How cars get in the way of sports
Part One of the Progressive's Guide to Stadium Development
“Becoming a part of this neighborhood is more than just moving in,” the Kansas City Royals say about their proposed downtown ballpark, “it’s harmoniously fitting into the community.” If they mean uprooting several existing businesses and a church and extending a regressive sales tax to finance their plan, then, yes, they would be fitting right in.
Kauffman Stadium, the Royal’s current home, is revered as a modernist classic, but it is 10 miles and approximately 35 highway interchanges from downtown, sited on exurban land in the early 1970s. The public transit option that the team suggests to get to and from the ballpark is a bus that makes all stops with 40-minute headways. It’d likely cost the public hundreds of millions to renovate the K to wring another 50 years out of it.
On the surface, either scenario presents a taxpayer-funded Faustian bargain. Kansas City accepts a new urban ballpark, gentrification and displacement be damned, or it keeps baseball confined to the suburban fringes, accessibility and sustainability be damned. Cities across the country find themselves in this pickle, with six MLB teams publicly kicking the tires on new or renovated ballparks and controversial arenas proposed in Philadelphia, suburban D.C., and elsewhere. They’re difficult civic conversations made more difficult by our not acknowledging what stadium development in the U.S. is actually about: cars.
To be (a real city) or not to be
WHYY reported on a panel of “volunteer experts” that last May called into question the traffic and parking studies underpinning the 76ers’ proposed arena in Center City Philadelphia. “[Sixers] games get out at 10 or 11 at night and the people with families will be very reluctant to … take public transportation,” said panelist Edward Gruberg. “It’s not gonna work.”
Gruberg apparently picked up sociology and city planning expertise while working as a biology professor. It’s expertise he also lent to the successful effort to block a Phillies ballpark in Center City in the early aughts.
Down I-95, Alexandria, Virginia, is contending with the politics of a proposed arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals. A traffic mitigation plan won’t “protect the surrounding neighborhoods," arena opponent and former Alexandria vice mayor Andrew Macdonald told Axios. "There is really no amount of funding for Metro and other improvements to roads that is going to make Potomac Yard a good location to put a sports arena."
Neighborhood busybodies stomp their feet and say you can’t build here, but that exacerbates the problems they claim they want solved. An arena or ballpark near no one often requires new roads and parking, which induces car trips, which induces traffic, which induces emissions, pollution, noise, and stress.
Professor Gruberg and his allies imposed decades of ecological and social harm, as well as untold millions in infrastructure costs, by forcing the Phillies to stay at the South Philly Sports Complex, where they opened Citizens Bank Park in 2004. The Sports Complex is at the very end of SEPTA’s Broad Street line, sequestered from the several rail lines and bus routes that converge in Center City, and that sole transit option carries just 15% of fans to a sold-out Phillies game. That’s no better than the transit ridership to a sold-out Padres game.
Philadelphia has one of the best transit systems in North America—San Diego very much does not—and we as a society have chosen to not capitalize on it. To most fans, it’s simply easier and faster to drive to a ballpark surrounded by freeways and a moonscape of surface parking lots.
The Padres also opened a new ballpark in 2004, but they returned to downtown after decades in suburban Mission Valley. (My urban-suburban distinction is based on land uses, not municipal boundaries.) Today, Petco Park is one of the best urban sports venues in the U.S., but the powers that be made one crucial mistake: they brought parking with them.
The ballpark was approved by a 1998 ballot measure, and to placate a heavily suburban electorate the city guaranteed 5,000 new parking spaces downtown, ensuring there was almost as much parking near the new Petco Park as there was at the old Qualcomm Stadium. Petco Park opened before all the parking was built, though, and in that brief, glorious window transit ridership to games was estimated at 50%. (I wrote about the Padres’ connection to urbanism in my third essay for Out in Left.)
Transit ridership was that high because cars can’t park in spots that don’t exist, and traffic doesn’t automatically get worse when land uses are intensified or when roads are closed, as Petco Park required. This is called “traffic evaporation,” and it happens whenever the public is told to avoid a certain route or driving altogether because of a planned road closure.
In 2011, Los Angeles closed a long stretch of the famously congested 405 freeway for maintenance. Traffic disappeared across the city and air quality improved immediately. The much-feared Carmageddon didn’t happen because behavior adapted to the built environment, and behavior adapted after parking lots at Petco Park opened. Transit ridership plummeted, and today downtown San Diego is choked with cars on game days. (It doesn’t help that every apartment building constructed since then has a parking garage.)
The Sixers proposed no new parking as part of a Center City arena, and it’s not included in the Royals’ plan for downtown Kansas City, even in a place that has the most freeway lane miles per capita. Both teams argue that extant parking can handle the expected traffic, and the Royals chose the location they did in part because it was the only site that wouldn’t require modifications to nearby freeway ramps, “improvements” for which the team would probably have to pay.
Even if the teams’ aims are more financial than virtuous, their land use decisions reflect how “over-parked” American cities are, which reflects the U.S.’s perverse planning paradigm. We think everyone’s going to drive everywhere, so we design our cities for that, then everyone drives everywhere. Traffic doesn’t exist because cars do. It exists because we build roads to parking stalls and charge virtually nothing for that convenience.
This is to say urban stadiums on their own won’t generate more car traffic. Existing roads and parking will. They’re just sitting there, waiting to be used—demanding to be used, in an economic sense—and to prevent that demand, people oppose stadiums (or anything, really). It seems to them the only tactic available to prevent traffic.
There’s an existing supply of public transit, too, and in an area like Center City Philadelphia it is an extensive supply. It’s also demanding to be used, and it would be. Even the Sixers are sometimes fun to watch, and families will get on public transportation at 10:00 p.m. if it’s the faster and cheaper transportation option. If people have traffic or parking concerns as they relate to new stadiums, or to any new development, then they should instead call for the demolition of parking garages and the closure of streets to cars.
You may be thinking, “Yeah, right, you big car-hating Marxist ding dong. No one’s going to ditch their car. Everything’s too far away and transit doesn’t work for everyone.” And to that I say: now you’re getting it.
Cities are great because they are efficient places to conduct commerce, governance, religion, and so on. They also provide many opportunities for fulfillment because culture derives from human beings. The more, the merrier.
The American focus on traffic and parking undermines this efficiency and enrichment. Cars require a lot of space, which engorge the built environment, pushing everything away—public transit can be as much as fifteen times more efficient than private vehicles. The devotion to the latter makes us poorer both economically and culturally.
Kansas City’s downtown, where the Royals’ new ballpark would be, is the city’s densest area and has a streetcar line. It’s by far the most valuable and productive land in the region. It’s practically Kansas City’s only valuable and productive land. “The newer, annexed sections of Kansas City are now a fiscal albatross, imposing disproportionate liability upon the municipal government for maintenance of roads and pipes while providing a disproportionately small share of tax revenue,” Daniel Harriges writes for Strong Towns.
In other words, the city subsidizes the suburbs, no matter how often or how loudly single-family homeowners say they pay their taxes. This is true everywhere.
Our fixation on cars complicates our addressing social problems. We want affordable homes, but limit development and drive up costs by imposing onsite parking requirements. We want more small businesses, but banish them from residential neighborhoods through zoning and again impose parking requirements. We want nicer and safer roads, but the people who use them most pay for them the least. We love sports, but don’t want new sports venues because of a range of externalities.
Philadelphia has the third-largest downtown population in the nation, and providing those residents an arena that they can walk or roll to is apparently not worth considering, let alone valuing. In our car-brained discourse, the people who—brace yourself—live in apartments and don’t own vehicles either don’t exist or don’t matter. Maybe these people, supportive of or indifferent to an arena, are too busy living life or making ends meet to participate in a midday panel about development.
If we want more homes, then we should build homes. If we want sports stadiums, then we should build stadiums. Without car facilities, these things would need to be closer together, which would contribute to and leverage the efficiency of cities. They would make us richer, healthier.
This is most pertinent to ballparks because baseball is our most urban sport. I wrote about this before, so the gist is: the sport as we know it was made possible by intercity rail, and the everyday schedule of baseball requires proximity and accessibility. Sitting in traffic on eight football Sundays is an inconvenience. Sitting in traffic for 81 baseball games is cruel and unusual punishment.
Additionally, the game is best observed as close to the field as possible, unlike, say, football and soccer, so the compact ballparks that urban areas necessitate are ideal. And nothing brings more people together more often than baseball. The sport is a major thread of the civic fabric, and that fabric is degraded when it’s stretched out, suburbanized.
What we’re really arguing about, then, when it comes to stadium development is what our cities should be and who they should be for. Until we exclude cars from that conversation, we’re just spinning our wheels.
Coming soon: Part Two, which will address stadiums and gentrification, and Part Three, which will address stadium subsidies. Subscribe below if you like what you read. If you’re already subscribed, then share this post with someone in your life.
Wow, is this good or what? A must read for budding urbanists.