Gregory's ServerAmericans wondering how on earth all the Taylor Swift fans got to last week’s concert at the Melbourne Cricket Ground when there’s no sea of car parking next to the stadium:
|
64 comments
@tsturm @ThermiteBeGiants @mike  @KinkyTurtle @ThermiteBeGiants @mike Understandable reaction - for many people in the US, seeing a regional passenger train or tram is as unlikely as an UFO sighting.  @thefathippy @ThermiteBeGiants Cars are not really reasonable for the general population in an urban environment.  My sarcasm sometimes works, sometimes it fails. 🤷 I was mocking the expectation of acres of car spaces. Public transport, particularly in urban areas, *should* be great, and we, as a society, should be spending far more on it than we do. A lack of decent PT almost forces individual car ownership in a large city. @thefathippy @ThermiteBeGiants I wouldn't know, Vienna has decent public transport. And my flat complex has its own underground station (admittedly, that far in the outlying districts, the "underground" goes on stilts in open air). Funny, met yesterday at a birthday party one of the city traffic planers whose job it is to prioritize public transit traffic over private traffic. You know, additional bus lanes, traffic lights that give way to buses and trams, and so on.  @yacc143 @thefathippy @ThermiteBeGiants I lived in downtown Chicago for a while. I even had my car with me -- parked in a long term lot downtown. Rarely used it. Really, would have been less expensive to rent a car for long trips. (And yes, you can rent a car downtown.) @JeffGrigg @thefathippy @ThermiteBeGiants And with parking charges introduced city wide (so that only residents can long-term park, at the exorbitant price of €10/m), even our second small car gets a place outside. (No we didn't buy it, we managed to inherit it ;) ). @ThermiteBeGiants @static  @Salvo @ThermiteBeGiants @static (personally, I've never owned a car.) @ThermiteBeGiants part of me is kind of annoyed by the smug replies because if it was e.g. the Boxing Day Test the answer would be “they park on the grass”, causing damage to the public parkland. I do see a couple hundred cars parked on the grass in Yarra Park, right next to the stadium. (Mostly for concert staff, I assume.) But that's nothing like the number of cars I'd expect for 96,000 fans in a typical "American" stadium.  @ThermiteBeGiants lol cars have really broken the brains of most of my fellow USians @jiub @ThermiteBeGiants we went all in on the wrong paradigm and can't envision anything diffrent @fluffykittycat @ThermiteBeGiants ridiculous seas of parking which are multiple times the size of the business are basically everywhere in the US and most people never even think about how stupid it is to do things that way.  @ThermiteBeGiants Arrivals tend to be somewhat staggered... It's amazing how much quicker you can get out of such places (Edmonton is my personal experience, but also other Canadian cities) when on foot vs. driving. I've had a ~1km walk and still only been barely behind the car which drove. @ThermiteBeGiants my partner said it took longer to get out of the stadium than it did to get home. @mnot @ThermiteBeGiants While this is true of MCG specifically, it gives the impression that Melbourne is some sort of European-style rail haven, which I'm afraid is not the case. Big-time car dependence is still the norm in AUS. Edit: @mnot excepted, of course :) @dpom @mnot @ThermiteBeGiants I spent two weeks in Melbourne last year. I guess compared to London or Paris it might not seem like it has much rail but I live in Seattle, two blocks from a station on our single (for now) line and a couple miles from the stadium Taylor Swift plays at when she's here. I'm not sure you quite appreciate how impressive Melbourne's system is to those of us from typical US cities.  @ThermiteBeGiants plus you can get absolutely hammered while you are at the stadium. I mean, we do that here, too; but the drive home is a little spicier  @ThermiteBeGiants @_patmurray at least half of these are people doing the sarcastic version of the post @peterrenshaw @ThermiteBeGiants To be fair the overwhelming majority of us do not have public transport as an option. Also the public transport that those of us that do have access is often horribly unreliable. The government and General Motors dismantled our public transport in the 1950's in favor of the Interstate Highway System and it has been all downhill from there.   @ThermiteBeGiants America-Centrism is sickening. Like they can't imagine #PublicTransport to work and #Cars not being default!  @ThermiteBeGiants the americans & canadians who take the bus and/or tram to events don’t often complain about lack of parking. @ThermiteBeGiants the funny part is that Melbourne (and most Australian cities) are not really known for amazing public transport.  @ThermiteBeGiants Thanks for the alt text! Small suggestion though: Currently it mentions that there are several posts by presumably Americans asking about the parking, but it doesn't say that each of them is met by someone from Melbourne explaining that there's public transport etc. it's even more insane considering the colonisation of the new wold would not have been possible without the public transportation by train    @ThermiteBeGiants @BenRiceM Sorry, Americans can’t imagine life without cars. Lived 5 years in Switzerland, just couldn’t get used to timing our travel to the tram so drove to work every day. It’s just what we’re used to 🙁 @PenguinToot @ThermiteBeGiants @BenRiceM not being able to time travel right in *Switzerland*, the most anally retentive nation in the world for punctuality, is quite an achievement @ThermiteBeGiants I'm still waiting for Burning Man (where there's a railway station on a line only used by freight trains) to cop on that they could hire 3 or 4 trains and bring the whole crowd to the event @sinabhfuil the event full of hippies and tech bros, using ancient public transportation methods? Not a chance  Why on hell is nobody telling them @ThermiteBeGiants ha. I reckon some of those were dorothy dixers. if only we could replicate the MCGs lack of parking lots for the places where people all go every week or more often, ie suburban shopping malls etc. Then we could be really smug.  @ThermiteBeGiants Don't tell them about the Dutch F1 GP at Zandvoort. Most people come by bike. @ThermiteBeGiants And here's that link to TikTok where you can see the aerial view and hear Taylor talking to the crowd. @ThermiteBeGiants to be fair there is some parking though nowhere close to the scale they have in the US @ThermiteBeGiants I thought this NPR podcast on Americans and parking was also fascinating https://feeds.npr.org/510355/podcast.xml @ThermiteBeGiants  @ThermiteBeGiants  @ThermiteBeGiants In the San Francisco region, they built Levi's Stadium (American-rules football) at the intersection of a tram line and a train line, claiming that this would help traffic, forgetting to check that the entire daily system capacity of both of those combined would not be enough to fill the stadium, let alone to empty it quickly in the evening. In truth, they wanted to hijack the train station's parking lot when there are events, so they wouldn't have to build their own. @ThermiteBeGiants @XaiaX it’s the saddest shit ever. Public transport being super shitty to non existent except for the few oldest cities, where it’s frequently neglected in favor of cars anyway, is baked into the USian experience. We don’t even see it. I lived in BsAs for a bit and that was the eye opener for me. In Houston, a 15 minute drive by bus turns into an hour and 25 minutes. We kind of have limited light rail, bizs always fighting against expansion fearing lost business construction.  @ThermiteBeGiants I mean, it's Australia so the cars parked just fell of the Earth, because the anti-grav engine in Aussie cars stop once the engine is turned off.  @ThermiteBeGiants Funniest one is how there's literally a big river of train tracks right next to it like you absolutely can't miss it.
screen.png I love the reactions. But seriously.....I wish there where more trains here in the States. The few times I been overseas. I love the fact I could just, take trams, trains, or just walk. Wayyyyyy more relaxing than well.....driving around here. |
@ThermiteBeGiants @mike That’s amazing! So funny that the missing parking lot triggers an immediate reaction. 😁