Ready, Set, Hike! A Trial Trek to MetLife Stadium
The officials planning Super Bowl XLVIII want it to be the Super Bowl of public transportation. They are not just discouraging fans from walking to MetLife Stadium on game day in February — they are forbidding it.
— The New York Times
A reporter attempts to walk to MetLife Stadium. Most likely the reason one won't be allowed to walk into the Super Bowl is "terror"-related, but the article raises again the question of why our pedestrian environment is so degraded. Why have we allowed our cities to be built in such a way that the owners of publicly-financed sports teams and their multi-billion-worth corporate sponsors can helicopter in to the game, but a regular person can't find infrastructure to make it safe and possible to walk in even if they *were* allowed to?
An assignment: look at your local stadium, most likely financed by public (your) money, on Google Maps and assess whether it's walkable. How does it rate on the Walk Score scale? (Indianapolis' rates a 72.) And a design problem: what could be done to make it better for a pedestrian, a family, perhaps a team of football-playing dogs?
2 Comments
Thanks for posting Donna. Pasadena's Rose Bowl gets a 45 score; pedestrian accessible but folks are encouraged to take free shuttle buses as the last 1.5mile leg from closest light-rail. Not terrible, considering the stadium was built in 1922?
Ben Hill Griffith has a Walk Score of 74 out of 100 not to shabby but then again we are a smallish town...
also this article and the whole "terror" reason/excuse depressed me.
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