PATRONS of the ICC Cricket World Cup game on Wednesday evening were understandably unhappy about the park-and-ride arrangements offered by the organisers.
Previous experiences with the venue, the Brian Lara Cricket Academy in Tarouba, would have made it clear that while custom built for cricket; it was poorly planned for parking and large crowds; so the decision to designate two nearby parking locations with buses servicing the crowd was sensible.
However, the execution of the procedure seems to have varied according to which parking location cricket fans chose.
The park-and-ride option was reported to have worked well at the location on Petrotrin's grounds, but the management of the South Park Mall parking achieved an almost universal thumbs down, with crowds pushing to board a clearly overwhelmed bus system. One fan, Aaron, described the experience to Newsday: "That was chaos…like a bad day at City Gate."
An estimated 14,000 cricket fans showed up to see the match between the West Indies and New Zealand.
Is it possible that the local organisers underestimated the crowd that showed up?
Reports of tickets being issued for seats that turned out to be non-existent were another challenge for patrons, leaving some ushers puzzled and ticket-holders incensed.
All this would be decisively trumped after the match ended and a crowd that had arrived at the stadium by the busload emerged as a surging flood of tired people served by far too few buses.
This choke point seems inevitable and must be addressed by instituting event management systems to manage a crowd keen to get home during a work week.
It would seem sensible for groups with elders or people with disabilities to be given priority in the bus departures, with incentives offered to younger fans to linger while the buses manage the return of the crowd.
Meet and greet sessions with cricketers or invited cricket celebrities? Social options for fans to discuss the match after the game?
Cricket lovers will know what their peers might enjoy and prove to be an interesting and appropriate way to stagger departures from a venue notorious for the difficulty it poses for access.
The Prime Minister, who often relies on solutions that require individual responsibility, suggested that fans leave earlier and use due diligence.
But this problem also offers an opportunity for the local T20 organising committee to create innovative, even exciting responses to a problem that won't be solved by asking fans to leave before the game is done.
Almost any solution would have been better than what ultimately happened, when crowds of impatient people, unwilling to trickle back to their cars in buses, walked to the parking venues in the dark, on the highway at midnight.
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