Today is going to be the first real-life, non-simulated test of Arlington's ability to handle two big events at once in its always busy Entertainment District.Six Flags Over Texas is open. Hurricane Harbor is open. And tonight the Texas Rangers play the Minnesota Twins in the Ballpark in Arlington, while a short distance away, my favorite Beatle, Paul McCartney, is going to be singing in the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium.
Somewhere in the range of 60,000 people will be finding their way to the two venues. Arlington officials have activated what they called their Traffic Command Center.
You can go to Dallas Cowboys Maps and enter your ZIP code and your assigned parking area to get your best route past all the road construction and barricaded roads. To park in one of the Dallas Cowboy lots it will cost you $30. To save $18 you can park in a Ranger's lot for only $12. With the short walk to the stadium being a little exercise side benefit, in addition to saving money.
I'm guessing that before today is done I'll will likely be seeing the results of a massive traffic jam as far as my abode. I am so old I remember traffic jams as being something that only happened in the Los Angeles area. I remember our first family trip to Disneyland and me and my siblings being so excited to be in our first traffic jam. We took pictures. Now traffic jams are the norm, not a novelty.
On Friday the Arlington Traffic Command Center gets another test, with the first Dallas Cowboy game in the new stadium. 70,000 are expected. One would have thought the stadium would be full for the first game in the new stadium. A lot of people must have balked at the high cost of renting a seat for a few hours. That $24 parking fee likely irks some, as well.
2 comments:
It isn't that when you were a kid there were only traffic jams in LA; it's that you didn't grow up in a big city.
I'd bet that even Seattle, far from a big city that long ago, had traffic jams when you were young, if for no other reason than there are so few main streets that cross town.
Actually, what I said was, as a kid, I thought that traffic jams were a thing that happened only in LA, due to the jams and the smog often being in the news.
My first time being in a LA traffic jam, I-5 was not completed yet. The section through Seattle was, but it was years later that the number of cars started overwhelming the Seattle freeways. By the time I moved to Texas traffic jams occurred at rush hour, even in the valley I lived in, 55 miles north of Seattle.
And by traffic jam, I mean when there are too many cars and too little road, causing a pile-up, not an accident caused traffic jam. I was in one of those in the middle of nowhere in Utah once. A fuel truck had exploded.
I-5 has gotten so bad it is not pleasant to drive. It used to be so easy. I remember in 2002, I was staying in north Seattle. I needed to be up near the Canadian border. The friend I was staying with warned me I needed to get past Everett by 3 or it would take a long time to get north. I said, how can it have gotten so much worse in the 3 years I've been gone? Well, I waited til past 3. I-5 was jammed upon entry. And stayed that way til I was north of Everett. Then backed up again at the Stanwood exit. Then again in Mount Vernon. I was so stressed out by it I got off the freeway at Marysville, at my nephews, to wait it out for an hour, hoping the traffic would lighten up. Marysville is the next town north of Everett. When I got back on the freeway, the Stanwood jams and Mount Vernon jams still awaited me. The trip north took me around 5 hours to cover 90 miles.
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