I’ve been circling this idea for a few hours, ever since Sports Business Journal ran a piece on venue operators and self-driving cars, and I can’t shake it. The parking lot, the thing every stadium and arena built its business model around for the better part of a century, is quietly becoming worthless, and almost nobody in the industry is pricing that in yet.
Here’s the number that started this whole train of thought. Waymo closed a funding round in February that multiple outlets reported valued the company at $126 billion, and by TechCrunch’s count it’s now handing out roughly 500,000 driverless rides a week.
Five days before SBJ’s story ran, Waymo added Las Vegas to its map, along with San Diego, Tampa and Denver. Zoox is building a robo-taxi with no steering wheel at all, because Amazon never designed it to need one. Tesla’s running its own version out of Austin, Dallas and Houston, cheaper and rougher around the edges. Three companies, three different bets, all built on the same assumption: the car that brings a fan to the game isn’t going to be the one they parked themselves.
That’s not a technology story. I keep having to remind people of that. It’s a revenue story that happens to be wearing a technology costume, and the costume is good enough that most operators haven’t noticed what’s underneath it yet.
Parking Was Never a Courtesy.
It Was a Toll Booth Wearing a Name Tag.
Let’s start with what parking actually is, because everyone gets sentimental about the tailgate and forgets what the lot is really doing to the balance sheet.
NHL teams collect about 43% of their revenue from the gate, and another 14% from concessions and parking combined, according to Badenhausen’s 2025 figures. NFL teams pull roughly a third of total revenue from what the industry politely calls “stadium sales,” which is tickets, concessions and parking bundled together, per 24/7 Wall St. Run those numbers through an industry planning calculator for a mid-size arena doing 120 events a year at twenty bucks a car, and you land on nine million dollars in gross parking revenue before anyone’s even turned on dynamic pricing. That’s an illustrative model, not a disclosed number from any specific team, but it’s in the right neighborhood, and it tells you everything.
Parking was never a favor the venue extended to fans out of the goodness of its heart. It was a captive revenue line dressed up as a courtesy, and Groundwork Collaborative’s research puts the all-in cost of taking a family of four to a game, tickets and parking and concessions together, at $631 for an NFL game and $430 for an NHL game. Fans hate paying it. Venues have been quietly counting on it for decades.
Nobody’s pretending self-driving cars erase that money overnight. Ace Parking’s Maureen Griffin made the honest point in SBJ’s piece: the real near-term question is whether an autonomous vehicle can handle the chaos of a sold-out arena on game night, not whether the technology exists in a lab somewhere. Fair enough. But look at what’s already happening at OCVibe, the district being built around Anaheim’s Honda Center. Honda Center is already averaging something like a thousand ride-share trips a night, and no autonomous ride-hailing company even operates in Anaheim yet. The demand showed up before the supply did, which is usually a sign you’ve waited too long to build the thing that was going to solve it. OCVibe’s CEO Bill Foltz put it about as plainly as a CEO ever puts anything to a reporter: eighteen designated pickup spots, a thousand cars trying to use them, and as he told SBJ, it doesn’t take much math to see that’s a problem.
Airports Already Figured Out How to Charge You for Standing Still
Here’s what nobody in venue operations seems to have noticed, and it’s sitting in plain view at every airport in the country.
Airports went through this exact disruption a decade ago, and instead of watching the money evaporate, they built a toll booth. Every time Uber or Lyft picks up or drops off a passenger on airport property, the airport charges a fee, and the rideshare companies pass it straight through to you on your receipt. RideWise’s survey of the major hubs puts the range from two dollars at Houston’s IAH up to five-fifty at SFO and Boston Logan. LAX just got approval to push its curbside fee all the way to twelve dollars a trip, up from four today, and airport officials expect that to bring in roughly a hundred million dollars in the first year alone.
Boston’s Logan Airport raised its own fee to five-fifty each way, eleven dollars round trip, back in the middle of last year. SFO alone reportedly pulled in $45.1 million in curb fees over an eleven-month stretch, and research on airport finance puts the biggest hubs at thirty to eighty million a year, every year, from a fee that didn’t exist fifteen years ago. Airports didn’t lose the parking war. They just repriced the curb and kept collecting.
Not a single team, arena or venue authority named in SBJ’s reporting has done the same thing. LAZ Parking has partnered with Waymo to work out how the vehicles actually move in and out of a venue, which is the right first step, and LAZ Live’s Jon Applegate asked the right opening question when he told SBJ, “No. 1 is, where do you put them?” But logistics and monetization are two different jobs, and right now, nobody’s doing the second one.
I’ll grant the comparison isn’t perfect. An airport has acres of purpose-built roadway to work with. An arena wedged into a dense downtown, San Francisco’s Chase Center being the obvious example SBJ’s piece points to, has almost none of that. But a tighter curb is an argument for pricing it more aggressively, not an excuse to leave it free.
The Product Isn’t the Ride. It’s Not Having to Think About One.
Flip over to the fan’s side of this, because it’s where the marketing case gets genuinely interesting, and where I think most operators are still thinking too small.
Michael White left Zoox in March to run business operations for the Florida Panthers, which tells you something all by itself about where the smartest people in this business think the puck is going. His read on what an autonomous ride actually sells is exactly right. “There is this inexplicable freedom when you’re not thinking about driving,” he told SBJ. “You can kind of unplug and not have such a cognitive load going on.” That’s not a transportation upgrade. That’s a redefinition of when the game actually starts for a fan, and White’s already built a version of it with Zoox and T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, exactly the kind of thing SBJ flags as the logical next step for season-ticket subscriptions.
This is the same argument I’ve been making about sponsorship for years, just pointed at a different part of the fan’s evening. Value gets created when a brand is woven into the actual experience, not slapped on top of it after the fact. A Waymo pulling up in team colors, playing the right walk-up music, is product placement a fan is happy to be inside of. A logo bolted to a parking gate is wallpaper nobody reads on the way in.
And then there’s the unglamorous part underneath all of that romance, which is that a venue needs a whole fleet of these things staged and ready thirty minutes before the final horn, and eighteen spots against a thousand cars’ worth of demand is not staged and ready. It’s a bottleneck with good PR.
Waymo says it wants to hit a million weekly rides by the end of this year. That’s a target, not a fact, and it’s worth knowing how it moved to get there. As late as December, the company was reportedly negotiating that same funding round at something closer to $100 to $110 billion before it closed higher at $126 billion. On the ride count, an independent forecast cited in recent coverage puts Waymo closer to 775,000 weekly rides by year end, not a million, simply because the company can’t build and deploy vehicles fast enough to hit its own goal. The growth is real either way. The finish line just isn’t where the press release says it is, and I’d rather tell you that than let a good headline number do the arguing for me.
Nobody Sobers Up Just Because the Car Drives Itself
Here’s the angle SBJ’s piece never touched, and it’s the one I’d want a general counsel looking at before anyone gets excited about a fan zone.
The research on rideshare and drinking cuts both ways, and any venue planning a bigger beer garden around the assumption that “nobody’s driving anyway” should know both halves before they sign off on it. On one side, a 2020 study cites earlier research finding Uber’s arrival in a market associated with a 6% to 27% drop in county-level DUI arrests. Uber’s own writeup of a JAMA Surgery study out of Houston found motor vehicle trauma dropped 23.8% on weekend nights after Uber entered that market, and almost 39% for riders under thirty, though that particular figure comes from Uber’s own summary of the paper rather than the paper itself, which is worth flagging. That’s a genuine safety case for frictionless rides home.
But there’s a second, blunter question sitting right next to it, the one a separate study actually asks out loud: if you remove the “how do I get home” worry from a night of drinking, do people just drink more? The researchers found that easier rideshare access might increase alcohol consumption precisely because it lowers the cost of getting drunk. Both things can be true at once. Fewer drunk drivers on the road doesn’t mean less alcohol got poured at the stadium, and a venue building its pre-game and post-game fan zones as if AVs solve that problem entirely is making a bet the research doesn’t actually back up.
And here’s a detail that ought to stop that plan cold before the concept deck even gets built. Waymo’s own rider rules explicitly ban drug or alcohol use inside the car, “regardless of whether permitted by local law.” Any sponsor-branded, drink-on-the-way-home activation is going to run headfirst into that policy. Somebody should make that call to Mountain View before, not after.
Who’s in the Back Seat When Nobody’s Actually Driving
Last angle, and it’s the one with the shortest fuse of all of them.
SBJ’s story ends on a genuinely appealing idea, a single bundled ticket for a teenage fan that covers the round-trip ride, the admission and the food, no parent required, if transit expert Andrew Miller’s guess about self-driving cars going mainstream by 2035 turns out to be right. It’s a good idea. The policy to actually support it doesn’t exist yet.
Waymo’s teen accounts, the only version of this that currently exists anywhere, are limited to riders 14 to 17, require a guardian’s account and credit card linked to it, and only work in metro Phoenix. Everywhere else Waymo operates, including Las Vegas as of this month, a minor riding alone is a straightforward violation of the company’s terms of service.
And the enforcement behind that rule is thinner than the rule itself. Three weeks ago in Santa Monica, a group of unsupervised teenagers rode a Waymo down Olympic Boulevard with a couple of them climbing partway out of the windows. Waymo confirmed the ride happened and suspended the account afterward, and the reporting around it noted that the company’s actual age check amounts to a human operator asking a rider to confirm verbally that they’re over 18. Nobody checks an ID. That’s the entire safety net standing between a nice “holistic ticket for teens” concept and a company’s real terms of service today.
So here’s the question not being asked, and somebody should be asking it before a single youth-ticket-and-ride bundle goes on sale: if the AV company’s own policy says that rider shouldn’t have been alone in the car, whose liability is it when something goes wrong? That’s not a 2035 problem. Given how fast Waymo, Zoox and Tesla are adding cities, it’s a problem for whoever’s drafting terms and conditions this year.
Some Curbs Are More Equal Than Others
One more piece, because it follows directly from the airport comparison above, and it’s the easiest thing on this whole list for a venue to actually go do.
Airports didn’t stop at a flat fee. They built a class system. LAX’s new structure charges twelve dollars for a direct pickup right at the terminal curb, and six dollars for the new Ground Transport Center a short automated-train ride away, which is just a fancy way of saying they’re charging more for convenience and less for a short walk. That’s not an accident. It’s a template.
Sports venues already know this game better than almost anyone. Premium parking, valet, club-level entrances, the entire luxury suite economy has always run on charging more to shave a few minutes off someone’s walk. A sponsor-branded VIP pickup zone right at the club entrance, priced above a shared lot a few blocks away, is the exact same play in a new uniform. It solves the scarcity problem OCVibe and LAZ are both wrestling with right now by pricing the scarce thing rather than pretending you can build your way out of it.
Nobody’s announced anything like this yet. LAZ is still mapping ingress and egress. OCVibe is still counting parking spots. Somebody’s going to be the first to put a price tag on the good ones, and whoever it is will look obvious in hindsight.
Going forward, expect newly constructed arenas and stadiums to have pick-up and drop-off zones, for which, of course, they’ll charge something to the ride-share companies. Those “zones” will be staffed by venue operations, security and the ride-share companies’ supervisors. And like with the airports, there will be tiered zones for VIP, status-level riders, and the general public. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see roving EV charging robots come to new venue parking lot operations and designs.
The Punch Line Nobody’s Written Yet
LAZ Parking bringing on a former Zoox executive in residence isn’t a coincidence, and neither is the Panthers hiring one to run business operations. Two operators, two leagues, and the exact same read on where this money is heading next.
Let’s also recognize that each and every stadium and arena parking deal is different.
Some venues own it outright and manage it. Some outsource the operations to a parking lot concessionaire. Other facilities may own the entire parcel of real estate. In some places, they are owned by the city or county and were built with taxpayer-backed bonds. Those bonds paid for the lots and may have caveats, carve-outs, or requirements. Contracts that are multi-year and may have been negotiated pre-reideshare have terms and expiry dates, limits, and rights. So, for ride-share companies and venues, a one-size-fits-all model simply won’t work. At least, not yet.
The Through Line
Here’s my take, plainly. The venues that come out ahead won’t be the ones with the flashiest AV partnership press release. They’ll be the ones who quietly build the airport playbook first, curb pricing, tiered access, an actual fee schedule, before ride volume forces the issue the way it’s already forcing LAX’s hand. Wait for the technology to feel “ready” and you’ll be rewriting your parking contract under fan pressure in 2028 instead of writing the terms yourself right now.
The question nobody can answer yet, including me, is who ends up owning that curb once the pricing exists. Does the venue keep the money, or does the AV platform, holding all the leverage because it owns the actual point of arrival, end up taking the cut instead? A parking lot was real estate the team controlled outright.
The curb might not be, once the last mile belongs to somebody else’s fleet.
A note on the numbers above: where a figure is a company’s own stated goal rather than an audited or independently confirmed result, I’ve said so in the text, not just in this footnote. Waymo’s million-rides-a-week target is the company’s own ambition for the end of 2026, not a current result, and the independent forecast cited above puts the more likely number closer to 775,000. The $126 billion valuation is the figure the funding round actually closed at, after earlier reporting had it $15 to $25 billion lower while the deal was still being negotiated.