No, but I can compare to several other countries, and if all places in the US are like this one club I was at, then compared to the rest of the world, the legal capacities are extremely, extremely, extremely low. Having said that, I reckon either this place was an abberation or else every single other club in the area was constantly over-capacity, as this was the only one that said they were full when they were half empty. The bouncers said that the police had been cracking down, and that they had to stick to capacity, implying that they normally didn’t.
In terms of exits, this was a small club with one floor and three exits. At no spot in the club were you more than 100 feet from an exit. The week before, they had at least twice as many people in there every single night. What is the point of regulations if no one sticks to them?
I put in the other half of that sentence, so that it made sense. If you’re legally responsible for setting the limit for a club you are never going to go to, and thus responsible if anything does happen, there is a huge incentive to propose a much lower legal capacity than if you were giving your honest opinion on what was safe. Your chances of dying in a nightclub fire are pretty minimal, rules or no rules. Why do people spend their lives worrying about this shit, then dying from heart disease because they ate McDonalds their whole lives?
The difference is that fast food and cigarettes harm only the health of the people consuming them. In a busy nightclub, the individual people in there don’t have sufficient information and don’t have sufficient control over the environment in order to make decisions; whereas, imposing requirements on the person who controls the gate is an efficient, logical, and justifiable measure.
Maybe we will make fast food and cigarettes illegal. That has nothing to do with whether fire codes should restrict the capacity of nightclubs.
Yeah, good point. Still, the danger is statistically tiny, and while I have no problem whatsoever with legal capacities as a concept, the one club I referred to was laughably empty. As in, no queue for the bar, empty booths, half filled dancefloor, and little or no atmosphere. So while they’re be a good thing in general, if they’re too strict they ruin the club, with very little increase in safety. Sensible restrictions I’m all for.
There’s always the possibility that you were being lied to and that capacity was being restricted for some other reason. It’s not all that uncommon for business owners to take some action and when asked about it by customers to blame it on government regulation.
Maybe, but we knew the bouncers, and there was a line of at least 60 people outside. They were doing a pretty vigilant one-out one-in system, which suggests they were telling the truth.
Just do what we do here - have the local government officially designate the busiest street in town the victory party strip and put the cops on alert, so people just party in the street. No overcrowding issues there!