United Center planning $7B mixed-use district to replace parking lots

[x Tame Impala]

And this is the chicken-egg thing for "safety" folks. Desolate and underutilized urban areas have a tendency to become "unsafe." When you put things in those places that people frequent and use, that changes.

When people go "well I feel unsafe traveling to this location any way other than by car" they typically don't realize that car infrastructure (large, mostly-empty parking lots, overpasses, highways that break up neighborhoods) is exactly what made the area feel "unsafe" in the first place.

Fair enough, but 20,000 people can't all take the bus or the L to a game. If you're coming from the burbs you'd have to take the Metra to Union Station then get from Union to the United Center. Not impossible via CTA but it's going to take you hours of commute time. Annoying at best to do before the game, exhausting and probably more dangerous to do at night.

People need to be able to park their cars, end of story.

 

[Rich Nixon]

Fair enough, but 20,000 people can't all take the bus or the L to a game. If you're coming from the burbs you'd have to take the Metra to Union Station then get from Union to the United Center. Not impossible via CTA but it's going to take you hours of commute time. Annoying at best to do before the game, exhausting and probably more dangerous to do at night.

People need to be able to park their cars, end of story.

Yes, but Chicago knows well how to do that vertically instead of horizontally. So you dramatically reduce the parking footprint with a couple of large parking garages, get the L station in place, and off you go.

People figure it out if there's demand. We see this hair-pulling in Philly whenever anyone proposes breaking up the sea of useless parking that is the Philly sports complex, but the reality is many arenas/stadiums don't have that while having similar dynamics of most people coming in from the suburbs.

 

[Moist ReadOnly]

Lol of course the first concern of people is "how will I park my car?"

So north american. As if car was the only way to get around in a huge downtown city or even a smart way to do it.

Spoken like someone who has no idea about North American public transportation

 

[Crow]

Excited for this to be completed when I'm *checks notes* 45

Where do you see the projected completion date?

Edit - I see it will take 10 years

 

[Hockeyville USA]

Bulls crowd is super corporate and yuppie.

In the lower bowl, the casual type maybe. The average Bulls fan is definitely not that type lmao

 

[Sam de Mtl]

Spoken like someone who has no idea about North American public transportation

Or maybe we need to change public transit instead of fighting to keep waste of valuable space parking lots?

That being said, everyone is free to keep their backwards ways if they wish.

 

[Melrose Munch]

Chicago has one of the largest subway systems and there are multiple L stations ~5 mins from the arena. I'm glad these lots are going.

 

[Moist ReadOnly]

Or maybe we need to change public transit instead of fighting to keep waste of valuable space parking lots?

That being said, everyone is free to keep their backwards ways if they wish.

At no point did I make my stance on changing that known; you spoke first on the matter and made it seem like all North Americans prefer that

Add on to it that until technology changes most cities cant fix that problem right now without insane funding; if you think stadiums and replacing parking costs a lot, try running current transit methods through established cities and suburbs

America is entrenched in car culture until a lot of things change - not just the opinions of North Americans