Lol, smashing success.
How dumb that a curfew prevents us from driving through a park to look at Christmas lights. Think of the people that haven’t attended any sort of event since March and they get turned away after waiting hours in a car to see this…
I think the common denominator here seems to be WRAL, unless it is coincidence. This and the hot air balloon festival in Zebulon. Traffic there went I went a few years ago was about 2-3 hours all along 64 in Zebulon.
Pretty sure this wasn’t because of the curfew but rather the event organizers overestimated how many cars can go through the route per hour. There were 500 tickets sold per half hour time slot, which I think anyone could see is not realistic!
WRAL was involved in the Walnut Creek one all those years ago. You’d think they’d have that as a readymade template.
You can only count on ABC11 
True, for the traffic jam, but I’m referring to the “100 families turned away by RPD at 10”
[EDIT] one paragraph says the park was shut down “after 10 p.m.” then the next paragraph says “around 11 p.m.”
Anyways, sounds like they sold too many tickets for the limited time slot. One solution is to extend the hours but alas curfew, so instead they are refunding an estimated 12k tix @$30 a pop right? $360k refund? Ouch
500 tickets every 30 minutes? for real. Did they not do simple math?
That’s 16.6 cars every minute, or one car every 3.6 seconds. There is no way that is feasible unless you are at a a Nascar track.
I would guess a more realistic number is around 3 maybe 4 cars per minute, and that’s if everything runs prefect, which it wont. So about 100 cars for every 30 minutes max.
guess they were counting on everyone driving like 20mph thru the lights when in reality they drive real slow with stops to take pictures. But guess they do not live real world.
I am down about half actually, lol. But we did get new raindeer for the yard that spruced things up some. Maybe we should start a page of house pics… though that does seem to far afield for Leo’s mission.
To continue the math, if you assign 35 feet to each car (15 ft. car length plus 20 ft. between cars) you get 581 ft. of travel per minute, or 9.68 ft. per second, which is 6.6 miles per hour. It’s not that dramatic
The curfew is 10pm, correct? And the lights are supposed to be over at 9:30. I feel like WRAL is using the curfew as a scapegoat for very poor planning on their part. If it was open an extra 3 weeks, there wouldn’t be such a high demand for the few spots they have available.
I know I am being hard on them but I do understand there is a learning curve to putting on something like this for the first time. I don’t mean to sound too critical because I do think this is a great idea. Hopefully they do it again next year with a lot of the wrinkles ironed out.
We went Wednesday night for a 9 PM ticket. Got in line on Western Blvd. near the money shot around 8:40, literally moved maybe 100 feet for the first hour, then drove up and got into line closer to the Hunt Drive entrance, by then it was 10 PM, didn’t get through the ticket takers until 10:30, then sat behind a car that they literally put in neutral so there was at least a 1,000 foot gap between that car and the car in front of it. The traffic guards were literally SCREAMING at this car to keep it moving. Both my kids were way past their bedtime (all earlier timeslots were sold out) so I actually had to pass that car to get out of there at a reasonable time. Between the bad organization of WRAL and cars like that, its a recipe for disaster. And the light show isn’t even that special! I’ve been to better light shows on farms in this very region.
They are too busy reporting lies, BS, useless crap and dumb stuff all day and night, rotted the brain to the core. Nothing left, they are spent.
Came from downtown down Western, which seemed much less busy than coming from State. Traffic moved quickly. Lights were fine, but it didn’t capture the Walnut Creek expansive feel. Some of the lights were too close to the road for us to get full impact. And making that road a two-laner was perhaps practical but also off-putting. We had fun with Christmas songs and all, and I was glad we avoided the nightmare traffic. We left North Raleigh around 5:15 and were back by 7 (which was actually when our tickets were set for). Still, we will do our neighborhood lights this weekend, and probably enjoy it more.
We went tonight. Got in line around 7:00 and were in the gates by 7:30! It was nice… lights could have been further away but still, nice to drive through Dix Park.
I would think that the bigger issue would be cars stopping along the way because they want to take a photo or something.
I agree that would make it even worse. Maybe 3-4 cars per minute is still too many.
The longer people have to wait in line, the slower they will drive through the exhibits ("If I waited 2 hours to get in, at least I’m going to take my time and enjoy it!), so the line goes slower still. It’s a wonder that by the end of the evening the line even moves at all.
All sounds great - now if they only moved quicker on Dix park