When are we going stop being the party house down the street that routinely has a police cruiser in front at 2 a.m.?
The city and county put out the unwelcome mat for the Daytona Truck Meet last year.
Daytona Beach city commissioners told of getting complaints from beachside residents during the event and explained the city had nothing to do with it. Volusia County Council members said they got an earful, too, and explained the county also had nothing to do with the event. "This is just not going to happen again," District 2 County Council Member Billie Wheeler said.
Except it did happen again this year. Only more so.
This year, the truck meet moved to Daytona International Speedway from the Ocean Center, which should have been an improvement. Holding it at the Ocean Center last year created a two-day-long traffic jam on State Road A1A and South Peninsula Drive. This time, the gridlock was more sporadic and spread out both on International Speedway Boulevard and A1A.
This year saw an additional problem that the event conflicted with graduation events. Families had to be on the beachside and didn’t have the luxury of avoiding the peninsula – something I was careful to do this time around because I had spent a half hour last year trapped among the truck bros.
Last year during the truck rally, Daytona Beach Police issued 447 citations and the Volusia County Beach Safety Ocean Rescue received more than 600 calls.
Ocean Center sales manager Patrick Blankenship pronounced that rally “a successful event.” Which gives you a good idea of how some in the tourism industry define “success.”
By that measure, this year was even more successful: Over four days police issued 2,151 citations, arrested 77 people (13 of them for felonies) and responded to 23 crashes. By comparison, the 75th anniversary Bike Week in 2016 only generated 1,049 citations for the whole 10 days.
I see an event with four and half times more police citations as the year before and complain that it’s an event that’s four-and-half times worse. Special events defenders see the same numbers and complain about police being four-and-half times stricter.
Both years, beachside residents called police, beach patrol and public officials about horns that could be heard in the next county, trucks burning rubber and racing in the streets, aggressive driving, people throwing garbage out of trucks, trucks belching plumes of black smoke, vandalism, fights, bad music blaring from trucks and just generally goonish behavior on the beach and back at the motel.
Why the truck rally generates more complaints than the Jeep rally is a question of pop sociology I’m not qualified to answer. Particularly since both events can really fill up the central beachside.
Is it a younger demographic among customized truck owners? A rowdier truck-bro culture among the monster truck crowd? Maybe it’s no more than more people showing up.
In any case, what’s dismaying is that after years of community complaints about the damage special event tourism has already has done to the quality of life on the beachside, the area continues to be a laboratory for the development of new special events.
When is this place going to grow up and stop depending on a menu of rowdy once-a-year festivals that drive other potential visitors away?
When are we going stop being the party house down the street that routinely has a police cruiser in front at 2 a.m.?
Burning rubber in the streets in Daytona! Watch the videos online! Wide open fun!
See you next year?