I see this mostly as a very good thing. Make car traffic so shitty noone will use it as their first choice except for when you have to move house or something.
Public transport and bikes are usually faster and more convenient anyway and have a lot less negative externalities. It makes the city a lot nicer.
Ah, gotcha. That’s overall tourism numbers for just Denver. That’s a subset of the numbers I posted in the other link stating 86 million visitors / $21 billion revenue state-wide.
No way to tell just how much of that is specifically attributed to legal pot although the trends suggest there is a healthy canna-tourism market effect happening. Most predict this will level off as other states legalize and the newness wears off.
Of course you are right. We can’t say which dollars are pot dollars but I think it’s an easy and safe correlation to make and it seems to support my idea that changing where you are to become more like a place people would pay to visit does actually work.
Great point. I used to watch Rick Steves just to strike any town he recommended off my list of places to visit.
I’d also add that a lot of this is regional tourism as well, especially when talking about Europe. A stag party going from London to Amsterdam is a lot like going from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. This can get a bit worse in places like Central Europe and the Iberian peninsula, because everything is cheaper than in the UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia, etc., A pint of good beer in Prague costs about 1 USD. You could get wasted on pocket change.
My personal observation from being a native and life-long resident is that for those who imbibe, legalization is a big deal and hugely important. But this is actually a small segment of the population. Most here don’t really care one way or the other as long as it doesn’t get in the way. You can sometimes smell it walking around but it’s not like a huge cloud of pot smoke has enveloped the city. Most of the cars in the dispensary parking lots have out of state plates.
In other words, most Coloradoans are like ¯\ (ツ)_/¯… whatevs.
I believe that once recreational pot comes fully online in CA that we’ll see just a small drop in tourism numbers. Most people come here for other reasons.
This is exactly one of my points when arguing about overpopulation: sure, we could probably handle even more humans on this planet, but should we?
Usually, yes. In this case, she owned the blame. I’ve got my own travel whammies, mostly around navigating onto roads that deteriorate into rutted gravel.
Moin, je perfere l’originale. It rolls of the tounge like a good Cabernet. Or one of these stones we roll uphill.
I have two words for you, Bar Harbor.
I’m not going to tell you again… Get off my lawn, YetiLives!
As someone who can rarely afford travel and tourism but loves it above all other forms of recreation, this is a little crushing, especially the comparisons to gentrification. Travel has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, to the point where I’m trying to plan the rest of my life around being able to do it on a consistent basis. I only have one life to live and there are many, many places I still want to see and experience, but it’s scary to think that I might be contributing to the ruining of those very places. I try to be a very considerate tourist and to avoid places that are obviously set up purely for tourists (as those tend to be boring and homogenized), but I imagine every person still causes some negative impact, even if they’re not the stoned assholes peeing on landmarks and tossing litter everywhere.
I went to Amsterdam last year and was there over the ester bank holiday my god was it a tourist trap, we ate in one restaurant, and one of the pub bicycles pulled up out side with a hen do, bear in mind that before this it was a restaurant with family’s in maybe about 10 tables max down stairs and was prity full but nice a quite, then the 20 girls come in and they wack the music up to club levels put on spice girls karioki and the girls ordered 20 shots of jagermister, i felt so sorry for the family’s we where thinking about having desert but instead spent 10 mins trying to get the bill so we could leave!
Every where we went was packed full of people, we walked past one place that had pool table in the window with 15 or 20 naked men round it with all their clothes in the middle on the table, we kept on walking, i tried to buy a pizza and the place wanted 60 euros and stones dont buy beer but pay over the odds for food!
Luckley we where visiting Germany so the Amsterdam stay was just one night tacked on as we could fly back from Berlin or their, and thought we had never been to Amsterdam so why not fly back and give it ago, but even in the airport things where no better £15 for a stone cold English breakfast that we had no time to complain about as we had to rush of and fly, would never go there again, def not on ester bank holiday weekend.
Isn’t it natural that the world’s most interesting places are overcrowded now that more people have the means to travel around? Do we want to live in a world where only a small minority can afford to travel to interesting places? As some previous commenters have written, if you want to go to very popular destinations, you are going to find a lot of people there. Duh! If you don’t enjoy seeing other tourists, travel off the beaten path.
P.S. People are the worst!
Anybody traveling off the beaten path is just the vanguard, blazing the trail for the masses to come later.
Try a stay-cation: Check into an all decked-out 4 or 5 star hotel that schmucks and plebs wouldn’t feel comfortable paying for, and then -and this is the important part- don’t leave the hotel! Instead have a massage every day, spend three hours at breakfast and look down on those people who seemingly have somewhere 'breathtaking" to tour to. Wanna ‘read a good book’ while on vacation? How about actually doing it this time for a change, preferably poolside. Feel like taking a nap after your 3 hour breakfast? Do it! Napping is good, and this is not a god damn race!
Edit: Does the hotel have an arcade? Great, play 19 rounds of ‘Dance Dance Revolution’, 'tis what the doctor ordered.
We might be able to squeeze in a few billion more (though it’s doubtful), but NOT if the majority of humans (let alone the totality) try to live a first world, middle-class lifestyle. And as you’re probably aware, it appears that that is just what most up-and-coming nouveau bourgeois want to do. (See, e.g., China, People’s Republic of, etc.) I’d be interested to see what some demographer or climate scientist calculates as the true maximum, sustainable earth population if everyone lives a middle-class American lifestyle. I would guess (it’s only a guess) that the number would be substantially below the current population of the planet.
I never travel in season because of crowds. A gamble with weather in shoulder season or a little cold or hot in off season is almost always worth it.
And yes, the Chinese are now everywhere as their middle/upper middle class has exploded. And are officially the new ‘rude Americans’ (from the mouths of many local tour guides).
I think the saddest part of all this is so many things people miss out on by having to adhere to a “bucket lust” of overrun places.
I myself think nothing could compare to the sight I saw one night the day before New Year’s Eve, riding the train from Bucharest to Chisinau, viewing the Danube from a crest overlooking a steep valley blanketed in thick snow and bathed in moonlight.
