Not a Home Run: the proposed location of a new MLB stadium create an intractable mess of parking and transportation

For the 10th time in two decades, the city gets "excited" about a baseball stadium.

If you didn’t hear the news, there’s a tentative agreement between the baseball advocates and the Zidell family to build a stadium at Zidell Yards. This might be one of the worst proposals the MLB advocates have ever put forward.

It’s important to understand that the entire cast of characters in this Major League Baseball charade are all Hype Men, they’re about as reliable, down-to-earth, and detailed as the CEO of a buzzword startup from San Francisco promising to bring in “next gen” “AI” “serverless” “blockchain”. At the center of this is a former Nike executive, who reminds of Gavin Belson, that has worked on this project for a decade without results - consider this interview of Craig Creek with Dan Haggerty/KGW from 2018 - nothing has changed in terms of what’s concrete. In the tech world we’d call this vaporware. But dear reader, I think it’s important for you to consider a true emblem of all of this absurdity: the baseball advocates included a gondola in their 2018 rendering for the baseball field at Terminal 2. Yes, a brilliant moving seating platform that could go out over the water during a game.

I’ve rented many Blazer suites for corporate events, and I can assure you that zero business executives are thrilled to be trapped in a glass box without a bathroom or beer service with their favorite IT vendor. This unrealistic, unwanted “feature” of a ballpark is disconnected from what a sports venue needs to function - and this was how they thought to hype people up - and this foreshadows the competence in choosing of Zidell Yards as the location for a major stadium.

The location proposed for this stadium just beyond absurd. This adjacent neighborhood, the South Waterfront (“SWF”), was designed as quixotic car-free eco-utopia by Homer Williams and the politicos at the time. It’s the pinnacle of the anti-car movement, which explains why it’s been such a wet fart of a neighborhood, failing to live up to basically any of the promises in the last 20 years.

Many Portlanders have compared the South Waterfront to being on an Island, as it’s divided from the rest of the city by the highway and river. Would we build a stadium on an Island?

How big is this stadium actually going to be? No one knows for sure because it’s all a fantasy and vague renderings, but the last plan was designed to use an abandoned shipping terminal aimed for 34,000 seats. So let’s go with 34,000 seats for this thought experiment.

What does the transportation infrastructure requirements look like for a civic stadium?

To understand the traffic impact of a stadium in Portland, let’s look at the pre-pandemic traffic patterns of Providence Park, home of the Timbers: Providence Park Comprehensive Transportation Management Plan 2019 Season Report

25,000 fans going to Providence Park, here's how they got there and how planners desire that they get there:

• About 8,000 fans took transit. 924 took a bus, 7,300 on Max. That's 33%.

• About 12,000 fans drove in about 5,000 automobiles. Where did they park? 4,445 fans in 1,860 cars parked on the street. 7,347 fans in 3,074 cars parked off-street in parking garages. All told, 47% of people drove.

• About 1,685 fans took Uber/Rideshare in 674 cars, 7%.

• 1,416 fans biked or scooted, 6%

• 1,883 fans walked, 8%

To summarize: fans utilized a total of approximately 5,000 car parking spots, and roughly 50% of the people drove. In addition, there was an additional 674 vehicles passing through with ride share.

What about the Moda Center and Trail Blazers? They also have studies on transportation, but I’m having difficulty tracking down the official documents. There is an article over on BikePortland from 2016 that surfaced this graph from the Trail Blazers, which has roughly similar numbers.

Quoting BikePortland “According to the team about 6 percent of Blazer fans walk or bike to the Moda Center. Add the 5 percent who take the bus and 25 percent who take light rail and you’ve got 36 percent of the 19,980 Moda Center fans who get to the game without a car.”

64% of people going to a Blazer game in 2016 were driving, which is higher than Providence Park. That 5% of single passenger vehicles represents an astonishing 1,000 vehicles. It’s safe to assume that the carpooling population represent at least 5,000 vehicles. Moda Center claims to have 2,500 parking spaces spread across 2 surface lots and 4 structures.

What does the transportation infrastructure look like for this neighborhood today?

If you wanted to drive to the South Waterfront right now in September 2024, what do your options look like?

There’s just a single 2-lane road named Moody Avenue that goes from downtown Portland to this community. There’s a few entrances into the South Waterfront from Macadam, but only if you’re traveling North on Macadam and need to take a right. Suppose you’re coming from the Marquam Bridge and going southbound, then you’re dumped at Macadam and Bancroft with just a single lane of traffic going this direction. Doing the math here, there’s only 2 vehicle lanes into the South Waterfront, Macadam or Moody.

Next - you get to the SWF, where are you going to park today? Because the area was designed by the rabid anti-car crowd there’s no free parking anywhere, the few big parking lots are reserved for OHSU employees, and the numerous gravel lots are unutilized (certainly didn’t take a page from the Goodman playbook and transform those into economic utility with parking lots). Parking in the SWF area is a contentious issue, it’s been cited as a reason grocery stores don’t want to invest in the area - or more accurately, why the city prevented grocery stores from moving in. Today absolutely no one cares about the lack of parking in SWF because today there’s no reason to go there. Almost no shopping, no attractions, mediocre restaurants (I just ate an Indian place in the neighborhood about two weeks ago, $80 for two people, hilariously dry chicken biryani, and terrible service). Certainly some people have made this community their home, but I live a stones throw away and almost never find a reason to go to South Waterfront compared to Sellwood, Multnomah Village, or Hillsdale.

Now it’s time to leave South Waterfront in your car, good luck escaping the mouse trap. If you want to go southbound on Macadam (suppose you live in Clackamas County) there’s only 1 road out, S Bancroft on to Macadam, and it’s just 1 lane and the traffic light hates your existence! Otherwise you can get easy access to 405 from going north on Macadam, but even just getting to Macadam means navigating several blocks before you can take a turn. Of course you’ve got Moody Ave leading back to downtown.

Let’s do some math on what this infrastructure allows:

• Being super generous and assume we’ve got 2 lanes in-to and 2 lanes out-of the South Waterfront and Zidell property without any bottlenecks or traffic lights to contend with. A highway can move up to 1,500 vehicles per hour - so let’s waive a magic wand and assume these roads were super optimized like a highway and we could bring in 3,000 vehicles per hour.

• Being generous at 3 people per car, that’s just 9,000 people moved per hour. (Seating capacity of 34,000 seats)

• Even in this most optimized scenario, suppose only 50% of the 34,000 of the people drive, it would take over an hour and a half for the vehicles to leave the area moving at maximum uninterrupted speed.

• The reality of how traffic will actually flow is likely 1/3rd to 1/10th of this vehicles per hour, so we’re talking about hours of sitting in traffic to and from the game. Godspeed to you poor saps taking the Ross Island bridge.

Transportation planners are going to be aware of this and will likely plan “an improvement” such as rebuilding SW Curry St at the I5 exit. It will be critical to re-do the roads in multiple adjacent neighborhoods. The entire Ross Island bridge interchange, especially the entrances going east bound, is going to be a total mess logjam after any game. The vehicle entrance to the stadium will need to be installed on S River Parkway, leading into The Mother Of All Parking Garages. Consider the Portland Airport’s parking capacity is 3,500 spaces - and that’s roughly the capacity we’d need - and that’s not going to physically fit on the property. I couldn’t easily find the number of spaces OHSU has in the South Waterfront, but reasonably let’s ballpark it at 500 spots they could offer the stadium guests on game night.

Where are we going to find additional parking for 2,000 to 4,500 vehicles?

Obviously the City thinks they can tell drivers to fuck themselves, as the City has done for decades. They’ll handwave away any concerns, make empty promises. Look no further than how the city treats the neighborhood near Providence Park, Allan Classen has documented the lies and betrayals for twenty years.

This will impact real people in nasty ways - take a look at the neighborhood connected to the Gibbs Street Pedestrian Bridge - they are going to be flooded with at least a 1,000 vehicles on game night. Has any engineer measured the hard capacity of this bridge? The city will respond to this parking problem with the only hammer they have in their tool box: parking meters and parking passes. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the “need” to install meters suddenly extends along Corbett and Macadam all the way to the Sellwood Bridge.

The South Portland Neighborhood Association in 2019 was able to convince PBOT to reroute traffic passing through the community to the Ross Island Bridge. I’m sure this Neighborhood Association and the City’s new District 4 representation will be thrilled at thousands upon thousands of cars that park in their communities for an hours long baseball game. I personally suspect this will result in multiple lawsuits and injunctions that delay the project or simply kill it.

It won’t be just the neighborhood, the bike advocates are going to lose their shit and they’ll lash out through PBOT. The residents in SWF neighborhood will lose their shit. I suspect that even a modest parking garage will cause a hyperventilating panic attack from the climate change crowd - and realistically this needs to be the second largest parking garage in our region.

Of course, ironically, you might drive right next to this stadium every day since it will be immediately adjacent to the Ross Island Bridge - you just won’t be able to get to the stadium. The property passes under the bridge. And did you know that the Ross Island Bridge is managed by the warm, kind, and competent bureaucrats of Multnomah County? This means helpful leaders like JVP will be a political stakeholder in all of this. The County might just sabotage this whole thing because of “bridge concerns” or some other nonsense.

I’m also just totally ignoring all of the civic and emergency services requirements. We’ll just assume that police cars and ambulances and everything else will just make it work. We’ll just assume that the neighborhood can magically handle 10,000 people leaving the stadium on foot and they’ll just stick to using the sidewalks and not block traffic and transit lanes.

Making all of these traffic retrofits like this work is just beyond any reasonable budget PBOT will throw in, as ultimately this is a really stupid and inaccessible spot to build a stadium!

I’m wondering - will PBOT try to sabotage this deal because it will radically fuck over the neighborhood and traffic patterns? Or is there enough political grease on these wheels for smooth sailing into this terrible traffic jam? When will the city “wake up” and realize this was a terrible idea and need to apologize profusely to the public?

What about Mass Transit to the South Waterfront?

The funny thing about the anti-car planners who dreamed up SWF is that they really didn’t anticipate needing to move a large volume of people through this area. I guess they figured everyone would bike or walk? Initially this community was only served on the dead-end of the Portland Street Car, it was slow and did not come frequently. Now there’s functionally 2 Street Car routes to this area: the N/S line, the A/B Loop. The Street Car is operated by the City of Portland.

• Street Car holds approximately 150 people per car and could hypothetically arrive as frequently as 10 minute intervals - with 3 trains that’s bringing a grand total of just 2,700 people an hour. (Seating capacity of 34,000 people)

Several years ago the Tilikum bridge brought a lot of TriMet’s services: the Orange Line and multiple bus routes (9, 17, 19, 35, 40, FX2 all run through the area). Plus, hypothetically people on game night could ride to Natio Parkway (38, 45, 54, 55) or Barbur and take advantage of those bus routes (12, 44), then just walk to the stadium.

• What’s the maximum number of people the Orange Line can move? Well, 372 people per train, in an optimistic scenario they move people equally in both directions and TriMet works overtime and we have 12 trains per hour - that’s only 4,464 people. (Seating capacity of 34,000 people)

• Buses are an interesting proposition because of their flexible nature, TriMet could establish direct “Park & Ride” facilities on game night with a plan of moving a great deal of the population on buses. A clever and well organized idea like that isn’t going to happen thanks to TriMet’s incompetence. But really, the best we can hope for is a meager 5% of the 34,000 people on game night taking a bus. That’s still a lot of full buses.

And the Gondola from OHSU! Can’t forget that. At least a dozen people will have a great trip to this stadium, maybe even some sick kids and disabled vets.

• In a really great scenario mass transit can move approximately 7,000 people per hour through this area. With a seating capacity of 34,000 people, and if approximately 1/3rd take mass transit, that’s 10,200 people needing a ride - so again, an hour and a half clog at the train/bus station.

If you decide to take public transit, good luck finding a convenient route. According to Google Maps, it’s an hour and 15 minutes to take mass transit from Nike HQ to Zidell Yards and you need to catch two trains. Even if you take a singular bus route, like the 35 from University of Portland, it’s still a 45 minute ride to Zidell - a car is faster at just 25 minutes. It’s an hour from the Airport or Clackamas Mall to Zidell. And it’s going to be a long wait after the game.

Piling on to this, TriMet has got some serious problems ahead that I’ve outlined in the past.

TriMet's problems are exponentially worse than anyone is talking about

Just seeing the winds of public transportation, Portland has been outdone in the transit world. It’s embarrassing that a city like Kansas City Missouri offers on-demand ride services, they’ve achieved the Portland progressive dream of “zero fare” transit, and here in Portland our ridership has utterly collapsed yet we still operate the WES for less than 100 riders per business day. It’s genuinely hard to believe that by the time this stadium opens in several years that TriMet will have turned it’s self around. Right now I’d bet that in 10 years TriMet will be worse off. In fact, once we see the multi-billion dollar price tag that for TriMet’s tunnel, we won’t stomach it. I suspect that most of the bus routes currently serving South Waterfront will be reduced in frequency or eliminated all together, as they just won’t be moving the working class to downtown.

Can we walk, bike, or scoot to the South Waterfront and Zidell?

That’s probably the most practical way to get there if you’re with in reasonable riding distance. You see, the mode you take is dictated by where you live.

In many ways this is an ideal location for biking: there’s a pretty good bike path to the area along both sides of the river. If you live anywhere near the Spingwater Corridor then biking will be the best route. Anyone that can easily bike/scoot to the Tom McCall Waterfront can breeze to this stadium. If you’re one of the 1,000 remaining people comfy biking into downtown Portland for work, then it’s no problem to go to Zidell.

If we’re really generous about Moda and Providence Park’s statistics on how many people bike/scoot, if it’s approximately 6% of people, it would mean 2,000 game-night scoot/bike riders. Let’s say that the target is 10% of people biking or scooting, so 3,400 people. By comparison, in peak Portland biking in 2013, central city saw only 3,478 bike riders. The current OHSU bike valet has a capacity of 400 bikes. Providence Park has a maximum of 454 bikes.

Today, I doubt all of the street bike parking spots in SWF would be enough to handle this surge during a game.

It’s certainly not impossible to put in bike parking garage at this stadium, they’ll absolutely have to. 500 bike parking capacity would be a good minimum.

Is there a better location in the city?

No, I don’t think so - because I don’t think we really need a new stadium or an MLB team. I think the Zidell family are great people and I’m happy they’re finding use for this land, but this just isn’t the best use for this land, not by a long shot.

At this point I doubt the project will even go through, as it’s contingent on the MLB selecting Portland for a team, plus getting the funding lined up - it’s just a long shot all around.

I think everyone with half a brain would much rather have this land developed into a business center and residential units, including a grocery store. Remember, we had that all planned out and it came down to a pissing match with the City over a few million dollars, so the whole deal was poisoned.

You know what would be really great for Zidell Yards and Oregon’s economy? That $5 billion dollar National Semiconductor Technology Center that Kotek is trying to bring into Hillsboro. Imagine having this important research facility next to our important cancer research facility, making a nice little PhD haven. A single epiphany conversation at Elephants Cafe between a top quantum chemical physicist and a Knight Cancer researcher might legitimately change our world.

I’m also curious if this location is going to compete with Tom McCall water front park for vital downtown festivities like the Blues Festival? It ain’t good if this takes people out of downtown. And what about the stupid Fish Bowl music venue that Prosper Portland has advocated for along the river for a decade? Can we call that dead once this baseball stadium is built?