Baseball season brings Dodger Stadium Express vs. aerial gondola to fever pitch

Take a dedicated bus to your seat section at Dodger Stadium to see The Boys in Blue this season? Or if that’s not good enough, Dodger fans might ride a sky-high gondola to and from the stadium — in the future.

On Thursday evening, March 30, as the Los Angeles Dodgers play their season home opener against the Arizona Diamondbacks, the only transit choice is the Dodger Stadium Express, a dedicated bus running on game days from Union Station and from the South Bay bus depot along the 110 Freeway to the parking lots at Dodger Stadium.

The bus is free to ticket holders and has been used by hundreds of thousands of fans and concert-goers since 2010 to bypass traffic and avoid the steep parking fees at the stadium atop Chavez Ravine. This season, LA Metro is running 12 buses from the west side of Union Station starting 90 minutes before first pitch and five from the Harbor Gateway Transit Center two hours before game time.

“It’s a great service that saves baseball fans from the hassle of driving and parking at Dodger Stadium,” said LA Metro spokesman Dave Sotero in an email. “Best of all, it is free.”

This is the first time since the pandemic broke out in March 2020 that the Express is returning to full ridership. In 2019, 307,000 fans took the Express from Union Station, and 70,000 from Harbor Gateway. But last year, Union Station shuttled 123,000 riders and Harbor Gateway had 34,000, Metro reported.

This is also the first year that the Express bus will run for all 81 home games.

Its robust return comes a few months after the release on Oct. 17, 2022 of a draft Environmental Impact Report for the Los Angeles Aerial Rapid Transit (LA ART), a proposed aerial gondola starting near Chinatown and ending at the stadium. The project is being put forth by Frank McCourt, former L.A. Dodgers’ owner, whose company, McCourt Global, owns 50% of the parking lots at the stadium. McCourt is working arm-in-arm with LA Metro and Climate Resolve, an environmental nonprofit group based in L.A.

The environmental document and early planning is being done by LA Metro. But LA ART has announced construction will be paid through private funds and possibly third-party financing. If approved, the project would be gifted to Climate Resolve, which has already created Zero Emission Technologies (ZET), the new nonprofit owners and eventual operators of the proposed gondola.

Its cost rose from $125 million in 2018 to $300 million in 2020, the latest date for which there exists a cost estimate.

The return of baseball now brings to a head the debate between those who favor the popular dedicated bus service and those promoting a future gondola transit line.

Since the release of the gondola EIR, heated opposition has boiled over from neighbors in Chinatown which will be directly impacted, and other northeast Los Angeles communities. A coalition called Stop The Gondola has been vocal, taking over a LA Metro meeting at Cathedral High School in January with speakers using bullhorns inside the gym to protest and march.

That group and other opponents, including the Los Angeles-chaptered Sierra Club, say the 13-story gondola will be an eyesore and that the gondola stations in Chinatown near the state Los Angeles Historic Park will draw traffic and parking woes across a wider footprint, and into neighborhoods. Many say the 13-story towers — and in particular, a proposed gondola station with parking, concessions and restrooms at the historic park — will spoil its natural ambiance and destroy mature trees.

Before Thursday’s Dodger opening game for the 2023 season, opposition groups will stage informational protests against McCourt’s project. They plan to tell fans that compared to the proposed aerial gondola, the Dodger Stadium Express (DSE) is a less intrusive and adequate, car-less, environmentally friendly, first-mile/last-mile alternative.

“A lot of people with Stop The Gondola coalition support the Dodger Stadium Express service,” said Phyllis Ling, founder of the coalition, whose house would be just 40 feet beneath wires and suspended gondola buckets in Chinatown. “It would be less invasive to our neighborhoods.”

But Climate Resolve claims the project will reduce game day traffic up to 20% and “meaningfully reduce air pollution in our most congested neighborhoods,” said Nathan Click, Climate Resolve spokesman. “It would take 77 Metro buses loading to full capacity every 47 seconds to meet the capacity of the gondola,” he claimed.

Click said the 20% traffic reduction maximum is part of a peer-reviewed study sanctioned by LA Metro.

He wrote in an email that the Dodger Stadium Express ride during peak traffic on Opening Day will take 49 minutes, while the gondola ride of 1.2 miles would take 7 minutes. He said a poll shows that 72% of residents of Los Angeles County support the gondola project.

But Jon Christensen, a professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability, says his independent group’s study found that a total of 4,690 people would take the gondola to the stadium on a game day but only about a quarter of them would take the gondola back — mostly because they won’t want to wait in line for the gondola.

“The gondola model is to drain ridership from the Dodger Stadium Express, which is already a successful clean energy alternative,” he said on Tuesday, March 28. “The gondola would not add anything good. It is taking away from an already good alternative.”

Christensen’s study showed that many gondola users would hop on one of the 12 Dodger Stadium Express buses back to Union Station, or call an Uber or Lyft.

Click disputes the UCLA study, saying it did not take into account all the variables, including game-day traffic. Christensen said the study is based on modeling. It also makes assumptions on what choices fans may make.

While the dueling studies debate has risen to a new pitch at the start of baseball season in L.A., the other issue is the draft EIR. While Click and Climate Resolve praise its conclusions, Christensen and others say it is extremely biased in favor of the project and doesn’t adequately present alternatives, such as the Dodger Stadium Express.

Ling said she’d like to see the Dodger Stadium Express add pickup locations in the San Fernando Valley and in Pasadena. A wider bus distribution is based on a model used by L.A. County for express bus service to the Hollywood Bowl. Fully dedicated bus lanes would speed up the trip, she said.

Christensen says Metro can replace the compressed natural gas buses, already cleaner than diesel, with electric buses, making it a zero-emission service. “We should be focusing on electrifying the buses. It is more practical, more available and more efficient.”

Express Bus to Dodger Stadium

What: The Dodger Stadium Express picks up game-goers and takes them to Dodger Stadium and returns them to where they started. It runs for all home games.

Where/When: There are basically two locations to catch this bus, free to ticket holders:

– On the west side of L.A. Union Station, near Alameda Street at the taxi zone. Service begins 90 minutes before game time through the end of the 2nd inning. Buses will pick up and drop off fans at the Top Deck and the center field entrance. Service back to Union Station will pick up at the same stops after the game. Return service ends 45 minutes after the final out or 20 minutes after post-game events.

– At the Harbor Gateway Transit Center (Bay 9) along the 110 Freeway and at the following stops: Rosecrans, Harbor Freeway, Manchester and Slauson. Buses run every 30 minutes starting 2 hours before game time. The last bus leaves the Transit Center at game time. Buses will drop off at the right field entrance. Service back to the South Bay will pick up at the same stop after the game. Return service begins after the end of the 7th inning, with the last bus departing 45 minutes after the final out or 20 minutes after a post-game event.

Connections: Transit serving Union Station include municipal bus lines, Metro Rail’s B (Red), D (Purple) and L (Gold) lines, as well as Metrolink and Amtrak. Transit to Harbor Gateway Transit Center in the South Bay is served by several Metro bus lines, the Metro J Line (Silver) and Torrance Transit.