Olympics chiefs set to ban all car travel

Reprinted in full from an article by Ben Webster, The Times, 23rd October 2007.

—

The team organising the London Olympics in 2012 is adopting the most aggressive anticar policy ever applied to a major event in an attempt to deliver a permanent shift in people’s travel habits.

The eight million spectators will be banned from travelling by car and forced to take public transport, walk or cycle. Only a small number of disabled people will be allowed to park anywhere near the car exclusion zones planned for the main venues in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Cardiff, and Weymouth and Portland in Dorset.

The Times has been given an exclusive preview of the transport plan, which describes organising the Games as the “country’s largest peacetime logistical operation”. On the busiest days, 800,000 people will converge on the venues.

The plan discloses that the Olympic Delivery Authority wants to make the Games a testing ground for a radical shift in transport planning to be extended to all major cultural and sporting events. It is even trying to deter spectators from using cars for part of their journey and has cancelled plans in the original bid for two giant park-and-ride sites on the M25 and M11.

Everyone booking a ticket will be sent a personalised, detailed itinerary, showing how to get from their front doors to the venue.

On the day, live travel information relevant to their route will be sent to their mobile phones. If there are delays, they will be advised of an alternative route.

All spectators travelling to an event in London will receive a free all-zones travelcard. Those from outside London will be able to buy discounted, flat-rate rail tickets from any station to the capital.

Even drivers not travelling to the Olympics will be affected by the plan because, for two months around the Games, one lane on several key routes in London will be reserved for 80,000 members of the “Olympic family” – athletes, officials and media. These routes, dubbed “Zil lanes” after the routes reserved for the Soviet Politburo cavalcades in Moscow, are likely to be policed by dozens of cameras and a team of enforcement officers.

The core route will run from Hyde Park Corner, to Parliament Square, along Embankment to Tower Hill, on to The Highway and out to Stratford.

In an interview with The Times, Hugh Sumner, the ODA transport director, said: “We have a very aggressive programme to make it the greenest games in modern times. We want to leave both a hard legacy in terms of infrastructure and a living legacy in the way people think about transport and about how they travel to sports and cultural events.”

He said that the Games would build on changing attitudes towards car travel since the congestion charge was introduced in London in 2003. London is the only major city in the world that has had a decline in car use and an increase in bus and rail travel.

“We want to accelerate the shift to public transport and cycling that we have seen in London in recent years.

“There will need to be traffic controls around competition venues. We will make it very plain to people that there isn’t going to be parking.”

The RAC Foundation welcomed the investment in new rail lines, such as more than doubling the capacity of the North London Line for the Olympics.

But Edmund King, the foundation director, gave warning that making the Games an experiment in mass movement without cars would deter many families from travelling to the Olympics.

“Many people will want to take their children to the Games to inspire them. But the prospect of lugging toddlers, prams and a picnic on and off buses and trains will make many abandon hope of being there to witness this historic event.

“The organisers should guard against being overzealous and too politically correct in their transport aspirations.”