Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, was quoted in a Los Angeles Times story about a lawsuit by labor advocates against the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority over a $730 million contract bid to build new subway cars. The subway cars are intended to replace the city’s aging fleet and run on the D Line extension to West Los Angeles, which is scheduled to be running before the 2028 Olympics. About Metro’s bidding practices, Matute commented on an earlier $66-million contract to upgrade the city’s tap-to-pay program, in which the agency did not publicly request bids but instead modified a two-decades-old contract. “The downside of this is that Metro can use the compressed timelines of delivering transportation services and infrastructure to its advantage to constrain procurement choices,” Matute said, noting the appearance that the agency ran down the clock to limit the feasibility of other alternatives.