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The Worst Part About Driving to and from the Sports Complex is that We’ve Accepted the Gridlocked Hellscape as Normal
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Metallica played a couple of shows at the Linc on Memorial Day weekend, tapping Limp Bizkit to open on Friday night and Pantera on Sunday night. One guy documented his 90-minute effort to get out of the sports complex after the first gig:
@onegalaxyy Metallica: Parking was a nightmare 😅#metallica#m72#m72worldtour #m72tour #m72philly #philadelphieagles #metallicaphiladelphia #philly ♬ Creepy Violin – Tihomir Hristozov
Based on orientation, this guy parked in P Lot on the east side of Citizens Bank Park. If Dante’s Inferno had a 10th Circle of Hell, it would be P Lot, because you’ve only got two narrow exits to work with. Half of these people in the video are trying to go north on Darien Street to escape out to Packer Avenue and the other half are going south on 7th Street and then turning west ON PATTISON to add to the westbound clusterfuck.
One of the problems is that the directing of the traffic in this area falls comically short. Last time I was there, two weeks ago for the 1 p.m. Phillies game, there wasn’t a cop to be found. The only two cop cars I saw were stuck in traffic with the rest of us, and so drivers started to take things into their own hands and cut people off, make illegal U-turns, and just exhibit general selfish assholery in an effort to get where they needed to go. What’s worse is that a number of school buses had taken kids down during the day, and the food joints down there were still operating during work hours, so you had this hideous mess of school buses running into 18-wheelers and everybody was just sort of stuck. It’s like Green Eggs and Ham in a way, because every situation is a bad one. You will be stuck in traffic here or there, at day or night, with a box or with a fox, in a car or in a truck, etc. and so forth.
What’s particularly telling is that when you go to that TikTok and read the comments, half of the people are saying something to the effect of “tell me this is your first time at the Sports Complex” or “this is how it always is.” And that’s what sucks the most, the fact that people have simply accepted it for what it is. We have normalized defeat, this idea that if you don’t live near the Broad Street Line, or don’t tailgate after the event, that going to see the Phillies, Eagles, Flyers, Sixers, or a big concert requires you to navigate a cluster of epic proportions that will probably have you sitting in traffic for the same amount of time as the event itself, or pretty close to it.
It’s gotten to the point for me, and probably a lot of you as well, where it simply isn’t worth it to go down there anymore. For who? For what? We’ve got huge televisions, comfortable couches, and cheap food at home. If I take the train into Center City, I’ve got to get off and connect to the BSL, and then hustle back after the game to reconnect and pick up one of the 2-3 last trains that departs after 10 p.m. You’re looking at more than an hour both ways, so it’s not any faster, you’re just swapping out your car for SEPTA instead, which isn’t exactly heralded for its reliability and pleasantness.
What’s more is that you go to places like New York or Boston or London and see how it works there. TD Garden, MSG, take the Tube, for instance, which runs smoothly and drops you off right in front of most of the city’s seven Premier League stadiums. No gridlock, no uninterested police officers, no lazy acceptance of a shit situation. You don’t realize how bad the sports complex is until you go to other cities and other countries and see how they approach stadium access.
Which kind of brings us back to paragraph four. The reason people accept this is because they don’t know anything else. They think that this is just how it is, because it’s what they’ve always done. Nothing is more Philadelphia than simply throwing your arms up in the air and saying, “welp, this is how it’s always been!” As if that’s an acceptable reason to soldier on. It’s why so many people got heated during the 76 Place saga, because they saw it as a referendum on the status quo. Now the Sixers are staying in South Philly, and it will be up to at least three of the four teams to improve the experience down there, depending on what the Eagles decide to do.
In the meantime, when you go to a Phillies game, or a Metallica show, or Eagles tailgate, make sure to build in an extra hour or two just to drive down there and park. Expect to sit in a gridlocked hellscape before leaving. That’s just how it is! Remember, we can’t have nice things like other cities do, like better ingress or egress, traffic control by people who actually give a shit, and more convenient mass transit not just for the PA side, but South Jersey and Delaware as well.
But at least all four teams are in the same area!
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com