Sure…and they might even re-build the platform to be bigger to allow more cars.
The problem is for Jane Doe in car-8 being told only the first five cars will be able to unload at (say) Park Ridge. She’s been partying and having fun and now she realizes at the last moment she can’t get off the train at her stop. She can’t muscle her way through a filled car of people fast enough to get to an appropriate exit. I bet that would happen a lot.
The Chargers might technically be pitching in for the cost of SoFi, but it’s a relative pittance. The total cost might be as high as $5 billion and the bulk of what the Chargers pitched in came from a $200 million loan from the NFL. It’s Stan Kroenke’s stadium, not Dean Spanos’.
As long as it is private interests paying for it and not tax payers I am fine with it.
[quote=“Kent_Clark, post:45, topic:1005613, full:true”]
Nitpick: 2005 was the former Expos’ initial season in DC.
My point was that during the first few decades that DC was sitting there without a MLB team, AFAICT pretty much nobody was threatening to move their team to DC if they didn’t get a better stadium. Which would be a strike against the ‘musical chairs’ argument.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but my recollection is that the Expos’ move was less a matter of ‘give me a better stadium or I move the team’ than just giving up on Montreal being a viable MLB city.
ETA: The first sentence in the quote box is mine, the last two are Kent Clark’s. Shoulda been a ‘snip’ in between his two where I cut out his Los Angeles example.
At its heart it WAS a stadium issue. Stade Olympique was a horrific dump and completely unsuitable for baseball, and efforts to build a new ballpark never worked out, in part because no one in Quebec was willing to spend public money on it.
It’s like an arms race.
In St. Louis, officials at the Dome at America’s Center (aka “The Dome With No Name”) have announced they need $150 million to bring the Dome up to standards, having not really paid much attention to it since the Rams left in 2015.
The Dome’s primary resident is the minor-league football team the Battlehawks, and it still hosts many concerts, rallies, and conventions. However, the NCAA has said it’s no longer suitable for basketball’s Final Four (and probably not the regionals, either.)
The $150 million is not for things like luxury boxes, but rather for improving handicap access, replacing 15-year old digital screens, improvements to the HVAC system and the various other details that a building that’s coming up on 30 years old would normally require.
The public authority that owns the Dome has $80 million in the bank, but much of it is earmarked for improvements to the adjoining Convention Center, which was built in 1977 and has been a continuing problem keeping it competitive with similar size venues in other cities. The city and county, which helped finance the Dome originally, have both said they have other, higher priorities.
Surprising.
Note the Flyers and 76ers left the Spectrum a mere 29-30 years ago, and it survived to 2010.
In the UK things ar ecompletely different.
Professional sports teams almost never move to another city, the only one which people ar egenerally aware of is the move of Wimbledon Football Club from London to Milton Keynes, it was incredibly unpopular with fans and within a couple of years the team went into administration.
Partly this might be due to geography the UK is small enough that you can travel from one end of the country to another and the pyramid structure meaning there are a lot of teams you can support, football fans in Milton Keynes might suppor teams like Leicester, or Oxford or Northampton, and traveled 30 or so miles to a home game they would not switch allegience because there was now a local team, for Wimbledon fans their fury at the move was so great they would never support the club that deserted them again.
I do not think it is in the powers of local government to raise extra taxes for a sport stadium, National Govermnent set what they can charge for local taxes, but even if it was possible it would be a vote loser rather than a vote winner to do so.
I support Everton who are about to move to a new stadium (after 146 years at the current one). It is entirely privately financed. The same is true for other stadia such as the Tottenham Stadium used for NFL games.
The nearest thing to a team getting publicly financed new stadium is the London Stadium, though this was mor ethe Governmet had a stadium that it would be politically embarrassing to leave to dust or knock down. This was used for the athletcis stadium for the London Olympics and the original plant was to reduce its capacity but keep it as an athletics stadium. It is difficult to know truth from fiction but it appears that a lot of the practicalities of this conversion did not meet what the disigners claimed and it the stadium was leased to West Ham (with little or no options for competing bids) most of the conversion costs were paid my Local and National government (with a small contribution from West Ham) and it is rumoured what West Ham pay for use fo the facilities is well below market value.