Cars wait in traffic to enter the parking lots at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles before Game 3 of the World Series.Luke Hales/Getty Images
Dodger Stadium was born after team owner Walter O’Malley flew over the site in a helicopter with the door removed. The ride left him terrified, but enthused about the amount of vacant land and its proximity to multiple highways. Fast-forward seven decades and the venue he envisioned that day is ringed by vast swaths of parking. Almost everyone drives to games.
A generation after Los Angeles, Toronto took a different approach. Then-mayor Art Eggleton was strongly opposed to the idea of building a venue in a sea of parking spots. What was initially called the SkyDome was instead slotted into formerly industrial land near Lake Ontario. There is very little on-site parking. Most fans walk or take transit to games.
There is lots to criticize in the SkyDome. Its costs ballooned and government picked up most of the bill. It was eventually sold for a pittance to a telecom giant (which renamed it the Rogers Centre). It’s notoriously bad for concert acoustics.
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But the logic behind how and where it was built makes it a stadium to emulate. There are a few reasons for this.
Thousands of parking spots around a stadium help encourage driving as the default option. The result is traffic jams, pollution and potentially, to the extent that people drink during the game, dangerous driving.
Giving so much space to cars also precludes other businesses setting up in the immediate vicinity. The result is that most of the economic value of games is captured by the team, with local merchants getting less of a slice. And if the stadium is downtown and still has lots of surface parking, which can happen if a city grows to surround an older facility, that is a poor use of desirable urban land.
Fans outside of the Rogers Centre before Game 1 of the World Series.Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
Conversely, building a facility with less parking can ward off these negative impacts. People find other ways to get to Jays games and are easily absorbed back into the city after. There are still traffic jams on game days, but the air is cleaner – and life is better for other motorists with the bulk of fans not driving to the stadium.
There are also greater spillover economic benefits to nearby businesses, which tend to fill up when the Jays play. High-rises house thousands of people on land that might have been dedicated to parking.
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Historically, sporting facilities were built centrally because that was where the fans were. Consider Madison Square Garden in New York, Happy Valley Racecourse in Hong Kong or the Montreal Forum, former home of the Canadiens.
Then, for decades, the trend was to build venues out of town. Land was cheaper and there were hopes of avoiding city traffic problems by making them easier to get to by car. In fact, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn, source of a team name that referred originally to dodging transit vehicles, partly to escape a cramped urban venue.
This model created its own problems, though. Dodgers fans fighting traffic and paying US$150 to park during the World Series might wish the old owner had set a different course with his stadium vision.
And downtown never fully lost its appeal.
In the last three decades, most Canadian NHL teams have bet on downtown. Among them were the Habs, which moved from the Forum to a facility less than two kilometres away. Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens was replaced with another central arena. The Vancouver Canucks moved from Pacific Coliseum to a venue further downtown.
The Ottawa Senators have the chance to be the next Canadian team to adopt this model. They play in suburban Kanata, where eight parking lots dwarf the arena, but are planning a new venue on empty land near downtown. While the specifics of the plan remain in flux, importing a model dominated by parking to central Ottawa would be a historic own goal.
It’s important to acknowledge that the SkyDome opened at a time when downtown Toronto was still a sea of parking lots. And, in fairness, this may have helped with the pitch for a stadium with minimal on-site parking. However, the decades since have showed that fans didn’t need it. Not really. These private lots were gradually replaced with condominiums as the city boomed, and Toronto has many fewer acres of surface parking now than it did then. In spite of that, fans keep coming. Games and concerts continue to sell out.
After three games in Los Angeles, the World Series is returning to Toronto. A winner could be crowned as early as tomorrow. But when it comes to the battle of stadium philosophies, one city is already the champion.