The transport system worked

After the chaos of last week, it was good to hear that Auckland’s public transport system worked well for those attending the Ireland versus Australia game at Eden Park on Saturday night. A Herald article today somewhat contradicts itself by saying that the buses and trains were ready but everyone drove – then noting some fairly large numbers of people who did catch the bus and train:

The Herald on Sunday polled 100 fans as they turned up for the game and found a mere 22 took the train to Eden Park. Almost a third had changed their travel plans after the disastrous RWC opening night – this time, more than half came by road.

The poll matched official figures last night, which estimated 22,300 people (41 per cent of the crowd) used public transport to get to Eden Park.

There was always going to be a pretty steep drop in the number of people trusting the train network in particular to get them to the game on time. Apparently the fan trail was quite popular, and clearly more people drove or took taxis to the game than had done so for the Tonga match.

But what really matters in my opinion is that the transport system seemed to work perfectly. The Auckland Transport Twitter account provided regular updates on how the rail system was going, as well as letting us know when various streets around Eden Park were reopened to traffic. While not everyone has immediate access to Twitter, I’m sure the media keeps an eye on it and if anything did happen then it would be possible for the message to get out pretty quickly.

What will be interesting to see is whether the fact that everything went smoothly on Saturday encourages people back onto the train network for future games. The chances of anything remotely similar to what happened on opening night occurring again are extremely slim, largely because it isn’t planned to hold another fireworks show downtown that will attract around 200,000 people. Maybe the system will be stretched a bit more on the night of the final (particularly if the All Blacks are playing in it), but certainly until then it would be quite surprising if things went wrong – at least in terms of having the system overloaded to such a degree again.

Oh, and on the field Saturday night’s game produced a pretty exciting result for the tournament as a whole. A quarter-final between Australia and South Africa looms as quite likely now, which is surely good news for New Zealand if one of those two teams gets knocked out before the semis.

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