ESSAY BY EDWARD GRUBERG, PhD
Dear Friends of No Arena,
For good reason, the Sixers have yet to unveil their analysis of traffic and parking. Let’s help them out. I have drawn maps of the Center City area around Chinatown and the maps extend into the Washington Square West neighborhood. The maps run east/west from 7th St. to 16th St. And north/south from Callowhill to Locust.
On the first map you can see two essential structures that the Sixers and their planners have conveniently not talked about. At the corner of 10th and Cherry there is a fire station (F) complete with fire trucks and hooks and ladders and an EMS contingent. Walk a few blocks south on 10th street past the Chinatown Gate, there is another essential structure, the Emergency Room of Jefferson Hospital (E). The fire station and the emergency room are so important that they are open 24/7 all year round. They never close. For each, timing is critical. You don’t want to impede fire trucks and ambulances to get to fires and to treat and transport patients. Conversely, people with medical emergencies need to get to the ER as quickly as possible.
So what have the Sixers done? Proposed to build an arena between the fire station and the emergency room.
If you want to mess up access to both critical institutions you would propose building an arena at 10th and Market. It is hard to decide whether the billionaire owners and their hired hands are naturally ignorant or they have to practice. Or they just don’t care. Nonetheless, the location of the proposed arena is a health and safety menace. Instead, they try to distract by talking about the Fashion District. Ugh.
For the third map, I have superimposed with red lines the spread of vehicles going to a Sixers game. I have used the Sixers own proposed Pollyana number of 3,700 vehicles. The vehicles have to be shoe-horned into a small space of narrow streets that are already congested. When you line them up that’s about 14 miles of vehicles (5 cars take up about 100 feet; 50 cars take up 1,000 feet; 500 cars take up 10,000 feet; you can check the math yourself). The Sixers suggest that only 30% of people will come by vehicle. There is likely to be many more cars actually coming to a sold-out game. At Philadelphia sports venues most (about 75%) fans come from the suburbs and they come by car. For the proposed arena, fans will all be trying to get to the arena before tip-off time. And they will all leave when the game is over. It is more likely that there will be 20 miles of cars converging on the area around the arena.
They will leave the emergency room inaccessible and the fire station blockaded for critical periods of time. They will mess up Chinatown and Washington Square West. For what reason? So the billionaires, who haven’t done a critical analysis, can get their way. Shame on them.
Finally, the Sixers have presented the proposed arena as all or nothing. Here at 10th and Market or nowhere else. Look at all the construction jobs that will be given up. That is just silly.
The Phillies looked into a downtown stadium in 1999. It didn’t work for them and they built Citizens Bank Park at the sports complex in South Philly. It has worked out well.
The Sixers can and should find a better location. The maps don’t lie.
Edward Gruberg, Ph.D.
Professor emeritus,
College of Science and Technology
Temple University
Photos Courtesy of No Arena Washington Square West
