To accommodate about 45,000 members of the Olympic Family of athletes, IOC and sports federation representatives, members of the media, sponsors, organizers and volunteers, and the throngs of tourists who will attend Turin’s 2006 Winter Olympic Games, TOROC has set up a Transports Section under Paolo Balistreri, an architect specialized in designing and managing transports systems in the intermodal sector.
The Transport Section has four objectives – to ensure efficient and safe transport services, to avoid creating snarl-ups and gridlock, to meet the requirements of the IOC’s Host City Contract, and to monitor, together with Agenzia Torino 2006, transport activities to and from Olympic work sites.
In order to achieve these goals, it has been divided into four divisions – Systems Development, Venue Management (the sporting sites), Fleets, and Client Services and Transport.
Balistreri says, “we still don’t know how many guests we’re going to have. We’ll only have a fairly accurate idea six months ahead of the event, but we’re working on a software package that will enable us to simulate a range of scenarios and adopt flexible solutions”.
The Fleets division will handle vehicles of two types – around 3,000 cars and vans, and 1,000 shuttle buses for spectators.
According to a TOROC official, “the interchange parking system is aimed at averting gridlock in the valleys by the use of coaches and shuttle-buses”.
