In the aftermath of Friday’s transport debacle, a lot of focus has gone on the people who didn’t make it to Eden Park because of problems with the rail network. To an extent this is justified, because these people had paid a lot of money for their tickets and it’s shameful the system let them down. However, from my experience (and the experience of others) this was by no means whatsoever the only transport issues faced on that day.
To start with, the whole public transport system seemed to be incredibly busy throughout Friday during the day, as many thousands of people came into town to enjoy the opening night celebrations. One person I know drove to Herne Bay to park their car and catch the Outer Link bus into town, but after waiting for around an hour for a non-existent bus, ended up driving back to the North Shore and catching a Birkenhead Transport bus in from there. Ferry services were cancelled, people trying to catch trains into town were left stranded on platforms, the busway stations on the North Shore got completely overloaded and so forth.
In town, as I noted in this post, the number of people kept on growing and growing throughout the afternoon. This led to safety issues as the evening wore on, because stupidly streets weren’t closed to traffic:
Lower Queen St and Customs St westbound were later closed to traffic on the advice of police [actually they never were].
But six people were hurt when a bus hit them in Fanshawe St in the city. The bus and a car had collided before the bus hit the group.
A 33-year-old man and a 50-year-old woman were taken to Auckland hospital.
Auckland District Health Board spokesman Mark Fenwick said both were in a stable condition.
But the real transport problems that I experienced related to getting everyone home. People had already started trying to get home after the fireworks, but the system was in chaos. My sister tried to get a train out west (while the game was on) but after waiting for well over an hour – with no communication about what was going on – she (and her 5 month old baby and 3 year old son) eventually gave up and caught a bus to somewhere relatively near home. They got home around midnight.
After watching the fireworks I headed back to my office to wait for the crowds to go down, then attempted to catch an Inner Link bus to Ponsonby before walking home. Waited on Victoria Street while two non-existent Link Buses on the real-time sign went by, then walked to Wellesley Street to see a half-empty Outer Link bus with “terminates at Civic” on its front drive past a bunch of people. Then walked down to Victoria Park Market just in time to have an Outer Link bus with quite a few standing passengers (but still plenty of room) pull up, but had the driver say there was only room for two more people. As we had my seven year old daughter (and three month old in a baby carrier) with us, we weren’t allowed on. Eventually our friend who had by this time managed to catch a Birkenhead Transport bus to the North Shore and drive back to my place, offered us a lift home.
Most people I’ve talked to about the evening had similar stories about the difficulties of getting home. It seemed that, just like most other things that happened that day, there was a complete lack of planning for dealing with so many people. Birkenhead Transport seemed to be the shining exception to this – providing a fairly constant stream of buses to whip people either into town earlier in the day, then out of town later on.
Overall though, the evening was a complete shambles for far more people than those who got stuck on the trains trying to get to Eden Park. I certainly hope that the study of “what went wrong” extends to the disoganisation of getting people in and out of town and is not only focused on the Eden Park issue.
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Man it gets better and better! Sounds like the whole network completely failed. After reading this, I’m sure confidence in Public Transport of all kinds is going to take a massive hit. I’m sure it’ll (slowly) recover. Just like New Zealand though isn’t it? So desperately focused on getting people to the game that it ignored how to manage everything else.
I walked from The Strand to Symonds Street and waited 15 minutes for a bus. Most never arrived and the few that did were full. So I walked to my office in Albert Street to wait a bit before walking home to Kingsland. I’m fit enough and can reqularly run twice that distance so it wasn’t really a problem. The rest of my group were going to walk to Mt Albert but managed to get a taxi at Kingsland.
I’m glad you are covering this aspect of it also. There is absolutely no way they considered the downtown people in this and that it was highly likely that they would want to leave straight after the game also. I had to pick my flatmates up at about 1am because they had been waiting for over an hour and they were not even close to getting inside britomart
I waited a whole 10 mins for a 020 that arrived more or less on schedule and managed to fit all the people at the stop waiting for it on. So a happy story.
Though I agree with your general ideas around Queen St closures/buses departed from further up and the like. The Inner Link was clearly never going to show as it somehow had to make it through a very busy Customs St.
I wonder if we were at that bus stop at the same time? I know there were a couple of disgruntled families being kept off the bus by the driver. I felt kind of guilty being one of the two people let on, since I was anticipating walking all the way home. Apparently on that particular bus you weren’t supposed to have any passengers standing in the raised area at the back, so the driver suddenly decided to get safety-conscious. We drove past a couple of stops, but the crowding only lasted to Three Lamps, at which point the bus started steadily emptying out.
Nope, the 020 doesn’t go to Three Lamps! The driver of this bus made a point of telling everyone boarding to squash in at much as possible- she was making it her mission to get as many people home as possible.
I was responding to the original post (about catching the Outer Link bus at Victoria Park Market), not your message Arnie.
Makes more sense then!
The Links (both Inner and Outer) just seem to disappear on Friday night.
I wanted a bus to go west after the game. I didn’t find any and walked home down Sandringham Road. Not a single Sandringham Road bus passed me in the half hour it took me to walk. I’m driving next time.
Getting home was a smooth breeze on the ferry to Waiheke at 6.30pm. Beautiful sunset and got home just in time to see the fireworks and match on TV. So it wasn’t all ‘fail’.
Glad Auckland has a lightly regulated taxi industry. The people desperately hailing cabs on Friday night reminded my of a normal night in Sydney at 2:30am.
Got a photo of one of the inner link buses with a line longer than the bus.
trip home was pretty uneventful for me, guess its a perk of living in the CBD.
Catching the NEX after the game was easy. Although I did have to ask the helpers twice to find out where the temporary stop was located. To my surprise the trip back was also FREE!
At 12:15 We went to catch an eastern line train home. There were less than 30 people waiting for the southern and Onehunga Lines, less than 100 for the western line (still pretty good), and then several thousand for the eastern line (bad luck for us). I asked a Veolia staff member, who said they were gatting trains going on that line, and it would take about 45 minutes to clear the dense crowd that covered the whole square and road outside. I have seen massive groups of hundreds ‘disappear’ seamlessly into a train after events before- so it was believable, but the Veolia logo on her shirt left me instantly skeptical. So we got in the queue. It was just as big 20 minutes later, but 10 minutes after that, when I walked back out (I was waiting with a friend, not catching the train myself), the queue was gone completely.
When stuff doesnt go wrong, the system can be very efficient, and may have been able to handle the loads well if it weren’t for the hiccups early on.