Arlington, Texas is an interesting city. A few years ago they branded themselves as “Alive with the American Dream.” However, unless you’re a fan of professional baseball, or football, an amusement park enthusiast or a member of Mensa, you may have not heard of them. The abridged description is thus: It’s a massive suburb of nearly 400,000 in the heart of the Dallas/Fort Worth “Metroplex,” it’s the home of both the Texas Rangers and Dallas Cowboys sports teams, and it’s a three-hour drive north from Austin. (There’s more, but in the interest of time and the narrow point of this article, that will have to suffice.)
Cowboys Stadium and Rangers Ballpark are literally down the road from each other. Back in 2011, there was a 3-day stretch of World Series games in Arlington, from Saturday to Monday. That Sunday afternoon, the Rangers played against the St. Louis Cardinals, and that Sunday evening, the Cowboys played against the St. Louis Rams. Hundreds, if not thousands, of fans took pedicab rides from one stadium to the other. It was so much fun.
Starting in August, Cowboys and Rangers seasons start to overlap.
Here are some numbers
- The Cowboys play for 684,ooo fans or more per season. The season officially begins in September. There are 8 home games. They play at AT&T Stadium, which also hosts college football games and other events throughout the year. They are the most popular professional football team, always drawing 5,000 to 12,000 more fans per game than their closest competitor in attendance.
- The Rangers play for 2.5 million fans or more per season. The season officially begins in March, usually. There are 81 home games. They play at Globe Life Park in Arlington. In 2012, the year after they almost won the World Series, 3.5 million fans turned out to watch them play.
- Together, not including other events nor the nearby convention center, the teams two attract an average of 3.2 million visitors to their stadiums each cumulative season.
Movemint Bike Cab’s experience:
Movemint Bike Cab kicked off 2009 by traveling to Washington, D.C. for the presidential inauguration, and then to Tampa for the Super Bowl. During that time, Cowboys Stadium (now AT&T Stadium) was under construction. Shortly after Movemint returned to Austin, that construction completed. The 5th-largest NFL stadium for the League’s most valuable franchise now stood in a nearby city. Movemint could rely upon the Cowboys to draw 80,000 – 105,000 people approximately biweekly for six months out of the year, not including all the college football games and non-football events held there. Sounds good to us!
Movemint has worked in Arlington, Texas since the 2009 Dallas Cowboys football season. At its end, the City of Arlington implemented a pedicab permit cap and a lottery system. The maximum allowable number of pedicabs per company was 10, and the total market pedicab cap was 40. The first lottery drawing allowed companies 1-year of access; every lottery drawing thereafter allowed 2-years of access.
Movemint was fortunate to have 10 pedicabs operating in Arlington continuously, from April 2010 to April 2014. We worked 2 World Series, 1 Super Bowl, countless postseason games, approximately 400 baseball games, approximately 50 professional football games, and a large number of college football games, concerts, other sporting events, etc. We lost the lottery drawing and therefore lost access to Arlington from April 2014 to April 2016; yes, we made it back.
I had never been a sports fan until I began working in Arlington. Then I came to really enjoy baseball, thanks to the Rangers. As it turns out, they play a minimum of 81 baseball games at home every year, and more if they make it to the postseason. And as it also turns out, that at 48,000 seats, Rangers Ballpark (now called Globe Life Park in Arlington) is the 5th-largest stadium in Major League Baseball. I had to learn baseball. It became a necessity because I was talking to so many people each night.
A benefit of having a shop based in another city is the ease of spinning off its success and schedule to work events elsewhere. In the Metroplex, we’ve also worked in Fort Worth and Denton.