Saturday Night Live Weekly Car Meet Axed

By: Andy Enright, Unique Cars magazine

Date: 02.02.2017

Popular casual car meet gets evicted

MELBOURNE’S wildly popular weekly car enthusiast meet, Saturday Night Live, has been axed by Victoria’s police over concerns of public safety.

Knox police claim that the event, which draws upwards of 400 cars at the BP service station on EastLink in Scoresby has outgrown its venue. On its Facebook page, Knox police posted  "Please do not attend for the meet (sic) as you will be asked to move along." Comments on the page ran to several hundred angry responses, the main thrust of respondent’s arguments that if it was not in this fairly well controlled environment, it would move to one that would be far harder to control.

In an article published in the Knox Leader, Knox highway patrol Acting Sergeant Stephen Glenk said the event would be axed, but was at apins to state that "it is not a ban, it’s by agreement with landowners". He claimed the decision was made in consultation with EastLink, the landowner, and BP management."When you can’t drive a car or truck into the service lane it starts to become an issue for us," Acting Sgt Glenk said.

The event started three years ago as a handful of friends meeting and had grown from there, but there has been little collaboration between event organisers and police. Despite that, attendees have been largely well-behaved, although access to the BP fuel station has proved problematic on occasion due to sheer weight of numbers.

EastLink spokesman Doug Spencer-Roy said the authority was invited by police to a meeting regarding the event. EastLink had voiced concerns about safety issues, most notably being tailbacks of cars spilling onto the freeway, some attendees choosing to park on the freeway shoulder and walk into the event.

Freeway signs will be updated to advise of this weekend’s closure.

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