Just five days to go for the arrival of the solar eclipse, which will be visible from western Mexico to eastern Canada on April 8. Weather permitting, it really should be a once-in-a-lifetime show, and the hype machines are gearing up accordingly.
My little town will be in the area of totality for just over three minutes near mid-afternoon. So will Niagara Falls, twenty minutes drive from us (though probably not on April 8), and in keeping with its over-the-top money-grabbing ethos, that little city is pulling out all the stops. The chief carnival barker, Mayor Jim Diodati, is telling everyone who will listen that he is expecting one million people to show up.
I'm not sure why Diodati or anyone else would imagine that watching it in Niagara Falls will somehow make the eclipse more exciting. Plenty of other less glitzy towns in the area -- Buffalo, NY or Hamilton, ON for example -- will get exactly the same celestial show. It's also not clear how Diodati figures his city can accommodate anything like a million people. Have you ever been? Its permanent population is less than 90,000 and the tourist area, which is presumably where all the visitors will try to go, is really quite small -- basically it's a kilometre or two along the edge of the Niagara River, plus the incomparably tacky Clifton Hill, which makes the Las Vegas strip look like the Uffizi gallery.
There are going to be extra trains to bring people down from Toronto, but this being Canada, there will only be three of them, and a quick back-of-the envelope calculation suggests they will be able to accommodate fewer than 10,000 people even with crush loads. So most of Diodati's million will be coming by car. At four persons per car, that suggests there will be 250,000 vehicles converging on the city.
There's only one expressway to Niagara Falls, and it's busy at the best of times. Even for those who do make it into town, there is nowhere to park that many cars. And even if you do find parking, there is no way the tourist area can accommodate the people. Total visitor numbers to the Canadian side of the Falls were about 13 million in 2022. That was a COVID year so the numbers may be higher now, but that equates to about 40,000 per day -- and as anyone who has ever visited can attest, the tourist area is always packed.
Has Mayor Diodati though this through? What's your guess? However, the very strong likelihood is that potential visitors have thought it through, and that many of them will think better of it, resulting in crowds that are just a fraction of the numbers Diodati is counting on. That said, it's still going to be a zoo, and I won't be going any further than my south-facing driveway that day.
UPDATE, 9 April: The first official estimate is that a total of 200,000 visitors took in the eclipse in the Niagara region, which is about 30 miles long. That's a far cry from Diodati's one million in Niagara Falls alone. There were maybe 100,000 in that city. How many people were put off by Diodati's insane prediction? Not that they missed much -- overcast skies across the area throughout the eclipse. And since I haven't stooped to this before, allow me to point out that an anagram of Diodati is "da idiot".
No comments:
Post a Comment