Support NeoGAF

[snacknuts]

I live in Indianapolis, home of the Indy 500. Memorial Day weekend every year is a pain in the ass if you spend much time on the west side or even downtown. Saturday is the 500 parade downtown, so they have lots of street closures on the days leading up to the parade. I was leaving the gym this morning and had to double back out of my way to get around them. You also have to worry about street closures, highway exit restrictions, etc on race day, and the city does not always do a fabulous job of warning you about them. This year is the 100th running of the race, so they are expecting record crowds (it's already the largest single-day sporting event in the world) and I'm expecting record headaches.

What kind of minor inconveniences do you have to deal with for large events where you live?

 

[Draft]

Commissioning week at the Naval Academy.

Lots of traffic, but also an opportunity to make some serious cash on the AirBnB market.

 

[TheOnlyOneHeEverFeared]

Bruce Springsteen is playing in Dublin tonight, the traffic is crazy.

 

[thekonamicode]

This weekend life is impossible if you live near LSU campus because of the three-day Bayou Country Superfest event.

 

[Sectorseven]

Obama and former presidents stop by for meals more often than is welcomed.

 

[Machine]

Does this include road construction? Due to the particular roads being worked on this spring/summer, life is much more difficult that usual.

 

[rob305]

Memorial Day Weekend, South Beach. All the locals leave, its a shit show. Read it up. Some hip hop festival going on and theres always shootings and brawls

 

[NealMcCauley]

My hometown is Bristol, TN so the same thing happens twice a year for the races. My elementary school is maybe a mile away from the speedway, and one year buses were running so late because of the traffic kids (6-12-year-olds) weren't getting home until 10-11pm. After that the district shut down on Fridays to never repeat that.

 

[Misha]

There's a motorcycle show at the local fairground that gets a ton of bikes riding up and down our road. I'm used to the peace and quiet :<

 

[smokeymicpot]

Summer makes everything better here. All of the bars become less crowded since everyone goes to the shore.

 

[Kas]

Bike Week. If you haven't been to New Hampshire, you won't understand. But every year for 1 week, we have a huge motorcycle rally that brings in tens of thousands of people to my little area.

Bikes going 24-7, roads being congested as fuck, food places being busier than Black Friday.

It's basically a week long Black Friday sale times 100

 

[bjork]

The annual one is the town's parade, where they closed the one main road through town until the parade is done. For a couple of years there, they did police escorts to take you through, but this was after several years of them not letting you leave your neighborhood, even if you had work. Inexcusable. They moved it downtown, by the bus station, thankfully.

The only other pain is the mon-fri hassle near the high school. The main road gets clogged with parents dropping their kids off, and the shopping center across the street gets choked as well. But aside from that, it's pretty mellow here.

 

[teruterubozu]

Summer in general. I live in a tourist town that gets swamped for 3 months, then it's like a ghost town for the other 9 months.

 

[SliceSabre]

Akron Marathon

I live along the marathon path and it can lead to long traffic jams. I simply choose not to leave that house till later in the day.

 

[Fracas]

Um my town has like 600 people in it, so it's just always pretty difficult

 

[Grover Cleveland]

Speed Street in Charlotte to commemorate the annual NASCAR race here on Memorial Day weekend.

An entire street in the heart of downtown shut down for a redneck festival

FML

Thankfully the actual race is 40 minutes away in the suburbs or that wpuld shut the city down

 

[vainya]

I'm from Newark, NJ. We have a huge arena downtown that makes traffic a nightmare whenever there is a concert or hockey game. Also, every May, the Universoul Circus comes and sets a tent up in the middle of downtown as well. Either way, it's better than five years ago when the Circus set up the tent across the street from my house.

 

[thelatestmodel]

My hometown is Farnborough, UK.

Every two years we have the second biggest airshow in the world, in a town of 65,000 people. I don't live there any more, but airshow week is / was a nightmare, the infrastructure can barely handle it.

The payoff is we get to watch basically every type of plane and helicopter in existence flying around for a week, which is pretty cool. I've been a few hundred feet away from a B2 stealth bomber as it came into land, which is honestly one of the most surreal things I've ever seen. They look like they just shouldn't be able to stay in the air, but they do.

 

[PeskyToaster]

Coast Guard Festival in Grand Haven, Michigan or basically all of summer.

 

[youngplaya21]

I live in Arlington, TX so anytime something is going on in the clusterfuck that is the Cowboys stadium/Rangers ballpark/Six Flags area, it makes me wanna punch a baby

 

[Ray Wonder]

Every sports event (Steelers/Pirates/Penguins) and travelling anywhere around Pittsburgh. I'm sure the Stanley Cup finals are gonna be a nightmare.

Other than that, not really.

 

[phanphare]

Speed Street in Charlotte to commemorate the annual NASCAR race here on Memorial Day weekend.

An entire street in the heart of downtown shut down for a redneck festival

FML

Thankfully the actual race is 40 minutes away in the suburbs or that wpuld shut the city down

ugh, I hate nascar

can also add grocery shopping whenever there's a chance of snow

 

[milanbaros]

The London marathon has 750k spectators and is a single day...

 

[QuantumBro]

They had a bike race near my work last Friday that turned a 25 minute commute into an hour long one. If your going to schedule an event, don't have it finish at the same time everyone's workday ends or save it for the weekend.

 

[ATF487]

I don't see very big events here in Somerville/Cambridge MA but it sucks driving around here when the roads are open, let along when they close some, which they do every once in awhile or road races/neighborhood events/etc

Every Sunday they close part of memorial drive so people can run/walk/bike on it, which is awesome, but I always forget about it when coming home from soccer

 

[Ploppee]

The Great Escape - Brighton, England.

Entire city turns into a 3 day music festival which in turn brings down all the bigwig wankers.

(I work in the music industry so I have to be heavily involved but it's very much a love/hate relationship)

Trying to get anywhere in the city takes about 3 times longer than usual.

 

[Violence Jack]

I couldn't say for my current city since I haven't been here long enough to know what those events are, but I have to imagine for the 420 festival or Denver Broncos games, you don't want to be driving anywhere near downtown.

But where I moved from, you don't dare drive on any interstate going into Atlanta on Labor Day weekend. Between Dragoncon, college football kickoff games, Falcons preseason game, the traffic is at a standstill. And fucking Music Midtown was ridiculous as well.

 

[MikeDip]

The slut walk made getting to school/work very hard.

Good cause though so I'm cool with the added difficulty.

 

[Jonbo298]

Annual Citywide garage sale. Everyone moving at 5-10mph and illegal parking is absurdly rampant. Coupled with the fact there's one main road to get on the highway because the other intersections are littered with vehicles.

 

[MiniBossBattle]

Bay to Breakers, Giants Games, Nascar in Sonoma.

 

[Brinbe]

TTC subway closures... Fuck shuttle buses lol

 

[Faiz]

Kentucky Derby. I do my best to avoid it by leaving town, though we've had to cancel our May vacations a lot the last few years...

 

[CloudyTuba]

I don't live in my hometown anymore but my girlfriend still does.

Once each year they have a big morning parade and literally trap her in. All her streets are blocked and her car can't leave. She has to plan ahead for it and leave before it starts. She forget this last time and was late for school.

 

[The Widget]

I lived in Austin for a bit. Aside from the big stuff (SXSW, ACL Fest, our annual kite festival), I remember having to reroute, drastically, thanks to a dog race. That was weird.

But I just came to expect it by that point. A sneeze in the wrong direction can back up traffic for a mile.

 

[Gouty]

Its not every year but considering the current political climate I'd say the Republican National Convention being in my neighborhood has a good chance to fuck my shit up for a couple days.

 

[Laevateinn]

I will soon be moving away from a college town. It will be great not having to plan life around football anymore.

 

[Forerunner]

There is a Trump rally in San Diego today, so it's going to be annoying to say the least.

 

[IvanJ]

Almost every day from May to November. Makes traffic unbearable, and the city swamped with tourists. We get to about a 1:1 tourist to resident ratio.

But few people really mind the annoyance, as they make a lot of money.

 

[br0ken_shad0w]

I lived in Austin for a bit. Aside from the big stuff (SXSW, ACL Fest, our annual kite festival), I remember having to reroute, drastically, thanks to a dog race. That was weird.

But I just came to expect it by that point. A sneeze in the wrong direction can back up traffic for a mile.

I-35 might as well be an event in of itself.

 

[Why would you do that?]

Whenever there's a Yankee game at Yankee Stadium, traveling to my college is really, really annoying. Sometimes I check to see if the Yankees are playing just so I can plan alternate travel routes, or at least mentally prepare.

Makes for a slightly fun conversation when I ask if they're playing and I say I'm not a baseball fan, though.

 

[Knuckle Sandwich]

They do a christmas tree lane thing where cars gawk at extravagantly decorated houses. Traffic is murder.

 

[Watevaman]

In my actual hometown, there's really nothing big except for a railroad festival that closes off the historic downtown. That traffic never reaches where we live or interferes in any big way.

In D.C., though, 4th of July is always a cluster. So much traffic, so much heat, it sucks.

 

[Gigarator]

I live and work nearby Manchester United's football ground and there's also a rugby ground recently built close by as well. So it can get pretty hectic most weekends of the year.

 

[pirata]

I'm from Austin, so it feels like every other weekend we gets invaded for some event. The most obvious is SXSW, in which hundreds of thousands of people from around the transform the city, but there's also the Austin City Limits Music Festival, the X Games, tons of sports events, other festivals, political rallies...

EDIT: How could I forget Formula 1? So many Europeans...

 

[studyguy]

The mountains along the freeway occasionally catch fire nearly every other September/fall season. Such is life in southern California. Somewhere is always on fire in the fall.

 

[A Fish Aficionado]

The Indy 500 is awesome. I would love to participate in those activities.
I tend to not be bothered by traffic around concert, it other venues, I just put on some tunes or something. I do ridesharing , so I'm in those jams, but it's really hard to viscerally react to those.

 

[8bit]

Fasnacht

Baselworld

Art Basel

Oh, and Sevilla v. Liverpool last week. What a mess that was.

 

[Affeinvasion]

Iron man closes miles of road around my town. Kinda annoying. I was glad to be out of town this year.

 

[Aureon]

Jubilee years are fucking hell in Rome sometimes.

 

[Matt_09]

Aintree, Liverpool. Every year we host the Grand National. For that weekend it is pretty chaotic as the village is relatively small.