If You Build It, They Will Bottleneck

For their May 28 game, the Atlanta Braves will be handing out bobbleheads commemorating Chipper Jones’ rescue of Freddie Freeman during a 2014 blizzard. Freeman had been stuck on a freeway for five-plus hours by the time Jones reached him.

Jones better give the ATV a tuneup. He’s going to need it to rescue Atlantans stuck in similar traffic snarls as they try to make it to Braves games next summer. The team’s new home, SunTrust Park, appears to be at the eye of a perfect traffic storm.

Braves fans got a sign of which way the wind was blowing as soon as Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed gave the team the proverbial finger in 2013, when he called its bluff and refused to match Cobb County’s $450 million in public funding to bring the Braves to the burbs.

My decision not to invest $150 million to $250 million for renovations to Turner Field or interfere with a transaction when the Atlanta Braves are moving 12 miles away means that Atlanta is going to be stronger financially and not choked by debt,” he wrote in a column that posted on CNN.com. “This decision also means critical investments in our city’s infrastructure — on bridges, green spaces, roads and traffic lights.”

Reed’s stand was, to say the least, unusual. According to a 2013 Pacific Standard article, 101 new sports facilities opened between 2003 and 2013, and most received public funding. All the while, economists everywhere have said the same thing. Sports stadiums and arenas are bad uses of public funds. No one understands this better than government leaders in the towns that currently host Braves-owned minor league franchises. According to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek story, the Braves are experts at getting the public to foot stadium bills. SunTrust Park is just its latest boondoggle.

(To be fair, even Atlanta isn’t immune to taking the plunge. The new home of the Atlanta Falcons, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, has a projected cost of $1.5 billion, about $600 million of which will come from public funds).

Even the Obama administration has addressed the subject. In the 2016 budget he presented to Congress, President Barack Obama wanted to bar the use of tax-exempt bonds to finance professional sports facilities. According to a March 2015 Wall Street Journal article, cities have used these kinds of bonds to raise $17 billion to build stadiums and arenas.

City leaders just can’t help themselves, and perhaps the Braves eventually could have broken Reed’s resolve. Instead, of course, the team took Cobb County’s offer, leaving Atlantans, Reed included, wondering what in the heck just happened.

Cobb County residents were about to get their own jolt. After all, there’s always a sacrificial lamb in the budget when a stadium needs to be paid for. Cincinnati’s binge on new stadiums for the Reds and Bengals led to cuts for police, education and other noble and necessary line items. Government leaders in Cobb County faced an $86.4 million school budget shortfall in 2013, the same year it promised all those millions to the Braves.

Take a look at the graphics in this 2013 Mother Jones article written shortly after the deal passed. This is one of them, in case you don’t feel like clicking through:

Maybe one silver lining for all those teachers looking for jobs elsewhere is they won’t have to deal with all that extra traffic that’s coming.

SunTrust Park is nearing completion at its site near the junction of 1-75 North and I-285, the beltway looping Atlanta that has fertilized pop-up cities like Smyrna, the Braves’ soon-to-be home. Anyone who’s driven on either freeway near that junction from, say, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on a weekday understands what that means.

Fans who must take I-285 or I-75 to the game will never make it for the first pitch of any Braves game. Ever. They’ll probably miss the entire first inning. And probably the second. Traffic there is already blizzard-of-2014-like without thousands of fans converging on a 30,000-seat ballpark.

Like a seasoned politician, the Braves stay on message when asked about this, always going back to a heat map of the ticket-buying fan base. Based on this map, SunTrust Park is set not just where the action is, but also southwest of where a lot of the action is. Translation: these people won’t have to endure horrific freeway traffic. But here’s the thing. That map may be a lie.

Andy Walter is an associate professor in the department of geosciences at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton. He studied that map and wrote a paper entitled, “Mapping Braves Country,” posted last November on the scholarly blog Atlanta Studies. Three observations by Walter really jump out.

First, among teams that have moved into new ballparks since 1989, the Braves are moving furthest from the core of its host city:

Second, the heat map isn’t as precise as many people might think. Each red dot represents a ticket sold to a Braves’ game in 2012. It doesn’t show whether a fan bought one or multiple tickets that year. So a guy who bought a ticket on a lark but really has no interest in the Braves may have helped define “Braves Country.” Finally, the heat map is arbitrary. The main conclusion Walter drew is that the Braves came up with the heat map to help bring people over to their way of thinking, and for the most part it worked.

Walter said his study of the heat map isn’t a critique of the move itself or where the new stadium is being built. “As a sports fan myself, I saw it for what it was — a map of ticket buyers and not necessarily ‘fans,’” he said. “What I was interested in was how readily the map changed/shaped the discussion. To this day I see references to the map specifically or to the ‘fact’ that ‘the real fans’ or ‘most fans’ live north of the city. It has become an unquestioned truth.”

Walter’s paper generated a flurry of comment activity and direct emails to him nonetheless. The sense he got from this feedback is that Atlantans are ticked off. Many feel betrayed.

“The feeling of betrayal seems to derive from several places,” he said. “First, from the sense that the people of the city deserved better, given that for decades, and from the beginning of the team’s existence as the Atlanta Braves, the people of this city invested money, space, community, and sentiment in the team.”

He said fans felt betrayed because of the approach the Braves took, defining their fans as paying customers when fans — short for “fanatics,” mind you — think of themselves as more than just their team’s customers.

“The second message I heard in feedback to my article was disappointment, if not disgust, in the secrecy surrounding the deal, the speed of it (working ahead of and around democratic processes) and, relatedly, the unseemly way that governments within the metro region are competing at great expense for what is all of ‘our’ team,” he said.

Then there was the third group, those who were relieved the Braves were gone from the city. Angie Schmitt has written about the Braves’ move extensively for the blog StreetsBlog USA, and in 2014 she suggested the Braves’ departure is good for the city.

“For starters, they got to forego some pretty steep subsidies,” she said. “In addition, a huge new area of the city is open to development. A place that was most of the time an empty stadium and a lot of parking lots is going to become a real neighborhood, with help from Georgia State University. Some private development along with it, last I heard, will in addition generate additional tax revenue for the city and its schools.”

Atlanta sports fans may already have moved on. On the Web site The Bitter Southerner, author Ray Glier made a strong case for the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, drawing a line between that team now to Hank Aaron’s Braves teams of the 1970s.

Meanwhile, the storm clouds continue to gather over Cobb County. Schmitt’s latest article on the subject was last October, when cost overruns delayed plans to build a bridge spanning I-285 that linked the stadium to 2,000 parking spaces at the Galleria Centre shopping mall nearby. As critical as this bridge was to traffic management, the county wouldn’t be able to finish in time for Opening Day 2017.

The bridge project has since been prioritized. According to a recent report on the local NBC affiliate’s website:

The 32-foot wide project is billed as a multi-use bridge because it will include a trail for pedestrians and bikes with accommodations for a future transit lane. The full bridge project won’t be done until Aug. 31, 2017, but plans call for the pedestrian component of the bridge (to) be operational by Braves Opening Day in April 2017.”

Still, the Braves have yet to make their overall traffic and parking plan for the new stadium public, which makes it difficult to predict what the scene will look like on game days next year.

What about MARTA, Atlanta’s public transit system that includes buses and trains? Forget it. Cobb County has repeatedly rejected attempts at expanding transit lines into the region, actions that have a whiff of racism.

Meanwhile, the congestion builds. The population in Cobb County, already more than 688,000 people, is growing at nearly double that of the nation.

“Transportation planning has really been an afterthought with all this growth in the northern suburbs of Atlanta,” said Schmitt. “To bring a lot of people to the same place by car at the same time just requires an enormous amount of infrastructure that is very, very costly to construct.”

Schmitt said there are no simple solutions, adding that maybe the Braves could move back start times to help out the fans. According to the second edition of The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball, the sport has a history of doing this.

Until 1912, the New York Giants started games at 4:00 to accommodate the Wall Street crowd and the stock market’s 3:00 closing,” wrote author Jonathan Fraser Light. “Pressure from sportswriters trying to meet deadlines moved the time up to 3:30.

“Game time for night games was 8:30 in the 1940s, 8:00 in the 1960s, 7:35 through most of the 1980s, and often 7:05 by the late 1980s to save on the light bill. Night games during the World Series often begin at 8:30 on the East Coast to accommodate West Coast viewers who are just arriving home from work.”

Viewers. As in TV viewers, who now dictate start times sporting events in general, not the fans who actually attend them. No team understands this better than the Braves, which blossomed into “America’s Team” with a nationwide fanbase thanks to regular game broadcasts on superstation TBS.

“I grew up in Wyoming and never had a hometown MLB team,” said Walter, “but every day my brother and I would watch the Cubs and Braves on their respective superstations.”

The Braves no longer enjoy that national exposure, as their deal with TBS ended after 2007. But the team reworked its current regional cable TV deal in 2014 to reportedly rake in another $500 million in revenue over the life of the contracts. Translation? TV money rules, and start times aren’t going to budge.

That leaves Braves fans south of Cobb County with a pretty long journey to see their team play in person next year and beyond. Even Chipper Jones and his ATV can’t save them from that kind of traffic.

References & Resources

• Kasim Reed, CNN, “Atlanta mayor: Cost too high to keep Braves”
• Aaron Gordon, Pacific Standard, “America Has a Stadium Problem”
• Ira Boudway and Kate Smith, Bloomberg Businessweek, “The Braves Play Taxpayers Better Than They Play Baseball”
• Richard Florida, The Atlantic Citylab, “The Never-Ending Stadium Boondoggle”
• Eliot Brown, The Wall Street Journal, “Use of Taxpayer Money for Pro-Sports Arenas Draws Fresh Scrutiny”
• Rebecca Burns, Atlanta Magazine, “The Atlanta Braves are moving to Cobb County and everyone is kind of stunned”
• Matt Connoly, Mother Jones, “How the Atlanta Braves’ Proposed Stadium Deal Could Screw Their New Home”
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Who buys Atlanta Braves tickets”
• Andy Walter, Atlanta Studies, “Mapping Braves Country”
• Angie Schmitt, StreetsBlog USA, “Why Atlanta’s Better Off Without Turner Field”
• Ray Glier, The Bitter Southerner, “If We Win Again, We’ll Be One Again”
• Angie Schmitt, StreetsBlog USA, “Braves Stadium Relocation Shaping Up to Be a Disaster”
• Dan Klepal, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Braves bridge budget shows $2.2 million in additional costs”
• Dan Klepal, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Cobb County commission approves Braves bridge contract”
• Julie Wolfe and Rebecca Lindstrom, 11 Alive, “Cobb County approves Braves bridge for $10 million”
• Angie Schmitt, StreetsBlog USA, “Suburban Cobb County Leader Fears Rail From Atlanta to New Braves Stadium”
• Mark Bowman, MLB.com, “Historic Braves-TBS partnership to end”
• Tim Tucker, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Liberty CEO: Reworked TV deals mean ‘in the order of $500M’ to Braves”
• Jonathan Fraser Light, The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball