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Comment by ouid | Hacker News Reader

If you don't follow the sports schedule, then you will inevitably find yourself near some stadium at a time when sports are about to happen, or have just happened.

This is a mistake that you will only make once. It sometimes takes upwards of 2 hours to drive 5 miles. Since I don't want to have to follow sports to know if it's safe to drive that route, I just never drive that route. There are good things near there, but I will never plan to do them because I don't want to have to check the arena activity to determine how good my experience will be.

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It's a similar experience on foot. One of my favorite local hangouts is in Wrigleyville. I almost never go there, because I won't go anywhere near Wrigleyville during baseball season, and in winter I'm in cocoon mode. That said, baseball season has enough game days to actually fuel a business.

Soldier Field is vaguely easier. It's still right in the middle of the city, but, being in a park, and not too far from the highway, game days don't really pose a challenge except when I've lost my mind and decided to drive to the aquarium instead of taking the train. On the other hand, I bet it's really awful for anyone whose regular routine forces them to use Lake Shore Drive or the spaghetti bowl.

I actually moonlight at one of those bars in Wrigleyville, the bar closes for the fall/winter because there's literally not enough business to justify keeping it open. The only reason it's still open however is because the owners have plenty of capital from other endeavors. If anyone were to try to start a new bar there without deep pockets, they would have a hard time surviving.

For me in Uptown, the Wrigleyville traffic doesn't seem too bad as long as I don't need to be _in_ Wrigleyville itself. The worst part is the Red Line--seems like game times seem to coincide with rush hour such that everyone needs to be going North at the same time. Soldier field traffic was pretty miserable when I lived in South Loop (all that traffic going to/from 90 via Roosevelt).

Funny, I was about to make a comment about Wrigleyville and you nailed it.

We now habitually check if there's a game or concert before visiting my cousin in the neighborhood.

A few years back I lived 3 blocks away from Wrigley Field. It was cool to hear the concerts and games from our back porch. But we basically locked ourselves in on game-days, since we knew it would be a pain in the ass to get anywhere.

One of my favorite single-purpose websites: http://isthereacubsgametoday.com/

100%. Usually it's not even clear to me why traffic is so bad... I just have a mental heatmap of averaged-out traffic shittiness and I stay away from the hot spots. Nothing has gotten better in the 15 years I've lived here, and basically everything has gotten worse, so I don't have much incentive to give the worst areas a second chance.

It means a lot of my city (Seattle) is off limits unless I'm really "going out" and not just going out for a bite or whatever.

Because, as traffic and transportation research is starting to show, traffic is supply-side (capacity) dominated, given time to reach equilibrium in a growing region.

It's a great example of a market with a fixed price (excluding some newer ppp toll schemes) and highly variable demand. (And where costs besides the direct price that end up controlling.)

> starting to show

I mean, it's good that it's finally hitting the mainstream, but induced demand has been a recognized phenomenon for literally decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#History

The reverse of this is what justifies a lot of ped/cycle infrastructure projects even in areas where there don't currently seem to be a lot of people out walking or on foot— "build it and they will come".

That's true, but having GPS and being able to do studies that are based on actually tracking vehicles has been a game changer (instead of just point traffic counts or driver questionnaires).

Seattle's roads were most definitely not built for the amount of traffic they see. I remember watching from my porch as cars spent an hour inching their way through the mile to the 99 when I was living in Lower Queen Anne. This was five years ago. I went back recently and things were far worse.

I live relatively close to Patriot Stadium, and as a rule I never go down there on Sundays; I try to plan my Trader Joe's runs for Tuesday nights or some other time I'm relatively certain sportsball isn't going to make it a madhouse.

Good point, made me realize a bit of my own experience - since I moved out of downtown Toronto, the entire area has been a mental black hole to me precisely because on game nights, it can take 2-4 hours to extract yourself out of 3-4km of space, so I just don't risk it (especially since it's the kind of 2 hours that feels like 7...)

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