Tony Franciosa wrote:so this was approved today - I think Mayor sign-off is the final step. truly can't wait for it to open... this will be a great space for the team and the city (despite the naysayers - who are mostly just parroting Comcast talking points)
mjkvol wrote:Arsenal wrote:Snotbubbles wrote:Anyone who has ever tried to drive in downtown Philly during the week knows, you aren't going to a game in the City and driving. It would probably take you a half hour to get to the location now, with 10-15K people trying to get to the same location, you're probably looking at an hour to get within a 5 block radius of the arena (and that might be a generous estimate) and then, once you get close, you will probably have trouble finding parking, and the parking you do find will probably be $40 easily as the people who own the lots will jack up the rates. What's going to happen is people will park somewhere outside of the downtown area and take public transportation to the location. But that presents a new level of risk for the commuter.
People are going to take public transit (subway, commuter rail, etc.) to the new downtown arena. You know, like people in pretty much every other city do.
I'd love to see the Venn diagram between people against this arena and those concerned about climate change. Two perfectly overlapping circles lol.
F***k "climate change", but you aren't entirely accurate when talking about other cities. When I used to go to games (before you had to take out a second mortgage to go), I went to a ton of events (mostly concerts) at MSG, and drove in, parked at Port Authority, and walked the few blocks to the Garden. Easy, peasy. Where is the Port Authority in Philly?
I hate getting out of the Sports Complex after a game, but at least you can drive in, park, and get in your car and drive out. I don't have a dog in this fight as I stopped going to games years ago, but it seems that this is a great thing for those who live in the city, but a major inconvenience or even a deal breaker for the rest.
I get that most people don't care and they like the idea of new buildings, but the arena really is just a bad idea all around that was sold on bad ideas and facts. And it really was just doing the mayor wanting to keep it 100 with some rich people and not factoring in anything that wasn't convenient for that. Even if you don't have the energy to care you can acknolwedge that the selling of the arena was all just BS.
-transit: almost no one who goes to Sixers games wants to take transit. The biggest demographic at games is far suburban families who aren't very adventurous types and don't want to keep their kids out past 11pm and simply aren't going to take transit, and the second most common demographic is more working-class families from less far away but who definitely aren't piling the kids into a Septa bus. The arena study that the Sixers themselves paid for (meaning it's not exactly objective) said that 40% of people need to take transit to games for traffic to not be dangerously bad, which means 4 x's as many people as do now. It doesn't sound insane in theory but it is when you look at those crowds and have to think about which 10,000 of them are actually going to take a bus or train to the city. (Also seems like at best you're pissing off your fan base and season ticket holders.)
-'revitalizing Market': I work like 6 blocks north of the arena and often take the train to Jefferson station and walk up there. First, Market east is absolutely not 'dead' and it's one of the more bustling parts of the city. I get that the mall is struggling cuz mall, though, it's the idea that an arena that's open only at night and only for like 60-70 nights per year is going to make that an amazing hub of energy. It's just going to be a dead empty block most of the time, and any 'revitalizing' is going to happen around it and in spite of it. In another 5 years everything around there would probably be new apts and shops serving them anyway. I get that the arena maybe solves a small and specific problem of replacing that one block of the mall, but that absolutely does not translate into giving energy and whatnot to those blocks for the vast majority of days/times. (Also the economic study said very clearly that the arena wold harm a near majority of Chinatown businesses, if people think that's a fake reactionary thing take it up with the super-biased study the Sixers commissioned).
-creating jobs: the Sixers were going to build an arena somewhere or other, the exact same jobs would've been created no matter where it was at. There were MANY other good locations in the city where the concerns about traffic, f'ing with Chinatown, etc wouldn't have mattered as much, but the billionaires wanted it here because that's the coolest spot and they're going to feel important having it there. And the Parker administration was always, always trying to help them get that rather than pushing for a solution that would've been fine for everyone involved. The idea that the Sixers were actually going to move to NJ or whatever is really farfetched--Josh Harris really wants his fancy new plaything to be in a parking lot swamp in Camden, the least cool or compelling place on the east coast--and it only came up when Parker needed an excuse to push it. (And besides, if the arena was built elsewhere and jobs went to other workers instead of the workers Parker was backing, sucks for her and her friends but in the grand scheme it's helping the same # of people put food on the table).
