July 17th

[Ghoulish Delight]

Traffic isn't going to be an issue in and around the Disneyland area, but it wouldn't be surprising to find that the general fear of traffic hell in and around Los Angeles does dissuade people from getting in their car at all that day, including people who might have otherwise decided to drive down from the Valley to go to Disneyland.

So yes, I predict a lower turnout than might have otherwise happened.

I also predict that the media has instilled enough paranoia about Carmageddon that it will fizzle out into a whole lot of nothing. At which point everyone will complain that the media made a whole lot of noise about nothing (failing to grasp that concept that it may very well have been the media's noise-making that might keep the impact low). So in the end you'll have people bitching that they should have just gone to where they wanted to go, missing the point that if everyone had done that, there WOULD have been traffic problems. Sigh.

Some proof that the paranoia is indeed sinking in. We have engineers from our office in India visiting this week whose flight is on Saturday, out of LAX. They are taking a shuttle service which is forcing them to be picked up 8 hours ahead of their flight time. 8 hours. Yeah, paranoia is high, which will mean traffic is low.