I'll never understand why fans are die hard loyal to franchises that screw them at every possible opportunity.

Because for many people it is a core part of their identity, without which they wouldn't have much outside of work and sleep

Bread and Circuses

“You will not believe this 2000 year old strategy, that still works today!”

As a non north-american I never understood this franchise system. How could you cheer for a team that will move anytime to a city more profitable? In Europe and latin america, if your city sucks, is becoming poor or so, the team will fall to the second division and will deal with that cause they are from that city, cause they are a club, not a franchise. For me this makes much more sense.

seat license fees (which are somehow different than tickets?)

What the actual fuck is THAT bullshit??

it hurts my brain

those players brains will be hurting from concussions

This is actually pretty accurate to how big oil, auto manufacturers and sports owners who are friends could operate.

It runs a 3.6 mile loop, that's just over a 1.5 mile walk from one end to the other. I can walk it in 20 minute

Well fine if you want to brag I guess but most Midwesterners would need defibrillators and a fast food chain or two along the way to make this trek, and it ain't taking 20min.

City street cars seem to be a waste of money now but more trains would be nice. They never invest enough in it.

I live in Atlanta. We have a shitty street car and a shitty train system. They don't go to enough places to be useful most of the time. But if they got the same kind of funding our stadiums got it would be crazy good. I could ride the train instead of driving to most places if they just expanded to some more parts of the city.

CAD 180 millions for a 35km long express bus lane where I live...

150m can do a whole bunch when you use properly rolled out busses, with their own lanes (and you can initially paint these if the budget is low). People driving their car on the bus lanes will nicely generate additional tax income (fines) and if the busses are good, the people will come.

Even in the Netherlands, where we have really good trains on even a European scale, we still have long-distance busses (comfy ones, for 1-2hr trips) and regional busses (still comfy, but those are 20-30 min trips). Custom infra doesn't always cut it, especially when repurposing existing infra will serve the job just fine.

you could absolutely build 1 or 2 decent rapid bus lines for that money, as well as pay for a few years of operations. but…. 1 or 2 rapid bus lines, while nice, certainly doesn’t make for a comprehensive system.

My city painted lines in the road, and people still bitch about it 3 years later, the lines are almost gone from fading and chipping, and cycling is still dangerous due to some traffic specifically targeting them for harrasment.

People are freaking out about that in my city while the $500 million dollar highway interchange right next to it gets no attention.

Raiders and Rams stadiums each cost over a billion and have been built in the last 5ish years. Stadiums should and can be cheap but the NFL owners aren’t doing that. Vegas is also tearing down the Tropicana to build a massive and expensive baseball stadium in its please with a smaller Tropicana on the site as well

It cost £200 million (£327m at current prices) just for 14km of tram lanes in my local city.

It could buy a decent amount of buses (~£200k each, more for green options), but without infrastructure changes and bus lanes, have fun watching them sit in traffic while everyone refuses to use them.

Shit's expensive yo.

Not only they aren't cheap, but they are pretty much never profitable. If we are to build things that are not profitable, we could as well build something that will offer a service to the population, like public transportation.

What city size can justify a $1 billion stadium

Could have just stopped there. The answer is none regardless of the rest.

Stadiums drive economic activity into city government officials pockets.

I was going to say Alberta, lol

Edit: I know the $1.22 billion is just for a new arena in Calgary, but it's a big part of it for sure

Where would you have them go, exactly?

Seattle voted down T Mobile park twice and the city still found a way to push it through lol