City Proposes to Pick Up the Tab for Dodger Transit

Amen.

The Dodgers say that “the service should be publicly funded, given the amount of money the team has put into stadium renovations”

Um, how is that a public benefit? The stadium is not a public place. It is a private business. They upgrade their own property and that is a reason why the public should pay for the buses?

I am all for better public transit but this is about favoring one business, the multi-millionaire Dodgers. Give me a break.

Wouldn’t a service like this be much more effective from Chinatown station? I mean it’s 1/4th of the distance which would allow for shorter headways.

A Dodger DASH shuttle should not be publicly funded.

Furthermore, the organization’s management is missing a positive public relations opportunity by not volunteering to fund this shuttle. A “Dodgers to provide Union Station shuttle” headline would be worth 10x the operating cost of the project – especially given the increased ticket prices and parking rates that aggravated fans not too long ago.

Incidentally, how often does the stadium’s parking operation gets audited for compliance with the City’s Parking Occupancy Tax? In tough municipal financial times like the ones the City has self-declared, the Dodgers may have just shot themselves in the foot as a POT audit could uncover much more than the cost of a shuttle.

Let’s hope City Council goes after this one with the same zeal it did a similar amount to be spent on improving Pershing Square.

As I understand it, the Dodgers have complete control over their parking facilities and share none of their parking revenue with the City or County of Los Angeles. This was part of the sweetheart deal awarded to Walter O’Malley that gave him total ownership of the 350 acres in Chavez Ravine and was approved by voters back in 1958. Historically the Dodgers have been resistant to tying the stadium into a regional mass transit system as it might cut into that lucrative revenue stream.

To be honest, Walter O’Malley had a stadium easily accessed by mass transit, the famed Ebbetts Field in a borough called Brooklyn once so crisscrossed by streetcar tracks that its inhabitants were known as “trolley dodgers”. It was Walter O’Malley who moved baseball away from the urban neighborhoods and began the exodus to suburban ballparks, surrounded by parking lots and entered from a freeway offramp. Many of the new stadiums built in the last decade have sought to return baseball to its urban roots and are seen as a way to reinvigorate city neighborhoods. However. Dodger Stadium remains on its acropolis, overlooking the city yet somehow removed from it at the same time. The present ownership, under Frank McCourt, a man who certainly understands the value of a parking lot, will do little to change this in the near future.

Hooray for transit to Dodger Stadium. Boo for making the City pick up the tab.

Also, I know it’s probably better than having the equivalent number of cars on the road, but those Transit System buses are the lowest of the low in terms of emissions standards.

If you’ve been on Highland Boulevard during a Bowl performance, you’ve probably seen the exhaust those white buses belch. It also angers me that the buses sit on Ventura Boulevard idling for hours. They’ll probably be sitting in Chinatown idling for hours during Dodger games now.

The Parking Occupancy Tax is that 10% tax all parking lot operators in Los Angeles must collect and pay to the City of Los Angeles.

If the Dodgers have had a waiver on that tax for the last 50 years then they should never cry poor again.

This is an outrage!!

Not really, but why couldnt the stupid Dodgers just increase ticket price by $.50 or so to offset the costs? Why should my tax dollars go to supporting a sport I can’t stand? I say bulldoze the entire baseball field and put a public park up there instead.

How about, if we the fans, pay $.50 or $1 to use the shuttle? That should cover the $70K cost for the year.

Oh, thanks for looking into the pollution issue, Eric! I had no idea they were biodiesel. So even though they’re carbon-neutral… I still wish they’d put some soot traps on them.

My opinion on the Dodger’s proposed 500 million dollar development around the stadium. It sucks.

It may be a nice parklike setting that people love to visit. But Dodger stadium is still a remote outpost that will never truly be conected to downtwon. So putting 500 million dollars worth of development up there makes no sense. I really don’t see that too many people will want to visit there when there is no game or other event taking place so it seems like a waste of money.