Re:The Case Against Travel
by pipes on Saturday June 24, 2023 @02:35PM
(#36461448)
Ordinarily I disagree with this kind of thinking, but I live in Edinburgh, for some reason I hate that the old town now feels like a theme park, though I'm not sure why. Especially given that during lock down I walked around it a lot and missed all the tourists. Makes no sense.
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It's about the number of people. Less than 5% is fun and allows you to meet all sorts of people from various places, at 5-15% it's already a bit more mixed, and at >15% it becomes disruptive to every-day activities and the place no longer feels "yours".
I'm just making these numbers up because I don't have a good way to estimate them, could also be ">50%" instead of ">15%". But that's what it comes down to.
I think COVID really highlighted the contrast; first it was a slow increase that you don't really notice directly, then suddenly none, and then suddenly a huge spike again. e.g. Edinburgh roughly doubled the number of tourists from 2012 to 2019[1] which, in spite of being a fairly large change, you probably don't really notice when spread out over a 7 year period.
[1]: visits to Edinburgh castle is probably a reasonable proxy: https://www.statista.com/statistics/586822/edinburgh-castle-...
Thats interesting about the visits to Edinburgh castle, probably very accurate. Feels accurate too. Around 2009 or so Edinburgh was pretty "dead" I remember work mates complaining about it, so much one of them moved to Glasgow. Now we have the opposite problem.