People who want Boston to host the Olympics, Super Bowl, NFL Draft or any other major event that attracts hundreds of thousands of people should be forced to sit in an idling car on the Mass Pike at the height of rush hour with nothing more than a bladder infection.
This town has come a long way in recent years, and should only continue to boom as a major, innovative metropolitan area.
But our subway system doesn’t even run past midnight during the week yet. Let’s hold off on proclaiming that we’re ready for the world to descend upon this fair city.
Members of the U.S. Olympic Committee are scheduled to meet in the area Tuesday for a quarterly board meeting, and hope to narrow down their list of candidates to host the 2024 Games later this month.
The USOC should put them up in Providence, and force them take the commuter train into town before switching to an infuriating, delay-filled ride on the Green Line. It’s best that they receive a realistic representation of the region.
Boston doesn’t have enough hotel rooms to house all of the Boston Marathoners, never mind the brigade of athletes, world leaders, media members and spectators who travel to the Olympics every other year.
Accommodations would be an issue for the Super Bowl, too, which many folks have campaigned to bring here.
The argument is that the weather held out for the big game in New York, which seemed to clear the way for Boston and a plethora of other cities in frigid climates to submit their Super Bowl bids.
But miserable, wintry weather is pretty much the only attribute that New York and Boston share. The former is the city that never sleeps, and the latter doesn’t have liquor stores that stay open past 11:00 p.m.
Hosting a Super Bowl in this region would be difficult to sort out economically as well. The Minneapolis Star Tribune obtained the extensive list of requirements that the NFL required Minneapolis to meet before it awarded the 2018 Super Bowl to the Twin Cities.
The 153-page document includes demands for 35,000 free parking spaces, presidential suites at no cost in luxury hotels, travel expenses for an 180-member party of NFL officials and more.
The NFL contends that the Super Bowl brings a plethora of tourism dollars to its hosting metropolitan area, but the game would be played in Foxborough and not Boston. It doesn’t appear to make sense to ask the Foxborough taxpayers to pay for most of those perks when Boston would largely benefit from the economic stimulus.
This city isn’t big enough to hold a Super Bowl or other colossal entertainment events. Robert Kraft wants to the NFL Draft to come to Boston in 2015, but for what purpose? Outside of a few photo ops with commissioner Roger Goodell at the local Starbucks, it’s difficult to discern what residents would gain from that outside of further congested roadways.
Everything comes with a price, and the annoyance that comes with hosting the Olympics, Super Bowl or NFL Draft would be too much to bear.
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