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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

So not really the whole city, but around 8% of it? Sounds crazy, but nowhere near as crazy as the ‘whole city’...

Its a figure of speech. Writing liberty. 8% is definitely a huge proportion of the city moving in a single day. For my own experience living in Montreal, no chaod but lots of furniture and other trash left behind.

8% of Montreal is 136,000 people. That's an entire small city's worth of people.

Finding a moving truck, company, etc for such a big percentage of the population that moves all on the same day is often a challenge.

It is, particularly since there is a) a premium price on the rental (3-5x last I checked) for that one day b) rental windows are shrunk (3-4 hours max is typical) and c) rentals are reserved back-to-back-to-back, such as 6-10,10-2,2-6,6-10,but often returned late, which trickles down. So last moves often end in the wee morning hours. Doubly fun when you're waiting on the previous tenant to get out before you can get your stuff in.

The same is true when using movers and moving companies, assuming you can find any with availability.

Madness and also inefficient.

I have to imagine the moving truck rental companies must summon nearly every vehicle in the fleet to one city for one day of the year.

This seems so insane. Do the advantages even come close to outweighing the headaches this scheme causes? What happens when July 1 is rainy?

They mean ‘everyone who moves, moves on that day’

The vast majority of people who move do it on july 1st. So much that when I moved in march everyone thought it was impossible.

Yeah but people who move often have the help of a few friends. The percentage of people who are moving/helping would be more impressive.

That's quite massive number if you just count people moving.

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