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Comment by nharada | Hacker News Reader

I was curious how much bigger the real stadium parking was.

SimCity: https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/simcity/e/...

Real Stadium: https://i.imgur.com/KwT1T53.png

I am surprised that this was surprising to people. Cars are much bigger than people, of course you'd need bigger parking lots than seating space

Assuming no other transportation alternative, and single person per car as well I guess?

Not assuming that, it's not that obvious how big parking needs to be.

> of course you'd need bigger parking lots than seating space

There is a tacit assumption in your statement. Of course you don't need vast parking lots around stadiums, and there are plenty of real-world sports arenas that don't have those (some examples [1][2][3]). The parking that there is is structural, and most people simply use public transit to reach these places, which are often located in moderately densely built areas. So, allow me to restate your claim, with a different assumption:

Of course you need great mass transit connections to a stadium, how else would people reach it?

Edit: But yes, people also don't have a good intuition on how much space cars actually waste in bulk. For example, many people don't seem to realize how much space it saves on roadways if 50 people sit in a bus or or tram or train rather than in 30 or 40 cars. Indeed, any rational motorist should be enthusiastically in favor of any project that makes public transit more attractive or accessible, purely for selfish reasons!

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[1] Nokia Arena in Tampere https://goo.gl/maps/3WmAxfA2pCXDre8p7

[2] Helsinki Olympic Stadium https://goo.gl/maps/BQhopp5kRtTrEDR79 [under renovation in the aerial imagery]

[3] Tele2 Arena in Stockholm https://goo.gl/maps/za3y6HfRvocjfZR37

Even in US cities, stadia often lack massive surface parking lots. Giants stadium and Fenway are examples that do have some (very expensive) parking but are also on top of transit.

Or Letzigrund in Zurich, with a capacity of up to 50,000 people for concerts, and absolutely zero street parking available: https://goo.gl/maps/kPye3VdVB9ZLpPsx8

Oh, very nice example!

Edmonton's original light rail line was good for connecting the home of the Oilers with the home of the Eskimos, the former home of the Oilers, as well as the home of the Ooks, the Golden bears, as well as the Saville Sports centre and the Claireview rec center.

The light rail line is not so good for connecting people from their home to their place of work. It was built a long an old industrial rail corridor 40 years ago and the area around all the rail stations is still zoned as industrial.

They've since built massive expansions, which is good, although they are now nearly 4 years behind schedule on the first major leg expected to open. I'm looking forward to an lrt system that's good for more than getting quickly from one sports complex to another.

I'd love to see how they manage parking.

I'm also a little curious on how to compare capacities. Per wikipedia, it is only 25k for sports. 70+k for teams is common in many of the other stadiums I looked at. That said, I don't exactly know that many stadiums. Very intimidating to see how large many of these places are.

> I'd love to see how they manage parking.

There are a few thousand parking spots in garages a few stops away on the light rail, but the whole district the stadium is in has only about 5k public parking spots overall for ALL purposes. The sensible strategy is to arrive by public transit — many of the events (both concerts and sports events) have a train ticket included in the price of admission, run extra trains for the events, (including extra security in the case of soccer games), and light rail drops you less than 100m from the entrance of the stadium.

If you absolutely need to arrive by car, either come early or pick a garage elsewhere in the city, and take public transit to the stadium.

If you're absolutely allergic to public transit, you could probably get a Taxi, Uber, or friend to drop you off.

For sports events, some of the away fans travel in hired buses which will drop them off at the stadium, wait at some special lot (considerably more space efficient than the equivalent in cars, and can be further away), and pick them up again after the game.

That looks like a pretty far distance to walk from the furthest parking spots to the stadium. Do these stadiums have some sort of "mass transit" system to move the people from their cars to the stadium?

I just measured that stadium on a map, corner to corner it is 1.3km. That is 20 minutes even at conservative elderly person walking speed, and the stadium is in the middle so for everyone it will be less than 10 minutes walk.

If you are about to sit for few hours and shove hotdogs + sugary drinks down your throat the 10 minute walk will do you good.

In my experience, some of them do have transport shuttles (golf carts, small vans, sometimes busses) that just do loops of the parking lot. Even some of the stadiums that don't provide that as an intentional house service find groups forming small shuttle companies to opportunistically make a few dollars on that service (and jam up parking traffic that little bit more because there aren't designed service routes, just these ad hoc third party providers trying to make a quick buck on a game day).

It's not saying much that stadiums are weird in a way that games don't model (edited). A stadium's audience loves to drive to places, that's the purpose of the destination, to watch a thing then eat garlic fries and drink and drive home, so whatever.

I like the author's politics and agree with her sentiments. But if the author of this thing thinks she can run a business on Main Street without parking, by all means, she should go and do that. It gives me "I'm going to release my app for low end Android devices" energy. People who spend money, especially on the alcohol and jewelry on which Main St thrives, really fucking love to drive.

The most authentic system to me in Sim City was starting in debt, which I understand few players do. Then, it makes most sense to pause time and spend 100% of your money on day one, because services can be paid in deficit but improvements cannot. So why waste positive balance on services you can keep on with deficit spending? This strategy brings you the greatest ROI and the greatest tax base growth.

The micro of like, how many square feet of X does it take to simulate system Y... I don't know, who cares. The minmaxing people on YouTube make fascinating content re: urban design ideas, but it's not like it's grounded in reality.

That's a very North American biased view.

In fact, many studies have shown that in reasonably structured cities, pedestrians and public transit users are a more important source of income to downtown commercial services than motorists. Their individual transactions tend to be smaller, but there are more of them. But it's also vital that the city center and its neighboring areas are actually places where people live, not just visit for work and shopping. There's a quote that goes something like "Americans really like to be tourists in the city they live in".

But yes, many business owners (and the sorts of politicians they tend to vote) are irrationally attached to the idea that motorists are the ones who bring in the money, and that proposals to make cities more livable and less car-dependent would be really bad for business. I'd wager that to an extent they're just trying to come up with rational sounding post-hoc reasons for their emotional attachment to cars and driving.

> But yes, many business owners (and the sorts of politicians they tend to vote) are irrationally attached to the idea that motorists are the ones who bring in the money

If they're so irrational, go and start a business with no parking! I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm saying that you're not appreciating the forces that make people put up with commutes and parking in the first place.

> pedestrians and public transit users are a more important source of income to downtown commercial services than motorists

My family and I bike everywhere. Obviously my dog in this race is more accessible cities.

I'm just being intellectually honest.

Like dude, the company that makes my e-bikes is going into receivership.

I live next to Valencia Street in San Francisco, and there was so much opposition to building new bike lanes, thoroughly vetted by experts, from cyclists themselves. I would almost call it "irrational."

They didn't even build the center lanes very far, because the center lanes from 23rd to Cesar Chavez would have reduced the way the megachurches use the center lane as free parking on Sundays.

The businesses on Valencia Street need those underage CSU revelers trucked in by Ubers. They cannot walk from a side street to Blondie's, the thing they pay for is to be dropped off in front of the door.

Someone has to deliver all that alcohol that sells! Someone has to truck the produce in gas-guzzling trucks to Rainbow. Someone's gotta gas-powered-bus the pickers to pick the produce at Rainbow.

This is my one neighborhood. You are welcome to try to start a new local business on the idea that "[poor people's] individual transactions tend to be smaller, but there are more of them." I can guarantee you will fail.

I appreciate that there are experts studying this. They are welcome to apply for civil jobs in San Francisco! They can go and win elections! I am aligned with those politics and want those outcomes, and I am not saying they are inaccurate at all. I am saying your "studies" an incomplete view on cities.

I understand and empathize with your frustration, but I did specifically say that there are some prerequisites for car-light city centers to work well. But I felt that you in turn unfairly generalized the unfortunate NA situation¹ when in fact in, say, Europe there are dozens of cities with pedestrian/transit-first historical centers and hundreds more where it would be perfectly achievable – and is slowly being achieved – if not for ideological opposition.

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¹ Even SF is much less dense than almost any European city of comparable size!

San Francisco is a small city, but, at 6,655.4 people/km2, it's more dense than Berlin, at 4,126/km2.

Strongtowns has an article on this [1] that cites papers which show that increases in walkability lead to higher home values and attracts more businesses. If you have studies that demonstrate an effect and a model which corroborates the effects, opposition is necessarily irrational. The fact is that in NA people are very attached to their cars and parking and that people in NA are much more "fitness inequal" (people who are unfit in NA are much more unfit than unfit people in other developed countries) [2] so it's much more likely for folks in NA to oppose anything that takes away parking.

[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-s...

[2]: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/trackin...

Yeah because their plan was stupid. For what's being asked of it, they should make Valencia one-way to accommodate its needs.

> It's not saying much that stadiums have very favorable land prices, which aren't modeled in the games.

But that's not even true, much like your assertion that businesses are kept afloat by customers who drive to them.

> But if the author of this thing thinks she can run a business on Main Street without parking, by all means, she should go and do that.

The whole point is that this is illegal. Let’s make it legal again and see what happens. :)

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