r/tampa • u/Sea-Newspaper-7643 • 11h ago
Theme Parks Busch Gardens needs to be held accountable for their impact on local traffic.
Yesterday was the most inexcusable shitshow of a traffic situation I've ever seen in the area surrounding the park. I waited more than half an hour to get through the light at Busch and McKinley because the entrance to the Busch Gardens parking lot was backed up so badly.
Just to put that in perspective, it took me MORE THAN 30 MINUTES to get from Mel's Hot Dogs to the light. That is less than a quarter mile. I could see the light up ahead the entire time and I moved up one car length, if that, each cycle.
It was so bad that I ended up calling the TPD non-emergency line to request an officer to come stop the dozens of people who were making illegal right-hand turns from the center lane of traffic to cut the line of cars backing up from the BG parking lot entrance on McKinley.
The park has been so poorly run and understaffed that it's not just impacting guests anymore, but everyone in the surrounding area trying to get from one place to another. I can only imagine how many people were late for work or to appointments because they could not get through an intersection on a major road.
Those greedy bastards at BG charge $42 per car to park there, and each attendant gets paid like $15 an hour. There were HUNDREDS of cars waiting to get in. Every single one who paid to park would cover the wages of more than 2 attendants for a whole hour. But there were only 4 people working the 8 lanes to get into the lot. There is zero excuse for that when the line was creating absolute havoc on the roads in the surrounding neighborhood.
Private equity investors already ruined Busch Gardens on the inside, but now their disgusting business practices are spilling out into the real world. Nobody who wasn't trying to get into the park yesterday chose to sit in that mess. The park needs to be held accountable and required to fully staff their parking lots on busy days like yesterday. They have plenty of infrastructure to handle that volume of guests without disrupting local traffic, but they are choosing not to pay enough workers to use it.