Staying cool on and off the tracks During a sporting summer the reliability of our railway network is not always at the forefront of our minds. By Steve Ehrlich, Space-Time Insight If anything, we take transport for granted, expecting trains to run on time and not be overcrowded. An estimated half a million British fans travelled to France this year for Euro 2016. That number of people using a limited number of transportation hubs can cause major disruption.
companies particularly came in for Looking at Wales in more detail, to a significant amount of flak. address the complications, the organisers of the World Cup At the start of the competition, established a regular transport headline after headline pointed working group, the Venue towards transportation issues that Transport Working Group (VTWG). resulted in organisers having to The working group was made up swiftly introduce changes to get of representatives from local the games up and running again. government, transportation, The situation reached boiling uniformed services and To maintain a reliable service, it’s point when the Enterprise and infrastructure organisations. In vital to consider the effects of Business Committee in the Welsh addition to this the regional people travelling in their Assembly called a meeting with working group, members were thousands to certain places at one the transportation and council invited to join national members in time. If we do not use all the bosses to discover what had gone the larger oversight transport information available to us to plan wrong. The issues during the group that met on a quarterly for these situations, the Rugby World Cup, despite basis. consequences can be anything thousands of extra seats being from not having enough drivers made available (at a cost of on duty to delayed trains, missed £429,000 during the matches in connections and overcrowded Wales alone), were in a large part platforms to people not making it due to overcrowding. The to the big game on time. organisers had not accurately planned for the number of rugby fans who would be travelling to the games, resulting in Last year’s Rugby World Cup [in the UK] provides a cautionary tale overcrowding and fans not being able to get to the matches. This to all involved in large-scale was particularly evident during the events. The championship may matches for which more than ten have been a success for the country, despite performances on times the number of spectators the pitch, but it did not pass travelled than had previously been without incident and rail predicted.
Mind the flak
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