Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee
I’m trying to really understand what the grand benefit of having the new arena is, and I haven’t really been presented with a lot of compelling reasons. My wife’s family came to town in December for the Bruins game and wondered why we needed a new building. Here’s what I am under the impression on the “need” for it, is this an accurate fulsome list or are there more?
- bathroom lines are faster or negligible
- roof maybe doesn’t collapse one day? Maybe? Is this true? Read something about the roof crumbling
- building is nicer to look at
That about sum it up? And for this we get wildly increased ticket prices (see: Oilers), less parking, and more construction for a few years.
Seems like the Flames and their owners get a lot of cool stuff but just not sure what average Joe guy gets.
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I think you've pretty much nailed it. IMO the roof is the only substantial consideration...everything else will be a pretty marginal better/worse in the grand scheme depending on individual use cases/viewpoints:
- a new building will likely be generally more attractive closer up, but lose that iconic/unique contribution to the cityscape from further away
- 15k+ people are always going to present challenges for access/egress/toilets...of course marginal improvements are certainly possible
Regarding the roof:
I'm not an engineer, but it doesn't seem like it should be
that hard/expensive to reinforce it an ensure it is safe for decades to come. A fairly recent article pegs the roof itself closer to $35M (quite different than the $200M rumoured this month):
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...roof-1.5637461
Perhaps you get ambitious and build out one of the end-zone concourses at the same time to tick off a lot of the other amenities we are supposed to see from a new building.
I'll acknowledge that it is probably more sensible to direct that money to a new building, but it would be nice if we weren't painting ourselves into the same corner again where the city is totally responsible for resolving whatever unanticipated problems emerge with the next building.