To support Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment in evaluating a new arena for the Philadelphia 76ers, our Program Director of Transportation Planning, Trent Lethco, led a comprehensive effort exploring connectivity, mobility, and fan experience at a proposed Center City location and alternative sites across the region. The focus has now returned to South Philly, where KLD is helping develop multimodal transportation solutions for a walkable, transit-accessible district around a rebuilt arena.
From New York to San Francisco, the NBA has a reputation for creating high-quality, fan-focused arenas for their teams that integrate well with their surrounding urban environments. In line with this vision, the league was eager to move the Philadelphia 76ers from their current arena in an auto-centric sports complex in South Philly to a new arena in the Center City, which promised better connectivity to the region's transit network and increased pedestrian activity in an area that could benefit from more customers and visitors.
However, sports arenas tend to introduce many transportation problems of their own4. To address this, Howard Blitzer Sports and Entertainment (HBSE), which owns the Sixers, recruited our transportation planning lead, Trent Lethco, to study all of the transportation implications of a new arena in the Center City location. Trent helped HBSE think through connectivity between the city’s transit system and the new arena, as well as pedestrian movements inside the arena, on surrounding streets and sidewalks, and ease of movement between the transit platforms, transit stations, and the arena itself.
At KLD, we approach sports venue transportation planning at both a design level and an operational level to seek out win-win solutions for the client, the teams, and the community, which allows projects to move more quickly through planning and approvals towards implementation. Part of that thinking on this project meant ensuring the new Center City arena would be well connected to Philadelphia’s SEPTA network and that people can get to the arena whether they're walking, cycling, taking public transit or driving and parking. In each of those modes, it was important to give the fans an optimal experience while also trying to improve the ambient transportation environment for everyone else as well.
Trent's scope grew over time from just looking at human movement to looking at parking, traffic movements and other activities related to the Center City site. He also helped the team explore the benefits of the arena being in other parts of the Greater Philadelphia region, thinking through all the different implications of locations, transportation options, and different crowd management plans to try and find a good solution that worked for everyone.
During the course of those efforts, it became clear that keeping the arena where it’s currently located in South Philly, but demolishing and rebuilding it, was the most politically viable option for the city.
We are currently helping HBSE to conceptualize a new district around the rebuilt arena that has all the features of a Center City environment, but in an area that is well-positioned to optimize walking, biking, public transportation, rideshare, and still allowing people who want to drive and park to do so. We are studying everything from desire paths and optimal access to circulation and mobility solutions to start to push through some initial concepts and think through what arena might look like in a detailed design way.
