As I say in the original post, Qwest would be 15 minutes away from the University. It’s quite common in college basketball for urban campuses to have their teams play in the local NBA arena. Meanwhile, there are very few big-time college football programs that share a city with an NFL team, so there isn’t much to compare this situation to.

Your last comment seems to complain that the Qwest Field area isn’t busy enough, which is of course the argument I’m trying to make.

Remember, state colleges belong to the citizens of Washington, not the schools athletic department.

I have never been to a college or pro football game in my life, but it seems to me that not having the physical presence of the football stadium at the university would be a problem. The whole campus plan at UW is on a view axis of mountains, lake, and ta da….football stadium. The UW used to be downtown and if it was, it might make sense to have its stadium downtown, but I just can’t see it being remote from the campus.

Our civic ghetto of government buildings is joined to the stadium ghetto by Pioneer Square. There actually are not nearly enough people on the streets of Pioneer Square. Being hedged in by those two often empty dismal areas is brutal and of course that neighborhood is suffering because of it.

The main reason I’d argue for making the move is that it starts to shift the entire focus of putting more cars into the Montlake area. This not only returns the neighborhood to the residents but eliminating all but an interchange for transit and emergency vehicles at Montlake would be a huge benefit to traffic flow on the SR520 corridor.

I’ve been on both the 550 and 545 plenty of times to know I’d rather take I-90

And 2) the stadium is already huge (190′ tall), so nothing but a really monster high-rise would be taller than what’s there already.

As for your apparent desire to have as few sporting events as possible at each venue, I’m not really sure what to say to that, except that it runs pretty contrary to expanding whatever economic benefits stadiums do provide, even if they tend not to make up for the costs.

We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that, although I think most people would prefer that we seek to maximize our return on those investments.

[In reference to Cal-Berkeley, minor league baseball, et al sharing stadiums.]

In each case you cite, the case isn’t nearly as strong given the points I made in the original case. In the case of Berkeley, the football stadium is nowhere near the BART station, the program isn’t asking for hundreds of millions for renovations (AFAIK), and McAfee Coliseum (where the Raiders play) is a 43-year-old dump, a far cry from Qwest Field, more recent renovations notwithstanding. McAfee is within walking distance of BART but not really all that close to the station. Despite all that, if I were a California taxpayer and the school came hat in hand, I’d expect them to look at this option.

As for the Aquasox, Silvertips, Rainiers, T-Birds, etc, I don’t think you can really compare minor league teams, that play every night and draw extremely locally, with football teams that, due to weekend games and huge hinterlands, draw from all over the state and beyond. I don’t see how can compare moving a minor league team to an entirely different city to moving a regional football team 6 miles.

What a strange world the car has created. There must be other ways of encouraging people to gather and eat and drink heavily without cars. Pubs? Picnic tables? A park?

Do we really want a world where you drink heavily in your car?

If this happened in Fall 2009, sure there’d be chaos. But I refuse to believe that this simply can’t be managed in the longer term. For example, here’s last season’s schedule for the New York Red Bulls, who happen to share Giants Stadium with both the Giants and Jets.

Are there Saturday games? Sure. But there also lots of Thursdays and Sundays in lieu of Saturday.

By the way, over half of the UW’s classroom space is in Health Sciences along Pacific St and the engineering schools are closer to the stadium than the quad. It sounds good to have light rail to the (geographic) heart of campus until you realize that few people are there except during class times, but the hospital keeps running year around. There are also a much larger percentage of professional staff (like me!) in the school of medicine than in other schools like Arts and Sciences. In the past few years UW has really tried to move researchers off main campus, presumably to free up space for students. As a result the HUB goes on skeleton crew all summer and you have to go to the Ave or Health Sciences for lunch anyway.

Too damn funny.

And yes, that is precisely my suggestion. The two stadiums should not have been built so close to one another in the first place but now that they are, we shouldn’t be seeking still more sports tenants.

And, you can’t “simply” alternate home dates because you’re forgetting that both teams have opponents who have their own scheduling constraints. Oh and the WSU game at Qwest, the high school football weekend, events at the Events Center, big concerts and so on would also need to be avoided. Do I really need to go on? You all can’t paper over the scheduling issues as insignificant.