Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
November 02, 2006
Urban Planning

How do you get 40,000 people in and out of a ballpark efficiently? Washington is trying to plan for that.

The District is in the last stages of developing a handbook for moving tens of thousands of people in and out of the Washington Nationals new ballpark on game days.

The handbook "will define exactly how everything is going to be done on game days," one planner said, including traffic and pedestrian movement, police presence, ambulance staging and fan parking. It will put in place specific mechanisms for movement, from when to restrict on-street parking to which roads to close for pedestrians.

Given the enormous traffic problems in Washington, this is no small task.


Posted by David Pinto at 09:11 AM | Stadiums | TrackBack (0)
Comments

It won't be much of an issue if there's no off-the-street parking within a five block radius of the stadium, which is what they're looking at right now.

Posted by: Will at November 2, 2006 09:43 AM

I hope they are looking at the Metro too in doing this calculation. When I was living in DC and going to my fair share of Nationals' games, it was often a disaster on the Metro platform. They wouldn't really run extra trains so you would have ten minutes' worth of people cramming onto the platform at the RFK stop. I would say that NYC and Boston set the bar for this one. Just run trains constantly at the end of the game.

Posted by: Benjamin Kabak at November 2, 2006 10:19 AM

Ben - the Metro after a Nats game is crazy. Part of it is because the majority of people are going the same way (the Vienna / Franconia-Springfield direction) back through DC. Part of it is because they don't run enough trains at that time of night. Then again, DC doesn't run enough trains during rush hour either.

Another place I've never understood is Baltimore. You have a dual stadium complex (with Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium). And yet instead of building a deck, which could even be shared, potentially, they bought out a ton of lots in the area to serve as parking.

It's confusing, unsightly, and not very space effective. That's the impression I get from Baltimore in general, but I think my point still stands.

Posted by: Will at November 2, 2006 10:39 AM

The new stadium will address the problem of metro crowding with the planned addition of a new line, the purple line. According to this, the new stadium will be at the Navy Yard stop on the existing green line. Right now, this means that most people would be taking the green line inbounds towards the main part of the city, making it just as crowded as RFK's station is now.

The purple line will sort of run around the outside, creating new stops and also stopping at existing stations on existing lines. So for example, people going back to Bethesda wouldn't have to travel back to Union Station and then take the red line; they could simply go to Branch Ave. and take the purple. Should make life a bit easier then it is now. (I go to school in DC and Will's right...getting back from RFK is a huge pain in the ass)

Posted by: the other josh at November 2, 2006 11:38 AM

The Arizona Cardinals apparently put a lot of thought into managing traffic to/from their new stadium (it's easier/harder for football facilities; games are less frequent, but more fans per event), and ended up with a pretty good plan.

http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/5948924

Posted by: Subrata Sircar at November 2, 2006 05:01 PM
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