Parking. It’s one of those secret, forgot-you-were-going-to-have-to-pay-it-until-you-have-to-pay-it expenses that slowly drains your will to live and often keeps you from venturing outside of your house and into the greater world at large. I particularly despise parking because it comes at the end of your journey, when you have, in theory, arrived at your destination. Only you haven’t. You gotta find a spot, and you gotta pay dearly for it.
And if you’re going to see the Cowboys this fall, you’re really going to pay dearly for it.
Some quick math. The new Cowboys Stadium has a seating capacity of 80,000, but that doesn’t include the potential 35,000 extra fans Jerry Jones would like to cram into his new glory hole via Party Passes. That’s 115,000 potential people in place, at a stadium that has precisely 12,000 spaces on site, all of which cost up to $75 each. There are an additional 18,000 spots within a mile of the new digs, also costing between $50 and $75.
The Cowboys say the parking situation at the new stadium is a wild improvement over old Texas Stadium, which had only 16,000 spaces nearby. But that stadium had a capacity of 65,000. The House That Double J built could squeeze in nearly double that number.
Ah, but there’s a plan to relieve you, Mr. Cowboy Fan. The Dallas Morning News reports that city of Arlington just approved additional parking spaces for outside the Cowboys new stadium. These spaces will cost as “low” as $25, and will be located within a 1.2 mile radius of the new place. And hey, what’s an extra .2 miles? You’re already hoofing it a mile. Consider it your pregame workout!
Oh, and just how many extra spaces did the town approve? A whopping 746 of them. That should solve the problem entirely.
"We recognize that there will be a threshold; people will have a tolerance for how far they want to park, and that will be related to price," said Trudy Lewis, a city project manager who briefed the council Tuesday.
You could also simply leave your car at home and roller skate in, though the team does charge an extra $125 in skate-holding fees. If Jerry Jones does follow through on trying to break the NFL attendance record in the home opener on September 20, there will be exactly 30,746 spaces available to a crowd of over 100,000 people. You could carpool, but that’s for dirty treehuggers.
May I suggest a Segway?
