Eight million spectators will be forced to take public transport, walk or cycle when they attend the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games, reports the Times. But a small number of the disabled 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.
According to the Times the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) 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 has cancelled plans in the original bid for two giant park-and-ride sites on the M25 and M11 to deter spectators from using cars for part of their journey.
Everyone with a ticket will be sent a personalized, detailed itinerary showing how to get from his or her front door to the venue. Live travel information relevant to their routes will be sent to their mobile phones on the day of the event and 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, while those from outside London will be able to purchase discounted, flat-rate rail tickets from any station to London.
Two months ahead of 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. 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, reports the Times.
ODA transport director Hugh Sumner told the Times, “we have a very aggressive program 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 work that has had a decline in car use and an increase in bud and rail travel, reports the Times.
