Bronx Parking Development LLC, the company that operates five parking garages near Yankee Stadium, missed a $6.9 million bond payment that was due yesterday.
This news should come as no surprise: since the garages (and the new Yankee Stadium) opened in 2009, they’ve operated at only 43 percent of capacity.
Expanded parking capacity around Yankee Stadium shouldn’t have been built in the first place. In a 2006 letter to New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Tri-State, along with environmental and public space advocates, urged the City not to make any unnecessary additions to parking capacity.
While the taxpayer subsidized parking garages continue to struggle, the number of people using transit to get to Yankees home games, meanwhile, is up. Ridership at the 161st Street subway station is up 5 percent since 2009 and Metro-North ridership now accounts for approximately one in 10 fans arriving at Yankee Stadium via the stadium’s new Metro-North station.
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Hmm – maybe the extremely high price of the parking has something to do with no one wanting to use these garages. Only the rich can afford to park there. I can only guess why the garages cost so much to build (inefficiency or corruption?) but this was a predictable disaster.
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[…] Because more fans are using the subways and Metro-North to get to Yankees games, the parking garages have been operating at only 43 percent since they opened in 2009. That’s made paying off bonds difficult for the system’s operator, the Bronx Parking Development Company. […]
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