This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Atrios writes:
One of the weirdly absurd things in Philadelphia is how relatively few people actually take public transit to the stadium/arena complex. It is by design, as they’re all in one place at the southern end of the city, surrounded by massive amounts of parking, and at the intersection of the two major highways going into the city
I lived in Philly when the new sports arenas were being debated. Several awesome sites were debated in and around downtown, especially for the new Phillies stadium. In the end, parochial decisions dominated: UPenn didn’t want all that traffic near their campus, and residents of Chinatown not unreasonably objected to having a good chunk of their neighborhood demolished. So two new stadia were built South of the city, right in the parking lots of the old stadia.
It was a missed opportunity. On the other hand, it sure is expensive to build infrastructure to support a downtown Stadium. Not sure Philly had the resources to pull it off.