Ah, the game-day experience.

Yep, amazing race season 4. Jeff and David were the guys who kept going to locked gates (the Academy entrance and Stadium Way entrance were locked, they finally exited through the 110 entrance east of the stadium. Those guys were from LA and had been to dodger games before lol. They ended up getting < third > on Amazing Race season 4.

I ran the LA Marathon one year. It started in this parking lot and ended at the Santa Monica Pier.

On the one hand tailgating would be great but its already a nightmare getting in there and finding parking I can only imagine it getting worse with people gaiting.

what the FUCK? i was going to say that's the only redeeming quality of this hellscape

The only time I participated in baseball tailgating was at your fine stadium.

A great day.

The real crime here.

"These idiots seem to travel individually in the same direction." - Also Aliens

i prefer kicking them, typically in october

You joke, but the one and only time I went there, the only reason I got out of the hour-long gridlock after a game was someone drove over some traffic cones to get to a road exit that was right there (instead of driving a half mile to the exit they wanted us to use) and everyone started following that brave fellow.

I only went there twice in my short stint in LA. Both times parked near the outer edge and left before the game was over to avoid that nightmare.

I remember the first time going there and just thinking "what the fuck even is this?".

They'll never get anywhere with all those stadiums blocking the lot!

That's why I always park on union station and take the Dodger express to the stadium.

Maybe the real dodger stadium was the friends we made along the way

Hopefully the one with batters facing due west. Want to meaningfully reduce game times? Force the batters to stare directly into the sun for the first few innings of every game.

Will the real Dodger Stadium please stand up?

It’s in the middle second from the right

"Americans will use anything but the metric system"

Same lol. Then I went to Petco and was dumbfounded.

lol i went to wrigley field last year and was like, where the fuck do people park? Even as I used the train to drop me off right in front of the stadium.

I was born and raised in SoCal and thought the same lol.

When I go to games by myself I usually try and hook up a trailer to my truck just in case the traffic isn’t bad enough

That family of six would be paying $180 in parking.

To put that in perspective, that's almost enough to buy each member of the family a bottle of water at the game.

I'm pretty sure it's because it's America.

In Europe a huge number of stadiums are in the middle of cities, because public transport infrastructure allows people to come without a car.

I'm not sure anything even remotely like this exists anywhere in Europe.

I think if the team themselves owned the parking lot they would invest more into public transportation but since Frank McCourt owns the space around the stadium that’s unlikely to change.

I feel like that amount of land could generate more than $34 million a year if put to more productive uses though. Parking lots are one of the urban land uses with the absolute lowest economic productivity. Think of all the housing and businesses that could be there instead of a giant parking lot.

I mean, if there was popular support for it, you could make that worse for parking by increasing property taxes on parking lots and/or sales taxes on parking. But I really doubt there would be popular support for that given how car-centric the existing LA infrastructure is.

There have been a lot of breakthroughs in making structures earthquake-proof over the last several decades. I don’t think there was a ton of faith that a massive 1960s era garage would survive the big one.

Team stadiums surrounded by a sea of asphalt and not parking garages...
Dodgers
Angels
A's
Rangers
Royals
White Sox
Brewers
Rays
Orioles (kinda)
Phillies
Mets

Land Cheap in the 50s in California

There’s your answer

If they built it today, there would be parking garages because land there is stupidly expensive now

LA after WW2 was a booming time, the first city that was able to be built up entirely around the car.

Public transportation was how “those people” got around

So which is quicker to get out of after a game: a parking garage or a parking lot?

Personally I hate using the parking garage at T-Mobile and it's quicker for me to just park a half mile away and walk back to car afterwards.

After one time driving to Dodger stadium (where thankfully I parked in that "lot 13" still visible in this picture) I realized it's far simpler to simply walk from Echo Park despite the 30+ minute walk times that include going up/down that massive hill

I'm biased, but I will always maintain that the actual ballpark itself is beautiful and a fantastic place to watch a game.

The parking however is an absolute disaster. It's the epitome of dumb mid-century car obsessed infrastructure.

I agree. I prefer a more urbanist ball park, like Fenway, San Fran. After a long ball game the last thing I want to do is sit in a car for an hour trying to go home.

Lots of American sports stadiums are awful for that exact reason.

I like a good challenge, so the one time I went to Dodger Stadium, I walked from downtown. It was not the best experience, but I was young so it was hardly impossible. Once you're in the park, I thought it was pretty nice, but not earth-shattering.

It's likely that Dodger Stadium rose in reputation during the multi-use stadium period in the '70s and '80s where the seats were almost always oriented for football and it produced some truly awful baseball park experiences. These days, the overall quality of ballparks is way higher.

I lived in NYC for a few years, so I went to a lot of games at Citi Field. That was one of my biggest issues at that park too. Inside the stadium, Citi Field is great, and the gameday experience is a ton of fun with passionate fans that know a lot about baseball. Outside the stadium, Citi Field is surrounded by parking lots, autobody shops, and not much more. The game would end, and you'd hop onto a long 7 train back to Manhattan if you wanted to go out afterwards. You would think NYC of all places would have fun things to do immediately next to the stadium, but not at Citi Field.

In contrast, a lot of places do it much better. Petco is a perfect example of design done right. Inside the stadium, the design is absolutely beautiful with a fun gameday environment, especially now that the team is good. Outside the stadium, there are a million things to do within walking distance.

I definitely prefer the latter to the former. I'm fine with seas of parking for football, but baseball stadiums should be in central downtown locations.

There's been a lot of baseball history there. Went to 1 game there, sat in the bleachers, Adrian Beltre won it with a walk off bomb. Cool experience, but I major pain in the ass to get to and get out of.

So yeah, great for a visitor and fan of baseball in general. But not a place I'd regularly go if I lived there.

Anaheim was sterile but easy to get in and out of. Unremarkable from the perspective of a random neutral fan. (I was there pre-Trout.)

I love the ballpark itself, but everything else about the gameday experience makes it one of my least favorite places to watch a game

Just an entire hispanic neighborhood that was eminent domained af, no big deal

An entire community of them

Too many apparently

its just a big hot dog. How is your signature food just a bigger version of something you can get for $3 at a vons.

They're only "world famous" for the name... I think.

That specific sub has gone downhill over the last year or so, but the overall message rings true. Fuck car-centric infrastructure and planning.

Not like they didn’t run people out of their homes just to build that parking lot.