Yankees Trail Mets By 10 Racks in “Subway Series of Bike Parking”

5:28 PM EDT on July 22, 2009

Yesterday, my Mets got shut out by the last-place Nationals, falling 10 games behind the defending world champion Phillies. Meanwhile, the Yankees grabbed sole possession of first place -- for the first time in months! -- after beating Baltimore. It pains me just to type the words.

But take heart, Met fans, at least our team provides bike racks at the ballpark. Not so the Yankees. Sarah Braunstein at Sports Illustrated for Kids reports on a recent outing to their new stadium:

Whenever I bike anywhere, I always check to make sure there is asafe place to park. First, I checked out the New York City Departmentof Transportation to find the closest bike rack to the stadium. Theclosest one is at the Bronx Supreme Court, about four blocks from thestadium.
I figured in a city with so many bikers, and with hundreds of milesof bike lanes, there had to be something closer. So I did what anyadventurous biker would do and called the Yankees themselves.
Theanswer to all my questions was ‘NO.’ There are no bike racks at thestadium. There is no bike parking. They cannot offer indoor bikeparking, even for reporters. There is no possibility of parking a bikeat or in the stadium.

The Mets, Braunstein discovered, have ten bike racks outside CitiField. In the grand scheme of transportation sins, Yankee Stadium's lack of bike parking pales beside its wanton profusion of traffic-generating car parking. And the Mets, despite their bike racks, are admittedly no livable streets angels (though the approach from the Willets Point station to CitiField is way nicer than the walk to Shea used to be).

Mostly, I just hope the Orioles' bike-commuting number one starter, Jeremy Guthrie, reads this and gets a little more fired up every time he pitches in the Bronx.

Ben Fried

Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.

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