Outside Barclays Center concerts, continued idling on the pad, honking and idling on adjacent streets (and the neighbor who left town)

Via Atlantic Yards Watch

Fans of the concerts at the Barclays Center have no reason to care, but arena operators should, so it's worth reviewing that concerts like the Justin Bieber show Friday night and the Beyonce shows that began Saturday and end tonight have their spillover impacts in the neighborhood.

First, of course, the Bieber fans screaming post-show until about midnight remind us how dicey it is to override the zoning that is supposed to put a cordon around sports/concert facilities.

One neighbor, in fact, commented:

We live right by that corner - we can see loading the pad from our bedroom window. After the chaos last time Bieber was in town we got a hotel for the night last night since we weren't willing to deal all the craziness a second time. And yet still no compensation of any form has come to us, ever.

Perhaps most glaring, however, was the continued violation of state rules that prohibit buses and trucks from idling on the pad adjacent to the arena on Dean Street. It happened last month, and it happened this weekend, before the Bieber show and then before the Beyonce concert, as detailed on Atlantic Yards Watch.

The video below may seem kind of Warholian, but it documents very clearly what's going on. The question is why the state doesn't enforce the rule, and why the arena doesn't. For the latter, they likely don't want to offend anyone connected with their very precious touring artists.



Other impacts

Other examples of the tight fit persist. On Twitter, one resident of Pacific Street wrote before the first Beyonce concert, "Tonight's crowd is coming in loud & rowdy down Pacific toward Flatbush."

Photo via @BrooklynSpoke

Doug Gordon (@BrooklynSpoke) tweeted before that concert, "How you know there's an event at Barclays Center: stretch SUV limo idling in hydrant space on 4th Ave."

As one poster on Atlantic Yards Watch described it after the Beiber concert, "Constant honking of car horns for past 45 minutes. No NYPD."

Concert has let out and the neighborhood has been subjected to the constant honking of car horns from traffic backed up along Ashland Place from Fulton to Hanson Place. The traffic gridlocked on Flatbush Avenue and Lafayette is also honking horns. No sign of NYPD traffic control agents at problem intersections Ashland/Lafayette, Ashland/Fulton, or Flatbush/Lafayette.

During that concert, as the video below shows, there was  double parking on Atlantic Avenue next to the arena lay-by lane.



General admission lineup

Despite pledges that those seeking general admission tickets would line up on Atlantic Avenue toward the plaza, they still lined up in the opposite direction for Beyonce tickets, clogging the narrow sidewalk toward Sixth Avenue.



From the inside of the arena


One writer, apparently an employee at the Barclays Center, wrote on his blog about the Bieber concert: "We had fights galore before the lights went down; still don’t why, either."

He also pointed out that, while fans waited outside before and after the show for Bieber, "All you Beliebers out there should make note of that: there’s no point in hanging around as he’s in early and out fast."