London -Box Hill

bearfraser

Nice to see the Daily Wail bitching about the traffic chaos with the trial 2012 London-Box Hill race this weekend and the percieved chaos of the actual 2012 events :- ENJOY !!

andrewlwood

To be fair, as a keen cyclist, I was pretty p||sed off this weekend. Trying to get from Wandsworth to Ealing in the car mean that we had to go via the M25 pretty much. I understand the need to close roads and I support the events completely, but some kind of rolling closures would have been a good idea - Upper Richmond Road was shut from 4am til 4pm, though the cyclists only used it for about 20 minutes in total.

wgwarburton

Hi,
I wonder if the expectation is that the route will be closed over this duration for the Olympic event itself, perhaps to allow for adequate security checks?

If so, then the point of the test event would be to assess the impact of this, and hence the closure would be similar. Arguably (perhaps explicitly? I don't know) these "test events" are logistical tests more than they are sporting events in their own right, though it makes sense to organise them along those lines, too, if only to get some idea of spectator numbers and interest.

Cheers,
W.

garryc

Have to agree, we were in Dorking/Box Hill to watch the race and the roads were closed long after the race passed through.

Dougal_bug

And the major problem you then have is places like Walton on Thames where I live is shut for the weekend. The route circles the town and uses the 3 main accesses in and out of it (down from Hampton Court, past bridge to Staines and heads South to Weybrdige, and then out through Esher when it heads back to Hampton).

Most residents don't mind a bit of road closure, but as they are running the two races day after each other, and they didn't open up parts of walton until 2.30 / 3, - we couldn't get across the bridge at 12.30 when we thought we might be in the clear 2.5 hours after they had passed that bit, and would not be coming back in that way. The residents are going to get wound up in such a situation.

Why not bring in a rolling road block, so say 30/40 mins after the bikes have gone through, locals can at least get out, via say Walton Bridge. After all we are not all mad sports freaks and there are going to be poeple who are not interested, even in the Olympics.