Oakland Ballers Encourage Fans To Leave Car At Home

The last few weeks have seen astonishing changes at West Oakland’s Raimondi Park.

The Oakland Ballers have turned the park’s historic baseball field, which city officials described just two months ago as “unplayable” due to years of neglect, into an instant stadium that will welcome a sellout crowd of 4,000 for the Pioneer League team’s first home game.

Among the facilities the team says will be ready for those fans are three parking lots adjacent to the field.

“There’s about a thousand parking spaces in total,” says Paul Freedman, co-founder of the Oakland Ballers.

But while the team is providing parking at prices ranging from $8 to $20, Freedman says he hopes many fans leave their cars at home and find other ways to the ballpark. This season, the team says its goal is to have 25% of fans get to the ballpark without driving.

Freedman says the team’s transit goals are both climate-conscious and practical.

“We’ve been told by people who do parking and transportation management for the city that if we didn’t do anything, as many as 80 to 90% of people would drive,” Freedman says.

Preventing traffic jams has been an important part of planning for the ballpark. Freedman says he’s met with neighborhood groups about that.

“We heard tremendous excitement about the idea of activating this park with baseball, and then, concerns about parking, transportation and traffic,” Freedman says. “And the best way to solve those problems is to encourage people to use other methods.”

On game days, the Ballers are running a free shuttle to Raimondi Park from West Oakland BART. They’re providing a free bike and scooter valet for those who want to roll to the stadium and encouraging people to use AC Transit.

For its part, the city of Oakland has repaved pothole-ridden streets, repaired sidewalks, removed derelict train tracks, and added high-visibility crosswalks in the immediate vicinity of the ballpark.

Oakland resident Tripper Ortman told KQED he plans to organize a “Bike to the Ballpark” group bicycle ride from Rockridge BART on weekend game days. He’s had success with this sort of thing before, as an organizer of “March to the Match”, a 3.8-mile walk from Rockridge to Laney College to see Oakland Roots games.

“I think there’s a lot of bad press around biking in Oakland,” Ortman says. “I don’t know that I feel totally safe at night riding around, but in a big caravan during the day on the weekends, it feels like something safe you can do. And it’s fun.”

For Brian Culbertson, a member of the traffic safety advocacy group Traffic Violence Rapid Response who lives near Raimondi Park, people’s decisions on walking or biking to the game will be based on safety.

“Oakland has a traffic violence crisis where a lot of people who are walking or biking are being hit by cars,” Culbertson says, “It is a difficult decision to say, ‘I’m going to take my family and bike across Oakland and put myself in threat by the cars.’”

According to a citywide crash analysis from the city, people who walk, bike or take public transit make up fewer than 30% of commute trips in the city but experience nearly 50% of severe and fatal injuries.

Culbertson points to “multilane arterial streets,” of which there are more than one in the area around Raimondi, as the main problem areas.

“If you have a lot of people on game day driving here, then you have a lot more people with cars interacting with people walking and biking,” Culbertson says. “So then a street like 18th, which is only really safe because hardly anyone uses it, will suddenly become a place for people to speed down and will become more dangerous.”

Culbertson says Oakland needs to install traffic-calming infrastructure, such as speed bumps, roundabouts, and concrete curbs, to slow drivers down not just in West Oakland but throughout the city.

“It’s not just up to the Ballers. It’s also up to the city of Oakland to plan that network of safe ways to get around Oakland to get here,” Culbertson says.

Traffic safety advocates hope improvements made to nearby 8th Street, where a soon-to-be-completed project has installed a number of traffic calming elements on a 1.1-mile stretch between Market and Pine streets, can become a template for future street redesigns in the city.

A few blocks away from Raimondi is Kilovolt Coffee. Andrea Mallea is the manager, and she takes the bus to work. Her advice for Ballers fans who want to take AC Transit to a game?

“I’d say plan your time wisely because sometimes things get kind of dicey as far as buses even arriving on schedule,” Mallea says.

Four AC Transit routes, running every 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the day, will get you within walking distance of the ballpark.

“I really think that there just needs to be an increase in routes and service if people are going to find that option to even be viable or appealing,” Mallea says.

For now, it remains to be seen just how Ballers fans decide to get to the ballpark and how the neighborhood accommodates the new crowds.

The Ballers plan to use parking data to track how many people drive to the opening game.

Ballers’ co-founder Freedman says he’d love it if the new team could get fans excited about coming out to the ballpark during this first season while minimizing traffic impacts to the Raimondi neighborhood. If the Ballers can do that, he says, it would be a home run for the team and the community.