Or … the case for a stadium-specific train station in Foxboro instead of a sea of parking.

Football stadiums are big, but where do they “belong”?

Football stadiums are generally unlike other types of stadiums. With a few notable exceptions, baseball parks and hockey/basketball arenas are located in relatively urban areas. While they are sometimes surrounded by parking lots (ahem, Chicago) there is usually (but not always, looking especially at you, LA) relatively good transit access. Baseball stadiums generally seat around 40,000 people and are used for 80 to 90 games per year (plus other events), arenas seat fewer than 20,000 but a basketball-football-event arena may be used more than 150 times per year.

Football stadiums are much larger (generally 60,000 to 90,000) but far less frequently used. Aside from 10 or 11 football games, even a large city may only attract a few acts which can fill a 70,000 seat stadium: the Taylor Swifts and Bruce Springsteens and Beyonces of the world. MetLife Stadium in New York has just 23 large events aside from football this year, meaning it sits idle more than 300 days of the year, and it is likely the most heavily-used stadium in the country. There are only a few stadium-level acts touring at any time (it’s a lot easier to fill a 20,000 seat arena compared with a 80,000 seat stadium) and outdoor events can really only take place between May and October in most places. A large stadium will be a ghost town most of the time, not a great land use if you’re trying to build a vibrant area around it.

A ballpark or arena may see upwards of 4 million visitors per year, spread over 100 dates or more. Football stadiums may barely crack one million, concentrated into a couple of dozen dates. These two factors mean that these large stadiums are often sited differently than smaller arenas in the US. But when nearly 100,000 people descend on one location, it’s not easy to accommodate them. Football stadiums can leverage existing downtown infrastructure (transit and parking) but this can lead to or exacerbate to poor surrounding land use. Or they can be built in another existing, American amenity: the suburbs.

A quick aside: American like our stadiums like we like our highways: big. Of the 11 stadiums with a capacity over 100,000, eight are in the US (all college football, two of the other three are cricket, the third is in North Korea so who knows how big it actually is). NFL stadiums are usually a bit smaller, with more premium seating. Still, they’re big, Americans drive cars a lot, and football fans like to stand outside their cars and eat food and drink beer before the game so with few exceptions, at least some outdoor parking is present.

As Ray Delahanty recently pointed out, it’s tricky to get good land use with that size of an arena if it’s placed near a downtown. I’d go further: in the United States, football stadiums are so big and so car-focused and lightly used they don’t belong downtown at all. There are large stadiums in non-US cities which manage to avoid parking seas, although in general they are located in cities where the majority of people don’t drive (don’t worry, they still drink before the game). Of stadiums larger than Soldier Field, the smallest NFL stadium (62,000 seats), 70 of 153 are in the US, including 29 NFL stadiums and plenty of other college stadiums. (Other countries with at least 3 on this list: UK with 7, Germany and China with 5, Brazil with 4, Japan, Mexico, India and Spain with 3, often with access to multiple metro lines or near a major railroad station.) So midsize metro areas and college towns in the US have larger stadiums than the national stadiums in most countries.

Because of these factors (big, America, cars), football stadiums have developed with a lot of parking. The actual football field of play covers 57600 square feet, or about 1.3 acres (wider soccer fields are about 77,000 square feet). The stadium surrounding the field might take up around half a million square feet, or 10 times more. The parking around a football stadium? It takes 10 million square feet (in some cases, more), about 230 acres, which is worth point out is more than about a square kilometer, or nearly 20 times as much space as the stadium and 200 times as much as the field itself.

Many stadiums are indeed surrounded by this sort of sea of parking. Professional American football stadiums tend to fall into two broad categories: those in the suburbs and those downtown. (Larger college stadiums are often much less parking-dependent: many fans come from the adjacent campus and weekend games utilize campus employee parking which otherwise sits empty). Suburban stadiums are generally parking seas: in nearly all cases they utilize stadium-specific parking. (The two exceptions are in Green Bay, when neighborhood streets, yards and lawns soak up much of the parking demand, and Santa Clara, where nearby office parks can be used for weekend events.)

Urban stadiums are rarely islands in the middle of parking seas. For the most case, they rely on existing parking facilities in the downtown neighborhoods they border. There are two glaring exceptions, both of which somewhat paradoxically date back to the early 1900s:

• Denver’s Mile High Stadium (or whatever it is called now) is urban-ish. It’s a bit more than a mile from Union Station and the edge of Downtown, too far to take advantage of Downtown parking garages, although there are some closer transit connections. It was originally built on land that existed because it was an early-20th century landfill.
• The South Philadelphia Sports Complex, which dates to filled river delta area in the 1920s. The original purpose of the land was to build a large arena for the Army-Navy game larger than the ballparks which football fields were typically squeezed into at the time. This led to perhaps the most robust stadium-only transit service in history. Since neither team was local (the game taking place roughly in between Annapolis and West Point), the Pennsylvania Railroad ran dozens of special trains to a temporary station built on a rail yard adjacent to the stadium, handling tens of thousands of cadets, midshipmen and other attendees. The extension of the Broad Street subway line wouldn’t be built until the 1970s.

No modern stadium has been built near a city center with a full 10-million-acre parking ocean. Even here the economics don’t work to have massive parking lots only used a few days per year. It makes much more sense to utilize nearby parking garages which are usually empty on Sundays and that’s what generally occurs. There is some space for tailgaters, but most event-goers use parking garages. An added benefit: downtown areas are designed (for better or worse) to accommodate a lot of people arriving by car at the same time, and usually has a decent transit system which can bring in a fair number of event-goers as well. It’s interesting that there are a number of cities with NFL stadiums and no appreciable rail service: Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Charlotte, New Orleans, Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville and Cincinnati, and only Atlanta really has a heavy rail-served downtown stadium

Moving a lot of people to one location is … hard, actually?

While these stadiums are at the center of urban bus networks, bringing tens of thousands of people to one place on buses is difficult (for instance, loading 20,000+ people onto buses for the Boston Marathon requires closing several blocks of streets to stage buses and to load them in two lanes at a time, a large queueing area, and all this for a single origin-destination pair, so there is no need to direct people anywhere than to “get on any bus”). And even if these smaller cities took advantage of their bus systems, they would be quickly overwhelmed. Nashville’s system only operates 150 buses at peak times, and only carried 11,000 people all day on Sundays before the pandemic. (Indianapolis, Jacksonville and Cincinnati operate on a similar scale, and several other cities’ transit systems aren’t much larger.) Even if buses were used at scale, it would require a huge fleet. At 50 people per bus (meaning selling almost exactly 100% of the seats on a bus, not an easy task), transporting 20,000 people would require 400 buses, plus dispatch staff, crowd control and route planning. This would dwarf the bus fleets of smaller cities, and since the buses would only provide a single round trip, it would require a full shift of bus and driver pay to move a single load of people, not a particularly efficient use of resources.

Picking up a lot of people in one place and moving them to another happens to a task at which mainline commuter trains excel. A 10-car train can carry upwards of 2000 people (more if packed with standees), so even if one third of attendees came by transit (unlikely for a football game, but more likely for, say, a concert for a singer popular with teens and 20-somethings) it would only take 10 trains to transport everyone. Trains could also transport event-goers to park-and-ride lots unused at off-peak times. 10 trains might only require 50 staff, an order of magnitude less than buses to move the same number of people.

Football stadiums are not designed with transit in mind. There are three football stadiums for which commuter rail is the only high capacity transit connection (others—Baltimore, Seattle, Santa Clara, Chicago’s current stadium—have rail lines nearby but more heavily utilize other forms of transit): the Meadowlands in New Jersey, Foxboro outside of Boston and the proposed Arlington Park stadium outside of Chicago. Not surprisingly, these are the three most extensive commuter rail networks, and in each case, the rail connection is made far outside the city. Each city provides an interesting example of how commuter rail service does, or does not, provide transit access to large events.

Chicago (Arlington Park)

Chicago doesn’t have a football stadium served by commuter rail, yet, but it may not far in the future. The Bears are planning to move from the smallest-in-the-league, 100-year-old Soldier Field on the periphery of Downtown to a larger, more modern suburban stadium on the site of an old racetrack. It’s hard to fault them for this: a new stadium downtown or anywhere near transit would require a large site that would only be used a few times per year. (I guess adjacent to the United Center or Comiskey would work?) Arlington Park is about 20 million square feet (nearly a square mile, three times the size of Suffolk Downs in East Boston) and adjacent to a three-track commuter railroad, which can support frequent service and a 30 minute ride into the city (it also runs on a diagonal through the Northwest side of Chicago, with a number of stations allowing bus and L connections).

Unlike some agencies, Metra is actually pretty good at running extra service to meet extra demand, and would likely be able to stage as many trains as were necessary to move people from this new arena to the city, and also to satellite commuter parking lots along the line. The third track of the railroad would allow the agency to stage as many trains as necessary to handle crowds while maintaining regular service. The station has two adjacent storage tracks, and a new development could allow for an expanded station to manage higher loads. The Bears’ plans don’t call for a sea of parking, but rather a mixed-use development next to a train station. Would I call it a perfect location? I might not go that far, but it’s a decent place for a 75,000-seat football arena.

New York (New Jersey Meadowlands)

Both the Jets and Giants play in the Meadowlands, build on reclaimed land in the swamps in New Jersey. The shared use of of the stadium means that it gets somewhat more frequent use than it otherwise would (a low bar; it still lies dormant more than 300 days each year), and with many non-drivers in the area a rail spur was eventually built to take people to and from the stadium. (It only cost $185 million—equivalent to $265 million today—for 2.3 miles. Really. It may serve 500,000 people per year, or about 1500 per day on average. And it may not even be the biggest boondoggle in the Meadowlands.) Other than events, there is no use of the line, which only serves the sports arena and the American Dream shopping mall, which opened after a 25-year, on-and-off construction period and may be all but stillborn, hemorrhaging money now that it has finally opened its doors (i.e., boondoggle). For football games, it works fine, with between 6000 and 10,000 people arriving and departing by train. For larger events, like line has been overwhelmed since the stated capacity of the line is just 8000 to 10,000 per hour.

This speaks to a bottleneck somewhere along the line:

• Perhaps it is an undersized station, with just three tracks (the rail station at Belmont Park on Long Island was originally built with eight tracks, although only two are now in regular operation). 8000 to 10,000 people per hour means that the rail line only supports a full train every 12 to 15 minutes, which hardly seems like the capacity of the line. With three tracks, the Meadowlands station should be able to turn a train in 15 to 20 minutes on each track (and that’s generous, since trains are only loading or unloading at any given time passenger traffic flows in one direction) meaning that the station should support 9 to 12 trains per hour.
• Maybe line capacity? The upper bound of the station may stretch the capacity of a two-track railroad with diesel trains and an intermediate stop and existing service; the 18-track terminal at Hoboken would be able to swallow the traffic at the other end of the line. The Pascack Valley, Bergen and Main Lines, which share a trunk route into Hoboken, only amount to three trains per hour at off-peak times (when nearly all concerts and events end, either on a weekend or late in the evening). These lines support 12 trains per hour through Secaucus and into Hoboken at peak hour, meaning that 9 stadium trains plus the normal service would be reasonable. That should allow 18,000 people per hour to be moved.
• My guess is that it’s simply the number of trains on the line for high-use events, and inexperience of the agency. With a cycle time to Hoboken and back of more than an hour, NJT would have needed more than a dozen trains on the line to fill the theoretical capacity of the line and station, so rather than having trains stacked up on the line ready to pull into the station, they were relying on six trains to make the round trip and come back for more. This is certainly better for crew utilization, but not so great for the passenger experience.

The 2014 Superbowl, where fans were highly encouraged to take transit, was a stress test the railroad seems to have failed somewhat spectacularly. It took three hours to clear 35,000 people from the stadium; 12,000 per hour is actually higher than the stated capacity (likely as people pushed onto trains) although some very helpful Internet people suggested just running buses without pointing out that they would have needed about 700 of them. If I had to guess, the issue was a lack of trains and crews:

Boston (Foxboro[ugh])

Which brings us to Foxboro, the third stadium near a commuter rail line. Sort of. There hasn’t been regular passenger service on the Framingham Secondary since 1933. 40 years later, the stadium itself was built, on a shoestring $7 million budget on donated land. At the center of this land deal: parking. The league stipulated that teams play in 60,000-seat stadiums. The itinerant Patriots had used a number of smaller venues: Fenway Park, and three small college stadiums (Harvard, BU and BC) and unlike the Bears, which moved from Wrigley to a “temporary” home at Soldier Field (they’re now looking to move half a century later), there was no large-enough structure in the area.

The owner of a local racetrack offered the land for the stadium but kept the adjacent parking lots which would now generate cash for both horse races and football games. The site happened to be adjacent to a rail line, and from early on some event service was provided. Service, however, is minimal, since the rail line isn’t designed for much more than a few freight trains. In general there is one train from Boston and one from Providence (the Boston train usually sells out) which meet at the platform. There’s no room for anything more. Aside from the poor local infrastructure, the railroad could support direct service from Boston, Providence and Worcester, theoretically linking the stadium to the three largest cities in New England, provided there was room to store more than two trains.

In the past 50 years, Foxboro’s sea of parking has grown, as the complex owner Bob Kraft has since developed a large shopping mall adjacent to the stadium (more of a lifestyle center than the atrocity that is the American Dream in Jersey). This is not a good setup for traffic as Foxboro is accessed by Route 1, a four-lane highway with traffic signals, and traffic is notoriously bad after games (one review calls it a “great stadium with terrible traffic,” a microcosm of Boston, depending on your definition of “great”). Lots of advice to beat the traffic is to take the train, although it means no tailgating and capacity is limited.

Most everyone else has to drive. There are two ways to distribute a lot of vehicles parked in one place. One is to surround the parking lots with highways and ramps (either in the suburbs or downtown). Another is to disperse parking near the stadium, allowing it to filter through nearby neighborhoods (Green Bay does this, but no one in Green Bay complains about Lambeau Field, which is probably against several state laws). Foxboro is located in the corner of a far-flung suburb a quarter the size of the stadium’s capacity. Decisions are made by an open town meeting. The stadium is located on a local four-lane roadway with traffic lights before it spills onto nearby highways. Traffic jams are legendary.

In 2019 the MBTA started, then aborted with the pandemic, and now restarted, a yearlong pilot to bring regular service to Foxboro, partially subsidized by Patriots ownership. Parking is provided for free, which may help apparent ridership, but there’s really little other reason for most riders to go to Foxboro instead of another nearby station, especially since rush hour service from nearby Mansfield is a faster trip by 20 minutes. (Before the pandemic, other lots would be full, but even with ridership bouncing back, parking scarcity is not as much of an issue.) With nothing but parking lots for a mile in any direction, there is about as much need for transit service to the site as there is to a mall Jersey. High ridership, for now is little more than an American Dream.

A station for Foxboro (and Tay Tay and … the World Cup?)

Which is not to say there shouldn’t be a station there. It should, if the 12 million (half square mile) of land were ever developed as something other than parking lots. It may be the largest developable plot of fully-impacted land in the region. And it happens to be next to a railroad. So while the current pilot may not be successful, if the surrounding area were home to 5,000 housing units it would make far more: Windsor Gardens, but on steroids, an anchor a the end of the line. I’m sure the citizens of Foxboro, who enjoy the largesse of the stadium’s tax revenue while keeping the traffic on Route 1 on the periphery of town, would throw a fit, but in Boston right now, nearly any housing is good housing. Transit-oriented? Even better. (In the very long run, a shuttle train to a connecting service on the higher-speed Providence Line might make more sense.)

In the short run, however, the line is wholly inadequate for handling crowds: it consists of one long platform which can handle, at most, two trains, and the slow, single-track lines in either direction make it nearly impossible to store or stage additional equipment near the stadium. So once a train is sold out, it’s sold out. For Patriots games, there’s not too much demand past what is provided. But when a different demographic comes to town, the situation can get dicier.

Enter Taylor Swift. The only ticket hotter than a T Swift ticket to Foxboro was a ticket on a train to get there. Rather than the SUV-driving, tailgating, suburban type, Swifties seemed happy to snag a seat on Commuter Rail from Boston, such that the first batch of tickets sold out almost instantaneously, and when more were added, they went in 90 seconds. (The Swifties who did get onboard seemed to enjoy themselves!)

The lack of any terminal facilities in Foxboro means that there is no way to leverage the existing rail line to bring crowds to the site and reduce the need for parking, parking which could be repurposed for something other than a parking lot only used a few times per year. There is plenty of room for an event rail terminal not significantly different (although at a smaller scale, sketch here) from what the Pennsy ran for the Army-Navy game, in essence, a few tracks facing in each direction allowing trains to park and unload passengers before the game and then swallowing them up afterwards. It need not be fancy, just ramps to platforms to allow accessible boarding for trains waiting for the crowds.

This would allow multiple trains for football games, where there is more demand than current supply and plenty of capacity at nearby park-and-rides at game times. An express train could run from Boston with a local train picking up passengers parking at nearby stations and using the train to avoid the last few miles of gridlock. For an event like a Taylor Swift concert, as many trains as needed to transport the requisite masses. Full trains make money. If the Cape Flyer makes a profit on an $40, 160-mile, 5 hour roundtrip with a couple hundred passengers, 1800 people on a $20, 60 mile roundtrip should be a cash cow. The agency has the resources at off-peak times, and events are scheduled far enough in advance that labor could be arranged well ahead of time. But the real value is in repurposing the land around the stadium from parking to something more beneficial to the region.

It’s hard right now to make an argument that the current Foxboro Stadium land use needs regular transit service. In a region with a housing shortage and relatively few large sites adjacent to rail lines, the half square mile of parking could be put to far better use if it weren’t needed and there was enough transit service to allow people to get to the stadium without driving (even if it just meant parking at an existing Commuter Rail lot elsewhere and taking a train). Should the public pay for this? Certainly not. But if improved rail service were funded by Bob Kraft, it would be a good investment which could leverage the value of the acreage around the stadium to be something other than parking cars for a few days each year.

In the shorter term, Foxboro will host at least 6 games of the 2026 World Cup. These fans will be much closer in demographic to a T Swift concert (international, interested in soccer, less interesting in tailgating) and many will be staying in hotels in Boston (and probably Providence, too). If the T can’t figure out how to manage moving more than 3000 people to and from the stadium on trains, they’ll have to have a fleet of buses, and all of the logistics that go with that. So if there is a good time to build a stadium terminal which can handle larger crowds that time is now.