I think the best case scenario is that capacity goes down by about 12% (50K to 44K).
That means every row that has season ticket holders in it is going to get shrunk by about 12%.
Where will those poor people go?
They will go to the next row back.
The second row also loses 12% capacity so about 24% of the people now in the second row will be in the third row.
The third row will have about 36% displacement to the fourth row,
By the time we get to the eighth row, best case maybe 4%of the people now in that row will still be there.
The distance one is displaced gets worse as your season tickets get further from the court side seats near center court.
By the time you get to the back of the sections near center court on the 100 level, people are going to be displaced by about 4 rows.
Now this assumes everyone keeps their season tickets. I suspect some are going to be so dismayed by the displacement that they will choose to give their seats up. But I doubt much of this happens on the 100 level. So it might not be quite as bad. But again, the powers that be are talking about giving the people with the best season tickets the widest seats. So the displacement in these rows is likely going to be significantly worse than 12%.
Not sure how they will do the reseating process. I am hoping they do it by years one has been a a season ticket holder, so loyalty, the thing SUAD should prize above all else, gets rewarded most. By SUAD has bad records and has little idea how long anyone has been a season ticket holder, so unless they do a great job researching things, this is probably not an option.
I think they will likely go through all the sections on the lower deck first instead, going from the sections near center court towards the end lines one by one and do it that way.
And then do the same thing on the 200 level (assuming it survives; they have to be thinking about making some of all of the 200 level seats some kind of uber expensive premium seating. Maybe make them all private boxes. For the sake of the people sitting there today, I hope not.
And then I think they will do the same thing on the 300 level. Start from the 310 and 309 sections row A and go up from there.
I figure by the time they go to section 310, they will beassigning seats 2 sections worse than people have today. Maybe 3.
Anyway, to answer your question, I don’t think it is going to make much of a difference if you have aisle seats today. Now, they might ask you if you want aisle seats and if you say yes, you might be reseated behind a basket. If you say no, you might only end up sitting even with a baseline.
If they reduce capacity from 50K to 42K, or 40K, it just gets progressively worse.
To be fair to SUAD, there is no great way to do this. Most everyone is going to get worse seats. There is a price to be paid for migrating from the very narrow uncomfortable bench seats we have now and pretty much all of us are going to have to pay it.
It is quite unfortunate.
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