Gillette itself was 100% funded by Kraft. I would assume (but it’s hard to find out for sure) that certain infrastructure improvements (new road, etc.) were funded by public dollars.
Yeah, I remember all the MLB teams threatening to move to DC after the Senators (v. 2.0) left in 1971. 
How long did Los Angeles go without an NFL team?
About 20 years.
And in that 20 year period, the vast majority of NFL teams demanded and received new or renovated stadiums that were publicly funded. Once almost every team had a new/renovated stadium, the NFL moved back to LA.
Go figure.
[quote=“RTFirefly, post:42, topic:1005613”]
Yeah, I remember all the MLB teams threatening to move to DC after the Senators (v. 2.0) left in 1971.[/quote]
And the Expos moved there in 2004. They moved into a shiny new stadium in 2008.
They moved to a shiny new stadium in St. Louis in 1995. Twenty years later the stadium was no longer new, and then the Rams moved back. And now they’re in a shiny, new stadium.
I don’t think the examples being provided disprove my musical chairs argument.
As has been alluded to, baseball teams play many more games per season than football teams. It would be much harder to schedule.
I want to know why stadium designers can never get it right in the first place.
Chicago’s Guaranteed Rate Field- easily the worst of the modern baseball stadiums. Now they want to leave it.
Commanders Field- How does a stadium go to pot so quickly?
The Ballpark in Arlington- They didn’t know in the 1990s that it gets hot in Texas and built an open air stadium anyway? Why not build a similar one in Death Valley?
Atlanta- Burned right through Turner Field, citing traffic as the reason. If only they had known that downtown Atlanta had heavy traffic in 1997.
Detroit- The Palace of Auburn Hills was supposedly a dream arena in 1988, in thirty years the Pistons would leave it for downtown. What was wrong with it? The location. So why didn’t some genius think of that in the 1980s?
Time after time taxpayers buy these billionaires these lavish stadiums only to get extorted again every twenty years or so.
Meanwhile, I’m sure that the public school buildings are lacking in no manner whatsoever.
The plan is working.
But note that their stadium was not publicly funded.
You could also add the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium in Arlington to that list, in which it was built in the east-west direction so that intense sunlight + glare would enter the playing field and seating section in the afternoon and blind players, staff and spectators alike. As if it wasn’t known which direction the Sun rises and sets in.
Arlington Park Metra stop (right next to the former racetrack) is about 12 miles from the Edison park Metra stop (the furthest NW part of Chicago on the same line). I wouldn’t say that’s particularly “far”, especially when the end of that Metra line is about 42 miles beyond that.
But to do that, you’ve got to start at Ogilvie. So you have to go away to go towards. Never been to a Bear’s game, but I have been to see the Cubs. We were staying at State and Ohio, we walked a half-block south, hopped the red line and were in Wrigley about 30 minutes after leaving the hotel. To get to Arlington, I would guess an hour or more? There and back.
Google is telling me that there is a grand total of three NFL stadiums that were 100% privately funded: Patriots, Rams/Chargers, and Giants/Jets.
My takeaway there is that it’s much easier to privately finance when you have two teams pitching in. And along those lines, hats off to Robert Kraft for getting it done solo.
It also helps to be wealthy independent of team ownership, which Robert Kraft definitely is.
I think the problem goes deeper.
Assume a given game has 40,000 people in attendance (which is low I think). Let’s say 10% of those people take the train (4,000 people). A Chicago Metra train can hold maybe 1,000 people (I am not 100% sure…I tried looking it up but this seems close to reasonable if they are packed). The trains run one per hour but for these games they may put on more so, let’s say one every 20 minutes (generous I think). It could take you 80 minutes to board a train and another 50 minutes to get downtown. And, once downtown, chances are you need to travel further to get wherever you are going so add another hour or more.
I’ve seen the crush at the train station by Soldier Field. It’s not pretty.
Also, consider how conductors collect tickets. They have 1,000 people boarding at once…good luck with that. Dunno how that would work.
Yeah, that’s low. Soldier Field currently has a capacity of 62,500, which is small by NFL standards. It’s clear that the Bears want their new stadium to eventually host a Super Bowl, and the NFL requires host stadiums to be able to hold at least 70,000, so we can count on a new Bears stadium to hold at least that many.
One of Metra’s bilevel cars (they have several different types) can hold about 140 seated, or about 240 if standees are included. They typically run six to seven cars on a train, but I’ve seen Metra trains, at least on the BNSF line, with 11 cars, so you’re probably looking at a train being able to carry somewhere between 1600 to 2600.
Even with several trains running on game day, it’s still not going to be the primary way fans would get to the stadium.
To be fair, the Patriots (football) and Revolution (soccer) play at Gillette Stadium. Both are owned by Robert Kraft.
Isn’t this limited by station platform sizes? If the stations are made for (say) eight cars then that’s all you get even if you could keep tacking more cars on.
ETA: I just thought of another problem. Metra would have to pile on trains to be in the city to take people to the game and then run them all back into the city after the game which would leave a whole lotta trains not where you want them the next morning. So, someone would have to drive them in before the game and back out after the game. Doable probably but an added cost.
Generally, yes, though on my line (BNSF), there are a few stops with short platforms, and they only open up certain cars of a longer train at those stations.
That said, if they were to be running special trains to a Bears stadium at Arlington Park, they’d probably run a trainset with the right number of cars for the platform.