Transportation trends in the last 50 years have simply gotten more and more car dependent. Do you live in the US, or are you talking about somewhere else? Do you have children?
Increasing car dependence in the last 50 years is not a trend I am personally observing.
Heckles, even in San Diego, where the trolley runs right into the stadium basically, you'd pay $5 per person round-trip, so you only need a family size of 3 to cost as much as the cheaper garages, 4 would match the "preferred" ones. Doesn't cost in gas, but you may be driving to the other end of the trolley anyway.
I do wish more transit systems had "kids ride free" deals.
I have the most experience with the Cubs. Children under 7 are free to ride public transit in Chicago, and children under 11 are de-facto free - they qualify for half-price fare and transit workers would rather wave them through than do the work make the card scanner charge the correct amount. Public school students can get a transit card that lets them ride for free anyway. And (pre-pandemic) if you rode public transit to/from work it was always cheaper to get the monthly pass so riding to/from the game had a $0.00 marginal cost. In effect, parking was only something that applied to people from the suburbs.
IF your family lives somewhere that is also served by that transit. Most of the stadiums listed are not served by transit that is reasonably accessible to where families tend to live.
> parking was only something that applied to people from the suburbs.
Exactly. That place with all the families.
Well, that's not the fault of the baseball team.
> Most of the stadiums listed are not served by transit that is reasonably accessible to where families tend to live.
This is definitely the fault of the baseball team. Look at Atlanta, for example. They moved from reasonably close to downtown to way out in the middle of nowhere, just to get away from the city. What about the other sports teams in Atlanta? Oh, a brand new dome right next to the train station? Hmm...
The article, and my response, is just acknowledging reality that things have gotten more expensive including parking, and that mostly people still drive to these sorts of venues.
Most people still drive to the new Atlanta dome. And Turner Fiekd had effectively 0 public transit prior to that move anyway unless you count a singular temporary bus shuttle route, as did Fulton Co before that. You have never been able to take public transit to a Braves game.
Driving to a venue to park your personal metal box in the populated city centers where 85+% of MLB stadiums exist is a luxury, and is not an expectation that can be extrapolated to an average attendee of a Major League Baseball game.
As mentioned by a different commenter above, I wouldn't even think to drive to Fenway. Or to games in San Francisco, Oakland, New York, Seattle, San Diego, Washington, and on and on.
This is exactly what the article is about. It used to be a normal thing for normal families to do, but the prices have gone up significantly.
You wouldn't drive to Oakland? Why? It's quite literally a stadium surrounded by parking https://www.google.com/maps/place/RingCentral+Coliseum/@37.7...
I wouldn't drive to the Oakland Coliseum because it literally has a dedicated BART stop accessible by everywhere else in the Bay Area.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
https://www.mlb.com/padres/ballpark/transportation/public-tr...
You’re just not looking then. You mention the Giants and the A’s but conveniently leave out the 49ers.
The vast majority of families in the US do not live anywhere near public transit like Bart of Caltrain. I appreciate that they’ve been built, but far more roads and highways have been built over that same timeframe.
It’s just…not. I don’t know how else to state it. Maybe it is for you. Maybe it is for the Bay Area. But nationwide it’s just simply not.
Uh... no. The few streetcars and bike trails built are drowned out by the massive growth in suburbs and people living even further away from city centers (or these stadiums).
Your trend comparison is leaving out the majority of the picture.