by Could Stratford cope with the Olympic crowds? Graham was behind the scenes finding out
Previously in this series: Part 3: Getting Ahead of the Games
A lesser-known part of the preparations for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games was the assurance work. This was all about confirming that the facilities and arrangements were on course to deliver a safe and effective Games.
Postponement was not an option. And the Games were a unique challenge in their scale and the level of interfaces and coordination needed. It wouldn’t be good enough for individual organisations to just be ready within their own world: it all had to work together. And transport was only one of the five ‘domains’, or pillars of organisation, for the Games (the others being Government, Security, London operations, and the Games themselves).
For transport, four levels of readiness were defined:
- Conceptually ready: the arrangements were shown to work in principle. In other words, there is a workable plan.
- Functionally ready: individual modes or venues could operate in isolation, whether with new or existing capabilities. In other words, the operators or locations are good in themselves.
- Domain ready: transport as a whole was ready to operate as an integrated system.
- Games-ready: transport and the other domains were integrated with each other, meeting the required capability for both the Olympics and Paralympics.
The transport readiness work included a range of test events, live and desktop exercises, plus ‘pulse checks’ which were a form of assurance review.
My transport planning colleagues and I at Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) were involved with two aspects of this. One was a set of readiness-testing desktop exercises for the transport operators and other important bodies. The other was using the opening day of the Westfield shopping centre to observe how Stratford and other key stations handled large crowds, like they would have to during the Games.
These were among the later parts of the Games preparation to get going, and were a bit of a Cinderella when the PB team began work. But the team soon got things moving with their usual practicality and efficiency.
Westfield Opening Observation Exercise
The gigantic Westfield shopping centre, near the Olympic Stadium, opened in September 2011, just under a year before the Games. Large crowds were expected on the midweek opening day itself and the subsequent Saturday, and the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) commissioned an observation exercise to see how Stratford station and other nearby transport hubs coped with the pressure. In effect it was a convenient test event.
PB was teamed up with academics from the University of East London for this one. Observers were dotted around key points in Stratford, Stratford International and Canning Town stations. Others roamed around the stations. Mystery travellers were sent on routes to Stratford from locations across east London. Gateline data was downloaded afterwards.
On the day, I led the control room observer team whose role was to record the stations’ operational responses so that these could be married up later with the crowding observations and gateline data. Taking shifts across the three stations, it was interesting to see the similarities and differences between the locations as the day wore on. Stratford, as expected, was very busy but coping. Its National Rail services were suspended for a period in one of the afternoons, providing a further complication. Canning Town was busy but ticked along nicely. Stratford International (for which we needed to watch a formal induction video) stayed very quiet.
Equally interesting was to see the range of operational issues that the station staff routinely manage: lift assistance calls (often accidental), contractor visits, spillages to be cleaned-up, juggling rosters to ensure key staffing roles are covered, dealing with crowding of course, and (on this occasion) West Ham fans on their way to Millwall. All this plus the in-house chit-chat, smiles and grumbles of any workplace. It was fascinating.
From memory, the basic conclusion was that the transport system worked fairly well. At one point Westfield was full and had to close its doors, but the stations did not have to. There were points of particular crowding, and a range of other things to follow-up. Some of the issues at Stratford were the persistent ones of station layout, wayfinding and differences between operators that the station has never really managed to solve once and for all – although the improvements made ahead of the Games had certainly made a big difference.
Part 5 continues the readiness story by looking at the transport desktop exercises
