to grapple with a bureaucracy that wasn’t intended for you.”

We spoke outside Univision’s studios after her interview. I asked to speak about her experience with Spanish as a way to show a private side of her to Angelenos. (I had asked Bass to sit down with me and talk about food. The interview was initially scheduled, then campaign spokesperson Alex Stack said it was canceled so Bass could attend a news conference assailing Raman for saying that former LAPD Police Chief Daryl Gates was a “gold standard” in protecting immigrants. Bass’ campaign didn’t reschedule the interview and didn’t provide comment on her Spanish skills in time for publication.)

In 2022, Raman co-authored a motion that introduced live Spanish translation services at city council committee meetings. She wants the city to research whether it can provide the information that’s being lost as the Trump administration increasingly deletes Spanish-language versions of federal websites.

“You have to show them that you’re trying,” Raman told me. “And even if you go out there, and you speak broken Spanish, and you mess it up, and you don’t conjugate it properly, and you get all the endings wrong — ‘a’ versus ‘o’ — the fact that you show up and you say it, and you try it in Spanish, means something to the people that I’ve been talking to.”

Her Spanish journey began with four years of classes at a suburban Boston high school. She chose Spanish instead of French because she felt it “would be more useful for me in the world.”

Raman forgot most of it while attending Harvard and MIT but started practicing with her brother, a Spanish major at UCLA, when she moved to L.A. 13 years ago. She read bilingual books for beginners and streamed shows such asNetflix’s dark comedy “La Casa de las Flores” (“The House of Flowers”) and podcasts such as “Chill Spanish.”

Those lessons have happened “pretty regularly” since she joined the city council in 2020, Raman said, although she scaled back once the mayoral campaign intensified.

I wondered what languages are spoken in her household. Her husband, whose Tamil-speaking parents are immigrants from India, only speaks English. Her twin 10-year-olds “can kind of follow along” when she speaks to her parents in Tamil, but she is no longer fluent in Malayalam.

“I have friends like who speak a different language, and they’re, like, religious about speaking it to their children,” Raman said. While she would love for her children to learn other languages, “life is too stressful trying to make every moment of your time with your family into almost a chore.”

I asked about the pandering charge. Throwing out Spanish phrases in an effort to appeal to Latinos is a political cliché as weak salsa as eating tacos in East L.A. or cruising in a lowrider.

Raman shook her head.

“To try and communicate to people in the language that they speak doesn’t feel like pandering. It feels like what the city should do,” she said. “Why shouldn’t elected representatives here also speak Spanish, or do their best to communicate to people in their language?

“If there was a lot of Tamil speakers here,” Raman continued, “I would appreciate that for me and for my family and for my grandparents.”

Mayor Karen Bass speaks during the “Latinos Con Bass” campaign at Ernest E. Debs Regional Park on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2026 in Los Angeles.

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

Then I tested her Spanish.

Had she heard of one of my favorite words: convenenciero? Someone who goes with what will help them and doesn’t stand for anything but themselves. Haters have never outright called Raman a convenenciera, I said, but that’s what they’re insinuating in almost every other sentence.

In fairness, most politicians have a bit of convenenciero in them.

“People say, ‘She doesn’t stand for anything,’ but people also criticize me for being ideological, so which is it?” Raman calmly responded. “I try and learn. And I don’t come and say, ‘I know what you want.’ I say, ‘I’m trying to learn what you want, and I want to make the city work for you. How can I make it work?’”

So you’re not a convenenciera?

“I don’t feel that,” Raman said, repeating the phrase two more times.

I told her I’d ask three questions in Spanish. First: how was she doing?

“Bien. Un poco nervioso.”

“Poca nerviosa,” I corrected. A bit nervous. She thanked me for correcting her and said, “Sí, sí, nerviosa.”

What was she doing to try and relax during this campaign?

“Yo quiero estar con mi familia. Mis hijos …” I want to be with my family. My children …

She thought about the right phrase.

“… son mi vida.” Are my life.

What’s a word she loves in Spanish?

Perez-Rangel suggested chisme — gossip.

“I do like chisme!” Raman said with a laugh. But that wasn’t it.

“I like the word tomar [to take] and how many different meanings it has,” she said in English, then rattled off definitions and tenses in Spanish. Tomar bebidas. Tomar su tiempo.

“Tomar City Hall?” I asked.

She laughed again and said something that needs no translation: “Yes.”

A national panel of the Democratic Socialists of America decided Monday to once again delay voting on whether to uphold or rescind the Los Angeles chapter’s endorsement of Nithya Raman in the L.A. mayor’s race over concerns that Raman hadn’t taken a sufficiently tough stance against Israel.

The left-wing group’s National Political Committee had begun a review of the DSA-L.A.’s endorsement of Raman after some members pointed out that Raman hadn’t been asked for her position on “R22,” a DSA resolution that requires local chapters to inquire about a candidate’s support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel before they are endorsed.

The committee met last week and again Monday, when it voted to work with DSA-LA to organize an Oct. 31 meeting with Raman to assess her position on BDS and other issues related to the Gaza conflict.

If she fails to “provide clear and unequivocal commitments” to their questions, the national committee will vote on whether to rescind DSA-LA’s endorsement, a spokesperson confirmed.

If Raman wins the Nov. 3 election, the group also wants a commitment by her to oppose weapons being shipped to Israel out of Los Angeles International Airport.

If Raman has not “expressed support for BDS and condemned weapon shipments out of LAX” by Jan.1, the National Political Committee will “compile the documentation of fair and ample opportunity for education about the Palestinian struggle for liberation necessary to begin a disciplinary process under R22 and thereafter schedule a vote on expelling Nithya Raman on those grounds,” according to a resolution approved by the committee.

The Raman campaign sent a statement to DSA on Monday during the national committee meeting that outlined her stance on BDS.

“I believe the best way for working Angelenos to stand in solidarity with Gaza is through non-violent protest, legislative action, and diplomatic pressure, including BDS,” Raman said in the statement.

The Raman campaign declined to say whether the council member personally supports BDS, and pointed The Times back to the statement she sent to the DSA and other statements she has made in the past. Raman has said she does not plan to make BDS part of her mayoral platform.

Some Angelenos in DSA were frustrated with the move to rescind the endorsement.

“I feel that this is unnecessary, but that I am encouraged that Nithya has actually expressed support for Palestine and our priorities and that she is compliant with R22,” said Clayton Ryles, a member of DSA-LA who also serves on the 27-person national committee, after the meeting. “Not everybody agrees on that.”

Ryles — one of a few DSA-LA members on the committee — plans to vote against rescinding the endorsement. He also supported Raman’s endorsement as a member of DSA-LA.

Revoking DSA-LA’s endorsement of Raman would have represented a major incursion by the national organization into the local chapter’s politics, invalidating a democratic vote to endorse Raman that passed 937 to 484 in September.

The co-chairs of DSA-LA acknowledged that they had failed to include a question about BDS on their candidate questionnaire, though they said they had inquired about Palestine both on the questionnaire and during a candidate interview.

“This was an oversight,” Leslie Chang and Sean Wakasa, the co-chairs of DSA-LA, wrote in an email to members.

“Nithya had strong answers on Palestine in her DSA-LA questionnaire, in public forums … and in her response to the NPC today,” Chang said in a statement to The Times on Monday. “We are disappointed that the members of the NPC passed their resolutions without reading the materials we sent them, which clearly answer the many questions that are posed to us in the two resolutions.”

“In these last few days of the election, we would like to focus on electing our entire slate and continuing to fight for working Angelenos,” Chang said.