Wearing my sports reporter hat, I took a taxi to the National Stadium, which is located on Cerro Patacon on the city's outskirts, on January 18. On the way back, I couldn't help but notice that nothing has been done to address the serious transportation problems that I have noticed in my previous visits to the nation's beautiful and relatively new principal baseball venue.

Understand what this means in economic and sporting terms. I bought the most expensive ticket that a person can walk up to the box office and buy, to see a PROBEIS all-star game that featured a number of major leaguers, for four bucks. (Of course, there are more expensive seats in the house --- the private boxes for which a few companies and even fewer wealthy individuals pay more than the value of the great majority of Panamanian homes.) The cheaper seats cost $2 and $1 respectively. And yet the stadium was at best only one-third full, and it was probably the best attendance for any of the professional league's games to date.

My trip back to Perejil was a good demonstration of why this was so.

There are few taxis and almost no buses to be had at the Estadio Nacional. People either drive to the stadium in cars or they don't go to the stadium at all, with a tiny handful of exceptions like me. Those of us who take the lesser-traveled path can take a cab to the game easily enough, but we have to walk more than two miles to Tumba Muerto, along a road that's partially unlit and that has a shoulder that's about three feet wide in places where there are curves that are dangerous even in daylight, in order to catch a bus or a taxi home.

This "drivers only" policy might make economic sense in a market like Chicago or Detroit, but the major league ball parks in those cities are nevertheless served by public transportation. In Panama it's totally insane to exclude the large urban population that gets around in buses and taxis. The National Stadium is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy in part because its promoters and the leagues that play there have not seen fit to organize buses to shuttle fans between central points in the metro area and Cerro Patacon.

Before you dismiss my complaint as mere whining or a minor league bit of class warfare, you should also consider the vaina that drivers must endure to catch a game at the Estadio Nacional. The traffic jams are typical of those that are common around most North American major league venues before and after games. The parking situation, on the other hand, is completely ridiculous by anybody's standards. There's not enough parking around the stadium, and that which is available has very few places of ingress and egress, which makes for maddening bottlenecks.

Think of everything that irritates you about common Panamanian driving etiquette, and imagine how it works in this situation. You have the aggressive drivers playing chicken to be the first ones in and out of the stadium parking lots. You have the people who believe that their ownership of a car gives them the right to park wherever they please, without regard to any inconvenience that it might cause for others. Many of the too-few parking spaces were unusable because people had parked in the lanes by which those spaces are reached. During the all-star game two vehicles in particular were blocking hundreds of others in, and repeated PA system appeals over several innings were insufficient to motivate the owners to move them.

A lot of these problems are matters that should concern the mayor and city council. There should be no public address warnings about obnoxious parking --- there should be municipal tow trucks, a city motor vehicle impoundment lot, and a king's ransom to pay in order to get an antisocially parked car back. There should be street lights all along the access route to the stadium, even at the risk that some of the squatters who live near the dark stretch will see them as opportunities to steal electricity for their shacks. Surely a lot of drivers would park in lots well away from the madness and take shuttles to and from the stadium if the city gave them that option, which it should do for a modest fee.

Let's put all of this into perspective. I have put up with the hassle several times before, and I'll do it again. Since no more than a couple of dozen of the thousands of fans who attended the all-star game came and went the way that I did, you could hardly call me normal in that sense. However, Panama City is more like New York City than Detroit --- a large percentage of the population here gets around by public transportation, and there's nothing particularly unusual about me in that sense.

I notice that it was suggested a few months back that the government should help the Estadio Nacional get through these difficult economic times by way of some cash subsidies to the foundation that built and manages it. I think that would be an expensive and ineffective approach. Put a little money and common sense into solving the access problem instead, and the fans will come in much greater numbers and be willing to pay higher ticket prices. That's the kind of subsidy we need to ensure professional baseball's long-term survival in Panama.

©2001 The Panama News