London's Transport Challenge.

As I've mentioned once or twice today London's public transport network faced it's first real real test of the Olympics as Olympic visitors shared the network with London's commuters for the first time. Although some Olympic events don't finish until mid-night local time and there may be some issues getting people back from the late-night session of beach volley-ball which ends after much of the network will have started to shut down for the night I would say that London's public transport system passed with flying colours. Apart from things like a broken down elevator at "Canning Town" station the only real headache was a track fault on the on London Underground's (LU) District Line between "Wimbledon" and "Putney Bridge" station which prevented trains from stopping near to the Wimbledon tennis club that was hosting Olympic tennis events. However transport organisers reacted quickly laying on shuttle buses to over-ground stations to allow people to complete their journey. They were also quick to inform people about regular buses that people could take to alternate overground and underground stations.

Of course apart from a lot of hard work on the part of transport workers this success has relied heavily on the patience and good humour of travellers and people taking the effort to plan their journeys in advance to avoid the busiest routes and times. There will be plenty more challenges ahead especially on Friday (3/8/12) when the first big track and field events begin at the Olympic park. Therefore it is important that people continue to be patient and plan their journeys. In order to help with that planning organisers have put together a special website http://www.getaheadofthegames.com (@GAOTG) which I can highly recommend despite the fact that it only seems to be available in English and does cover the all of the Olympic venues in the UK meaning it can get a bit confusing. It might be worth setting up a separate Twitter account just to handle travel updates though.


21:10 on 30/7/12.