AndyPok1

Do people live on Park Ave? Do people spend time in Park Ave in the evening? No. These places are dead after dinner. The only reason I go to Winter Garden is either for the bike trail (daytime activity), a show at the garden theatre, or the brewery. If doing fine == the 2020s version of a suburban mall that shuts down at 9PM, then yes lots of places are doing fine. A) the first video you posted happened on a Sunday. And yes, it was a fight at a bar. No one is saying these things don't happen. Security jumped in immediately. B ) the second video you posted is from 2012. The scene downtown is nothing like it was a decade ago. But regardless, you're missing the entire point. People can get drunk and then go wherever they want. It's a pretty common occurrence to be at a BBQ or pool or whatever drinking all day on a Saturday before changing and heading DT. They can be drunk without being served a drop of alcohol in DTO. You may not even want to drink anymore, but you don't want to go to sleep yet and you want to hang out with your friends. So you go out.

I think that sentence says everything we need it to. There's more than 15,000 coming to our downtown on a weekend night when most Central Business Districts are deader than a doornail after 6PM, let alone on weekends. It's part of what makes Orlando attractive to the 20-40 year old crowd. You can Live. Work. Play. No one here is saying we shouldn't add more retail. But that's perpetually going to be a struggle with or without the bars. And as far as "entertainment", we already have an amazing performing arts center, an arena that is considered a standard for modern arenas, a movie theatre, an improv comedy venue, a full time karaoke bar (as bad as the sound levels are), and numerous music venues. What entertainment that occurs after dinner would you like to see downtown that we don't have? Maybe I'm a simpleton, but I legitimately don't know what the other forms of entertainment are.

It's not perfect. But a vast majority of those bars have been around 5-10 years. They are successful businesses. I know people don't want to accept this, but bars are the primary driving factor of activity from 8P-2A. Happy Hours and Dinners are done. Events have started. The only reason people are out and about are because of bars. And that's true virtually everywhere. It's good that we have it downtown. It's what makes lots of people want to live downtown. It's what increases urbanism. There will always be bad actors.

Thanks for the assist. I could have looked on Google, but it was more of a challenge to myself to see how well I could do off the dome.

... wut. Jim Gray clearly does not frequent downtown bars. Unless he's including Parramore, Thornton, and every restaurant with a liquor license his estimate is off. Top of my head brings us to 72, and at least 20-25 are food/venues (and I'm being generous), largely separated by street... Also, may of these are all "one" bar that I'm counting separately (Chillers, Cahoots, Latitudes; Fuel, Stokes, Swiggs are all just one big bar that happens to have different names for different areas. Harry Buff AC Sky Bar Cheyenne Marys The place that replaced Lions Pub Latitudes Cahoots Chillers 23 Church whatever it is The other side of 23 Church Basement Attic Treehouse Shots Aloha Beautiful Mathers Robinson Crow Shakai Bullitt Hansons Mai Thai Corona Tanquerays Hallows and Screams The alley bar behind 55W The concert venue thing across from 7Eleven Stagger Swiggs Stokes Fuel Caseys Ono The thing that used to be Bar B The Beer Bar across from the fire station Ember Celine Harp Celt The Bar with the lamps Corner Pizza Cantina Other Bar (Its Irish now) Waitiki Monkey Bar Hooch Shine Tiny bar with bras on the ceiling New cocktail place that replaced Subway WXYZ Bar Sidebar The one Club The other club that’s also Hookah Dapper Duck Pourhouse Underground Office Thrive Beachem Whatever Finns became Lizzys (closing) Lodge Woods Aero I Bar (closed?) 64 North Sly Fox Saddle Elixir Neon Beach Motorworks Pups Pub Unless you want to make your city massively unappealing for young adults, there's always going an area of "the kind of bars". I've seen a few articles referencing that Gen Z doesn't drink as much as Millennials. At least with the older Gen Z, I haven't noticed this trend. Perhaps as we go into the younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that will be the case.

When I initially moved down here for my internship I went into the Goodings in LBV and noticed it was partially carpeted which was my first red flag. I then saw the prices were ridiculously overpriced for tourists. I walked out and never went back in again.

The NFL and FBS have been around for 100 years. Those are some DEEP roots compared to 6 months of XFL. There's no way to prove it, but I believe that had the XFL had some slightly more mature roots (3-5 years maybe?) it wouldn't have declared bankruptcy. We shall see this go-around. I think a once-a century global pandemic resulting in an economic situation deserves to be considered an outlier for failure, but you do you. And yes, there are challenges to football. To be clear, I don't care about the XFL. I'll probably go to some games since its in town and I like supporting local things, but probably won't watch. I don't watch NFL, I'm not gonna watch a second-rate version. But your analogy to professional wrestling is actually the issue. Yes, it fell out of favor. HOWEVER, even though it isn't nearly as big as it was in the 80s, let alone its mainstream run in the late 90s, it's massively profitable right now, FOR THE SAME REASON AS XFL... Live TV rights. WWE's 3 big contracts right now: 200 million a year - FOX - Smackdown (2 hours every Friday) 260 million a year - USA - Raw (3 hours every Monday) 200 million a year - Peacock - "PPV" / Streaming Catalog (Special Event ~4 hours every month) We are in the era of content. How long will this era last? Who knows! I've said for 5 years that eventually we will all pay $30 to Netflix and $30 to Disney every month because eventually they will gobble up everyone. But as of now, there's still 8+ competing (Netflix, Disney, HBO, Amazon, Apple, Youtube, Paramount, Peacock). And until this settles out, which I don't think will be happening for at least another 5 if not more years, producing live TV, especially sports, is going to have big tech and content backing up brinks trucks to your doors.

Not disputing those things, and it may not succeed in Orlando specifically. But, at least for now, its an entirely different ballgame than any of those former ones you list. Live sports broadcasts are basically the only things that make money anymore. It's the content era, and the XFL can probably come close to subsisting on TV rights alone.

I think 3am is a good compromise. Everywhere outside of FL I've been, alcohol sales end at 2AM but that means the people shutting the place down get their last drink then, but they don't kick people out until ~230. Orlando tends to do last call at like 140-145 and pretty much shuts down at 2. If you're a regular, you can get 210ish. This leads to the mass exodus of everyone leaving at once as opposed to people slowly trickling out over a 40 minute period. 3 both will be a happy medium and also a differentiator to attract more people. Win-win. (Though those days are behind me ha)

The second edition of the XFL in 2020 was successful until Covid hit. I don't think its unreasonable it can be again in 2023. I don't think about first-year sports league could have succeeded with Covid. At least not in a fiscally responsible way.

This. Pools on the east side get morning sun, and most people want afternoon/evening sun. Also, typically pool is on a high enough pedestal and high enough walls that you don't see I-4.

lololol just a median for no reason? For real?

I had a short work trip (Tues night-Fri) this week and "had" to park in Term C rather than my usual Terminal Top. Great alternative. It's sub-ideal for me coming from the north and being an AA loyalist so literally couldn't be any further away, but better than having to end up in any of the park and rides. Only downside I experienced is that when I got back late at night, they were only running 1 of the 2 trams, so it meant an 8 minute wait instead of 4. The way they tacked it onto the corner of the high-gates was creative, and works decently well for now. Though once more traffic starts coming through there and especially once phase 2 gets activated, I think they're going to need to reconfigure the 60-120 B TSA exit, because there will be a chokepoint right there.

You're not wrong... but how often are you exiting downtown during evenings? There really often isn't multiple ways to go depending on your starting point and how backed up traffic is and what roads are blocked off (which I support). Getting to SoDo at 10PM from downtown on a Friday when Orange is closed and there's an event at DPAC and Amway and the one-way of Pine is backed up to Rosalind... Basically the only option is going down Robinson to Summerlin. (To be clear, will still be perfectly viable on a road diet. And I'm one of the few people here that are pro-one way streets. But it can make getting home troublesome at best. I'm able-bodied so I tend to just walk to rosalind and have an uber pick me up and drive around the park, but most people don't do that).

Fair enough. I think those are awful and half should be gotten rid of.

Which is a one way artery in a downtown core. Not a neighborhood.

I assume you mean Grant, but yes. That's absolutely true.

Define signalize? Like an actual traffic signal? That would be awful. That would be 5 out of 9 intersections signalized in a half mile span. I'm all for a pedestrian beacon or something there like was supposed to be part of the redo and got ripped out.

I will say, since the city switched from publishing agendas/minutes on their website to using Novus, I find myself reading them 90% less. It's cumbersome to browse through. So I've missed a lot more of the tiny projects that I used to bring up.

I'm late here, but this is true for literally every football stadium. It's one of the reasons attendance is down at NFL games. The experience isn't as good as being at home, and sitting in traffic for hours to get home is miserable. At the end of the day, moving 60,000+ people out of one location at one time is going to be a nightmare for roads. Regarding walkable communities, that's what makes it PERFECT being where it is. It's a little over a mile from downtown, there are buses that shuttle you from Amway to CWS. We get the benefits without ruining walkability, while still being close enough to walk if you dont want to drive or wait for the shuttle.

Yes, but I didn't expect them to change it before the reconstruction. However when you're MAKING ALL NEW SIGNS AND CONSTITUENTS BROUGHT IT TO YOUR ATTENTION

You named a handful of outliers. There is literally nothing confusing about Kaley St and the location of the I-4 Interchange. In fact, numerous of the new signs were CORRECTLY signed Kaley St, and they went back and changed them to the INCORRECT Kaley Ave. https://library.municode.com/fl/orlando/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TITIICICO_CH65OFBOPR_PT4OTAPPR_4ISTNA_S65.537GERE

Yes. According to Orlando Municipal Code, Kaley is a street within the city of Orlando, and the I-4 Exit Interchange is within the city of Orlando.

They still haven't fixed the Kaley signs. I should send another email.

I went Memorial Day weekend. I highly recommend it. I'm not sure if they finished their soft opening, which they were only doing a hundred pizzas a day and only doing four slice pizzas. And it's expensive as Scott mentioned ($15 for 4 slices). But it was super good. I intended on only eating one piece and then putting the rest in the fridge, but then I ate the entire thing because it was so good.