The Biggest Prize in Sport

Dubai Sport City

The business of sports, and it's relationship to the city, has been on my mind. A while back, this op-ed ran in the New York Times positing that rising ticket prices linked to tax write-offs for business entertainment has ruined baseball as a working-class diversion. Then this post, from the Guardian's soccer blog, on how in direct contrast to the English Premier League, Germany's Bundesliga has maintained a focus on the fans, kept ticket prices low and built impressive new stadiums, and as a result has the highest average attendances in Europe (if not the world). These caused me to revisit a post that Aaron Renn had over at the Urbanophile some time ago on pro sports naming rights. Get ready for some tangents.

I want to start off comparing apples with much larger apples. First, here is a satellite image of Toyota Park in south suburban Bridgeview, Illinois, home of Major League Soccer's Chicago Fire...


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...a perfectly acceptable small soccer stadium, one of the first specific-use facilities built in this country. Seats around 21,000 for a game. Now, here is Arsenal's new Emirates Stadium (still under construction in this shot), which holds just over 60,000...


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...notice anything? These are shown at the same scale. Here's the answer, from Ticketmaster's UK site: "PARKING: VERY difficult, street parking in a residential area with SEVERE restrictions." I chose Emirates to highlight a key difference in thinking when it comes to stadium development between the US and Europe. The stadium is a short walk from two London Underground stations, a British Rail station, and several bus routes. Meanwhile, Toyota Park is surrounded by parking lots and seriously awful pre- and post-game traffic jams, and a single bus line which gets stuck in that same traffic. And this for a stadium that would be considered adequate for a second or third division team in England or Germany. Compare it with the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas, which holds 100,000 and sits in the largest city in America with no public transit. Even more notable was the fate of Arsenal's beloved old ground, Highbury Stadium. Rather than tear it down, as would likely be the case in the US, it was converted to luxury condominiums for sale to well-heeled fans.

Aside from being yet another symptom of our national automotive addiciton, there's a serious public safety issue at play here. Anybody who has ever attended a professional or collegiate sporting event in America knows that folks like to throw back a few cold ones during the course of the game. But at the same time, we are effectively inviting people to drive home drunk by not providing adequate transit options. In Green Bay, a state legislator went so far as to suggest that installing roundabouts near Lambeau Field was a bad idea because it would be too difficult for drunk drivers to navigate.

New stadiums being built or proposed tend to fall in one of two camps: those in downtown cores, like LA's Staples Center or San Diego's Petco Park; or those nestled in exurban sprawl, like the aforementioned Cowboys Stadium. Los Angeles, in it's quest to lure an NFL franchise back to the city, is torn between the two models. The argument against the downtown stadium focuses on congestion and parking, and suggests that people wouldn't go to games if driving there was inconvenient. To which I ask, what are the two most-cherished stadia in the United States? Arguably, Boston's Fenway Park and Chicago's Wrigley Field...both of which are situated in dense, old urban neighborhoods with good transit connections, and neither of which provides much in the way of parking. Sure, a baseball stadium is different than a football stadium, but if you include transit improvements (which Los Angeles is already doing anyhow), and give people places to go hang out before and after the game, they will go. Besides, if people will go see the Cubs play, they'll see anybody.

Les Bicyclettes de Londres

Back from 'the Smoke' with a tale or two to tell. I wish that I had better photos to document but my camera was constantly malfunctioning. I landed right at the peak of last week's 24-hour Tube strike and set about making my way to the city. Upon alighting the Heathrow Express at Paddington Station, plans called for me to catch a bus to meet the friend I was staying with and collect the keys to her apartment.
Once I reached the street, the chaos of a million disrupted commutes became apparent, as I encountered a mob of hundreds waiting for buses. When mine came up and I realized it was already packed to capacity, and that cabs were in short supply and high demand, I decided that suitcase or no I'd have an easier time of hoofing it to Belgravia. Along the way I passed a rather picked-over cycle hire station, as well as a couple of Londoners with yet another transport alternative:



Unfortunately, the bikes were not an option for me, as you currently need to purchase an annual subscription to the service to use them:



As the empty racks can attest, the bikes were in great demand. From my observation perch on the upper deck of a London bus, it would seem that the highest demand is coming from business guys in suits. They were hardly the only bikes on the streets though, and watching people weave through London traffic gave me an entirely new perspective on just how much street width is needed for a proper bike route. Most London streets have just a few inches clearance between the traffic lane and the curb and yet cyclists were out using those inches in force.



The photo at right gives you an idea of the general alignment, though here in Hyde Park there is a wider-than-average traffic lane and a separated cycletrack alongside. Most streets do not have such a luxurious expanse off to the side, just picture a bike following those yellow stripes. The exception is on streets with bus lanes, which are open not only to cyclists but motorcycles as well, and in some instances, black cabs.


By the following day, the strike had ended and most Tube lines were running pretty much as normal. The shared bikes were still in high use however, and seemingly still mostly by these dashing Savile Row types. I took time to do a mental inventory on the types of private bikes being ridden about the city and it was a little surprising; while most riders tended to be on hybrids, there was a rather large contingency of home-grown Pashleys and similar upright models, a huge number of folding bikes, and the number of fixed-gears I encountered could be counted on one hand.

All in all, it would appear that cycling is thriving in old London town. I arrived just a couple of days after the Mayor of London's Sky Ride, which drew upwards of 85,000 participants this year. As I stood on the sidewalk...er, pavement, on Essex Road in Islington during the evening rush hour, the number of two-wheeled commuters passing me by was astounding. It makes perfect sense to me, in a city where it can take fifteen minutes to move two blocks by motorized vehicle (no joke).

I have a few more posts to wring out of this trip, on Dublin's growing bike infrastructure and on how my learning of Daley's impending retirement colored how I looked at things. Oh, it's good(?) to be back.

London is the Place for Me

Next week I'll be in London, checking out the bikeshare program, visiting friends and ogling antiquarian maps...just in time for a Tube strike and some typically awful British weather. Expect to hear more about it.

The World Laps Chicago

Since the World Cup is on it's two-day break before the quarterfinals begin, I have a chance to think about things less important. A few years back, Chicago was held up as a shining example of what big cities could do with bicycle infrastructure when the civic elites set their minds to it. Then, apparently, Mayor Daley got distracted by his dreams of Olympic glory, selling off the rights to the city's parking meters, inventing new ways to use the English language and who knows what else. Nowadays, a lot more is happening in New York, London & Mexico City than here at home.

I've been reading about what transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is doing in New York for the last couple of years with great envy. It wasn't until I finally booked myself a trip to London later this year that I realized how much we've slipped. As we all know, London is a sprawling metropolis, and as excellent as their transit system is, I've grown so accustomed to getting around by bike that I figured it would help out my patience and my wallet to do so during my visit. They don't have an ideal system in place just yet, and reading the comments on various posts on the Guardian's bike blog would indicate that there is still a very, very long way to go. But let's run down what's coming down the pike just this summer...400 bike share stations throughout the center city and completion of the first two "cycle superhighways". All under the aegis of a Conservative mayor in need of a new hairstyle who rides a bike to work. The city is spending £110 million just this year, a big chunk of which is coming from Barclays, who get naming rights to the programs and even get to put their logo on the maintenance crew's uniforms. But what impressed me more than anything is that the city's bicycle plan is totally integrated within the framework of Transport for London (TfL), the government body charged with running the Tube and double-deckers. Go to TfL's website and you can find an entire section with information on bike sharing, route planning and even a page where users can upload their own routes into a Google Maps mashup.

Again, the system isn't perfect, one of the largest flaws being that bikes aren't allowed on subway trains and only on buses "at the driver's discretion". However, it really got me thinking about the RTA here in Chicago. Public transit planners worldwide struggle with the dilemma of the "last mile". Including bikes in the equation would make transit a lot more attractive, especially in the suburbs, but of course only if adequate infrastructure exists to ride them on. This is something London really isn't too far ahead of us on, traffic has decreased since congestion pricing went into effect, but it's still pretty horrendous. And those streets are narrow, some London streets could fit into a single lane in a place like Schaumburg.

Speaking of lane width, I remember hearing an anecdote once about how the Mexican government promised to double the total mileage of the Mexico City's freeways by the end of a certain year. Money for the project either dried up or was siphoned off and the authorities simply doubled the number of lanes by remarking the roads and claimed it as a success. Nowadays I guess we would call this a road diet. The effect of these sorts of actions just made room for more cars, and now the city government is attempting to undo some of the ill effects, notably the infamous air pollution. A few years back they introduced the hoy no circula scheme, which restricts drivers from using their cars on a certain day each week based on the last number on their license plate. Now, the local government is pushing bikes as the ultimate solution and has begun by expanding bike parking, installing ramps down stairs into Metro stations, bike boxes, pedestrian bollards, bike sharing, all that good stuff.

None of this stuff is all that difficult. Chicago had a deal in the works for a bike share program a couple of years ago that fell apart, and is now tentatively moving forward with 100 bikes at six stations. Six. Compared with 400 in London, where stations will be no more than 400 meters apart, which do you think will be more successful? Despite Complete Streets design measures being passed by the city, county and state, I've seen very little in the way of new bike lanes, bike parking, bike anything over the past couple years. There has been some stirrings of support for bike boulevards and the like, but it seems like the grassroots support falls on deaf ears at CDOT, possibly because the agency just named it's sixth commissioner in five years? Mayor Daley set a very ambitious course five years ago with his Bike 2015 Plan...unfortunately, the amount of work left to do is daunting.

London Calling

Most "normal" people, when dreaming of a trip to London, imagine themselves shopping at Harrod's, drinking a few pints in an historic City pub, or perhaps attending a football match at the Emirates. If I've managed to corner you after a couple beers lately, it's altogether likely that I've told you how much I would like to go to London to see the world's largest atlas. The 1660 Klencke Atlas will be on public display for the first time ever at the British Library this summer, and being the huge nerd that I am, I'm pretty much awestruck. I mean, come on. Just look at this thing. All hand-engraved, to boot.


Today, the Independent ran an in-depth preview of the exhibition of which it is a part, titled "Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda & Art". It's accompanied by images of several more pieces that will be on display, including the one above, a c. 1917 French map depicting Imperial Germany as a hungry octopus. Wouldn't you just know it, now I want to go see it even more. But alas, London is a rather expensive place to visit, and expenses are something I can't really afford at the moment. So here's hoping I find a job soon to fund a London sojourn, or that some mysterious benefactor sees fit to buy me a plane ticket.

via The Map Room