- A great technical document describing the noise problem for the University of Minnesota's planned football stadium is available. It contains an explanation of the impact of concert noise, which the San Jose Draft EIR has basically glossed over. I have yet to find anything that properly explains the impact of the inversion layer on sound, especially in the warm months. For those that wonder why I'm focusing on the noise issue so much - it's because any Bay Area location will probably have a huge environmental noise impact on surrounding neighborhoods. This is true whether it's in Oakland, Fremont, or San Jose.
- Marc Normandin's Beyond the Box Score blog has a nice interview with economist Andrew Zimbalist, who recently penned a book that I have purchased but haven't had a chance to read: In The Best Interests of Baseball: The Revolutionary Reign of Bud Selig.
- On the heels of the opening of Busch Stadium III is a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about the Ballpark Village concept that is going up alongside the ballpark. Cleveland State economist Mark Rosentraub, who like Zimbalist has written extensively on the problems with publicly-financed sports venues, extends some hope that a properly planned development can work for St. Louis in a better way than other stadium-based resurgence projects in other cities. Incidentally, I don't count San Diego and San Francisco as good for comparison, since for both of those cities it's generally thought that their ballparks are but one factor in causing accelerated development, in conjunction with soaring land costs and other unrelated encroaching development.
China Basin noise data gathering happens on Wednesday.
4 comments:
Just read an article in 4/7/06 San Jose Business journal (hardcopy; didn't see it in the online edition). Q & A with Wolff about Fremont. Not much new, other than what we've read on ML's site, except the last paragraph reference to existing oportunities outside California. Next edition (4/14) of the Business Journal will feature Q&A with Wolf about San Jose.
M.L.,
If the A's were to relocate to San Jose, could we see "accelerated development" in the area surrounding the ballpark and HP Pavilion?
In the interview on Beyond the Boxscore, Andrew Zimbalist says that he would like a new A's stadium to have the capability of expansion because he doesn't think "that they should satisfy themselves with an attendance that was forever more never going to be above 32 or 34,000."
Is an expansion going to be capable with the current stadium design, and if so, how will that impact the noise issue?
anon. - City planners are fully expecting that the are between the arena and ballpark would have accelerated development. The planning docs are already there and the ballpark inclusion requires a simple revision. Key to this is the fact that SJ Redevelopment expanded the definition of downtown to include the area a couple of years ago.
gojohn10 - I imagine they'll end up doing what's been done in the Arizona Cardinals' new football stadium. There, one end of the stadium is left "open" due to the grass tray that slides in and out. There's space for them to add probably 5,000 seats if they wish. At an A's ballpark there could be a large concrete pad in the outfield with proper supports to add seats should demand warrant it. However, the design presented last year has the outfield built up to the point that such expansion couldn't occur. My guess is that they'll make expansion possible.
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