How bad was the car situation that prompted this level of intervention?
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"We both agreed they had outgrown the neighbourhood"
What a class act.
I hope they find a better town to show off dem lights.
I feel like I need to see pics of the parking situation/attendance on the street. Like, yeah.. Lights are fun and that sucks, but also.. this must have been a pretty big fucking problem if it warranted this kind of response. Article says the show would end after 20 minutes and immediately an entirely new crowd would filter in to replace the previous one. Sounds like lot of vehicles waiting to get in to view it in a residential neighborhood not designed for that kind of volume. I'd probably bitch to the council too after several years of enduring that.
I'm sure there's some particular joy in doing this to your own house, but the city should hire this guy to do a big display in the city centre. Probably more adequate parking, people maybe make a night of it and go to local restaurants, you could pick your place to minimise upsetting neighbours.
Once a hobby turns into a full time job it looses its meaning. Plus being hired means you are no longer your own boss.
Also, we seem to forget cities always cut budgets for things. It used to be the city may have decorated its streets with lights or setup decorations in public plazas. A city may have also had it's own light show that diminised in quality year after year, now a distant memory due to skyrocketing costs.
There may have been public fireworks show or a puplic skate rink. All those things usually are the first to go in a effort to save cash when city funded.
This man was doing a economic service to his town in terms of tourism on his own dime. The city shot it self in the foot here, then they tried to have their cake and eat it too asking him to pay for pirmits
And really the big problem here is the cars, 20 cars takes up a lot more space than even 60 people. People could even fit on the lawn if space allows. The cars make noise honking and running, they are the ones with bright lights. If everyone got off a bus, watched a show, and walked to the next stop it wouldn't be nearly as problematic. Perhaps a designated area nearby where cars are expected to park and people and their family could walk to see the show could have been a solution.
And this is why north american suburban neighbours in how they are designed suck IMO. You need a car to get around, even just to go get milk.
Suburban neighboorhoods should really be designed like communities with mixed density housing, small shops that you can walk to, pedestrians and cyclists trails that connect two points quicker in a shorter distance then by car. Mixed zonning for offices and businesses and nothing over 6 stories.
Designing suburbs like this would allow the density required for a tram line and mixed transportation modes. It would also potentially solve suburban sprawl that then compounds the "car is king" problem.
Everything mentioned above is possible, but requires people to accept a level of change.
Think how Amsterdam as a whole transformed its self starting in the 1970-1980 from a gridlocked "car is king" mentality to pedestrian and livability first approach.
Perhaps a designated area nearby where cars are expected to park and people and their family could walk to see the show could have been a solution.
If there's any space nearby that could reasonably hold, say, 50 parked cars. If there's a mall, or an office building that's empty at night, within a few blocks you could maybe make it work, but not in the middle of a large area of houses.
My guess is that there would still be problems, though, because it's cold outside in December and nobody seems to know how to dress for the weather anymore. They're using the cars as portable heat sources.
I think them using cars as portable heat sources highlights the car centric part of our culture. We would rather drive what is basically a private living room and view the attraction in that thing.
Holiday drive thru light shows in the GTA pretty much sums up the car centric nature of Ontario.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.todocanada.ca/drive-thru-holiday-light-displays-in-gta/amp/
They should just end the drive thrus at a Timmie's, nothing is more Canadian.
My home town used to put lights all over their waterfront, with cool moving light shows and stuff, it was something i really enjoyed as a kid and got us out and walking by the water in winter. I haven't seen them do it to the same scale as when i was a kid for many years. It used to be dozens of displays, now there are just a few trees that get lights. I wonder if people not wanting to leave their cars influenced it. Soon the santa parade will be stationary and we can all just drive past it at this rate.
I think it really just came down to costs and city budgets. Cities always seem to cut public funding allocated for things like this when trying to balance their budgets.
That is why I find a few of the comments that were suggesting the city should hire the man a little counterintuitive. The first thing the city would cut would be the light show saying it's to expensive and to extravagant, probably in the same year they hire him even.
Honestly, sounds like a traffic enforcement problem.
The address is pretty easy to find. It's a terrible spot for crowds, with no lots or sidewalks.
Buncha Scrooges over there in Kingsville Apparently. Those massive restrictions on hours plus the requirement for a "permit" -cough-moneygrab-cough- are just ridiculous. I'd love for there to be a light show like that in my neighborhood.
It sounds like people who live around there were taking ridiculous times to get in and out of their houses because of the traffic. This would also be a bad situation for emergency services such as ambulances and firetrucks, potentially.
So it's a traffic problem, not a capacity problem.
Ban on street parking, direct people to the closest lots. Problem solved.
It's in the middle of suburbia. There are no nearby lots, and their street has no sidewalks.
Downtown Kingsville to the edge of the suburbs is about 2km in the furthest directions.
So the issue is that the city has decided to not build sidewalks for super walkable distances, there are more than enough lots around.
If it's like the places I grew up, people are driving through neighborhoods. They're not parking, but driving at basically a crawl (sometimes pausing to take pictures). If they enforced local traffic only (i.e. anyone who wanted to see it had to go on foot), that would solve the issue so long as the parking exists somewhere.
It's not. It's a 17-minute show timed to music.
I mean, there were specific shows at a couple houses when I was a kid, but no one stopped there to block everyone for the whole thing because that's a dick move. If people are, then they definitely needed to enforce local traffic only and a permit to set all that up and organize it makes sense to me.
File a permit with the city to put up Holiday decorations. Ludacris. Do I need one if I put a tree inside my house?
If it generates traffic and fire safety issues and requires coordination with police, fire, and/or other municipal services to make it safe, then yeah, a permit makes sense as it covers all that. The other option is to tone it down. It's all fun and games until you or a loved one is dying in a fire or waiting for an ambulance that can't get to you
As I said elsewhere, just ban street parking and the problem evaporates. There is no more car traffic generation or precived blocking of emergency vehicles.
The problem is cars not people.
Over here in Europe we'd just arrive by public transport.
Yea but Canada refuses to build a functional country. Hell we can't even keep bike lanes installed without drivers feeling attacked.
I read about that, and my first thought was that bike lanes adjacent to streets indeed aren't a great thing - but then again, you probably don't have all the bike/pedestrian only paths offering way shorter connections we have here. In the area I live in I can reach pretty much any house by foot within 5-10 minutes - while most of them are only reachable by car with a lengthy detour, if at all.
The lanes weren't the best but they are way better than nothing. Everything must be car accessible here, no exceptions. Cars must always get prioirty. It really is so vastly different you really have to experience it to understand. Standing next to one stroad makes you really ask "how the hell is this the best way to build the majority of places in this country?"
Most of our transit is hourly bus service that is late from the poor roadway network. Most of our stops don't even have shelters. Trams don't have prioirty at lights. It's all so backwards.
Permits are agreements with a processing fee.
Contracts require an exchange of "considerations." Payment is a consideration.
500 hours, 600 hours worth of set up time
I wish I had one tenth the freetime this person has in their life.
500 to 600 hours divided by 365 would only come out to a 1hr or 2hr a day.
1.5hrs a day x 365days = 547.5hrs
Though a good chunk of that time would be in the physical setup of the lights over a weekend or week.
Most of us commute 2hr or more a day in total. (1hr in and 1hr out of work). Just let that one sink in for a while.
Most of us don't have a commute that's more than 27 minute in one direction, but still too many people do.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240826/dq240826a-eng.htm
By May 2024, the era of shorter commuting times had come to an end, as the average commute time to work for regular commuters was 26.4 minutes, on par with the previous high of 26.3 minutes reached in May 2016.
And here's a table for times: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240826/t003a-eng.htm
How is this not the onion?!
Because you dont live there and it’s not you being inconvenienced. So you have no sympathy for the neighbors.
I have sympathy for the neighbours, I don't have sympathy for the people with the lights who are ridiculous
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