DColeKC wrote: ↑Wed Jul 22, 2020 3:41 pm
GRID wrote: ↑Wed Jul 22, 2020 2:29 pm
DColeKC wrote: ↑Wed Jul 22, 2020 2:17 pm
100% agree. Let's not forget some of the reason for wanting it downtown is to be closer to residents who can walk to the stadium and tourists. No one is walking to the Truman Sports Complex right now and very few business folks in town for work are catching a game because it's cheap and easy to get to. Hopefully this means an increase in attendance. Not to mention the overall experience for out of town guests. Being able to stay downtown and walk to all the spots required for a family weekend trip is huge!
Being 30 miles from two very urban ballparks and having gone to dozens of games at both, I think you are overestimating the percent of crowds that walk to games form the immediate local area. It might increase weekday attendance some, but will it be enough to offset the loss from those that don't want to drive back into the city and deal with parking etc. And parking and traffic will be a problem not because there is not enough parking, but because KC's downtown highway and surface street infrastructure is just not designed for large crowds coming and going.
Downtown KC doesn't even have any major streets to collect and distribute traffic to and from the stadium like you have in Denver, ST Louis Baltimore, DC etc. In order for a downtown park to work in KC, you would need to spend a few hundred million on infrastructure improvements alone. Anyway, my point is that most people, even in very urban ballparks come from places that you have to drive from or take transit. The streetcar will help, but still most will drive. A VERY tiny percent of people gong to the game will be coming form people that live downtown or are staying in downtown hotels. You can see this in any city. Clev, Balt, DC, Sea, Toronto etc. Then you have Milwaukee which draws very well from a city smaller than KC without a downtown park. LA basically has a suburban park even though it's near downtown and they draw 50k a night. 99% of people that go to cards games are from the burbs. Baltimore, Pitts, Cleve all can barely get 10k on many nights with amazing downtown parks. Build it downtown, but don't expect it to change attendance much.
You still need a 35k seat park though or again, how do you even make the numbers work to be in the MLB in the first place. Got to be able to pull in those 35k crowds on fri and sat or during special games.
Only thing I disagree with is the STL comment. Nowhere near 99% come from the burbs. STL, Texas and Atlanta are the only mlb teams I have actual inside information on. STL games actually feature a solid percentage every game from out of town guest staying in downtown hotels. More so on the weekends of course. Big business attendance on weekdays as well.
Atlanta sees a big regular attendance from people living within 1 mile of the stadium. They average almost double the attendance of the royals.
Texas is a bit odd because it’s similar to KC’s current situation but does have the entertainment complex there and residential in the pipeline. Still somewhat Isolated from major residential.
I mean the local fans are mostly from the burbs. Obviously I was being a bit facetious there, but StL is a suburban city, probably more so than KC is on a relative scale. But yeah, the Cards have a massive draw, not only from out of state, but from most of rural Missouri.
I guess I just hope KC figures out how to do a downtown ballpark right. Honestly a lot of things KC does are half ass and on the cheap. I just think some money needs to be spent on a stadium and the entire east side of downtown for it to really be worthwhile. I just think a stadium plopped down on the east side of downtown with little to no real improvement to the area is sort of a waste especially if it's a cheap feeling minor league type ballpark compared to other new MLB parks. The highways and surfaces streets in all of eastern downtown would need to be redone and a lot of park space needs to be added and there has to be a major residential/office etc project that goes up at the same time (or it will never happen at any decent scale).
I honestly just don't see all this happening. I would love to see it, but with a downtown park, the city needs to go big or not do it at all in my opinion and that is nearly impossible to pull off in the fragmented KC area. KC just doesn't have the population to pull of such a massive project without metropolitan support and cooperation and that cooperation and support is still not there. It may not even be there in Jackson County, let alone the entire metro. Add in the fact that a massive amount of KC sports fans are against even the thought of moving the Royals downtown and KC is going to end up with the most scaled down, cheapest downtown ballpark built yet surrounded by parking lots for decades. Traffic will also gridlock trying to get to and from with KC's obsolete downtown highway system (downtown KC has a million lane miles of underused roads and highways yet can no way support high volume game traffic) because it's so poorly designed and none of it can handle any sort of volume. And in the lack of real transit won't help. That streetcar will not be able to handle any sort of real volume that would really make a big dent in traffic and the traffic in downtown going to games will clog up the streetcar's ability to move the few fans it can because it's not in its own right of way. Just my pessimist opinion of the matter.
If you can't do it right, then why not just make the TSC 1000 times better at a fraction of the cost. If you can do it right, than it would be pretty awesome.