Shuttle Bus Issues - Jim King (Festival Director) Initial Report

[Paul ™]

Hi all - as rob promised last week, here are the findings of our event director Jim King, and his report:

Rob has asked me in my capacity as Festival Director to look into the queuing problems for shuttle buses on the Monday after the show.

I have discussed the matter fully with both Big Green Coach, Showsec Security, The Festival Traffic Manager and the Ferry companies and whilst more work needs to be done to complete the detailed report, I have the following key points to report back.

Clearly some people have had an unacceptable wait for the bus to take them to the ferry port. What’s even more clear is that some people leaving Bestival for the same ferry terminal experienced highly different queuing times depending on which queue they joined.

It’s important to note that the festival changed shuttle bus operator this year. There were many good reasons for this but most crucially was the desire to have a bespoke service which would only operate the festival shuttle operation without having other service commitments and thus gave us more control on timetable and routes.

By way of background information, in agreement with the festival, a total of 67 buses were operated on rotation between the ferry ports and the festival site by Big Green Coach which was a significant increase on previous year's service.

The time table and number of buses in service are worked out and agreed in advance based on the egress (exit) data from previous years so that we can ascertain when the higher volumes of people leave the festival site.

Another important factor is the ferry capacity. In previous years the festival's customers have faced long waits at the Island Ferry terminals as the numbers of customer arriving at the ferry terminals exceed the capacity of the ferries for foot passengers. Cowes and Ryde are particular difficult to manage large numbers of people at and we therefore try and manage the system so that the waiting time at the ferry ports is minimised with us managing the larger queue at the festival site instead.

On the Thursday and Friday we found that the new service provided by Big Green Coach had greatly improved the service from previous years. Queue times were considerably reduced at all the ferry terminals and whilst we would look to improve the stewarding and bus loading operation in future years, the key component of numbers of buses in operation and waiting time were on average significantly better than in any previous year.

The ingress data is then analysed so that we can see the correlation between foot passenger numbers on the ferries with the numbers of customer coming to site by bus, by taxi or by other means. This information then allows us to schedule the return services for the Sunday and Monday.

What is very evident at the first look at the data from this year is that the egress on Sunday was much lower than in any previous year. With the sunny weather holding until late on the Sunday this slower egress was expected and provision was made by BGC to stand more drivers down so they would be rested and be available to work on the Monday.

The decision was taken however that a large number of buses should remain in operation as the weather was forecast to change for the worse on Sunday night and throughout the early hours of Monday morning. Whilst this weather did hit the site as per the forecast, the amount of people leaving the site was still unusually low with only 700 people using the shuttle service on the Sunday compared to a figure between 5 and 10 times that amount in previous years.

The knock on effect of up to 6,000 additional customers wanting to leave on the Monday was the shuttle bus queues became busier from earlier on the Monday morning. This was particularly the case with the Ryde service.

The other services were monitored but the Ryde service was of most concern as there was little or no queue at Ryde ferry terminal meaning that some ferries were leaving with spare seats on them. A decision was taken, with my approval, to increase the number of buses servicing Ryde so that all ferries from all terminals left the island at capacity. Before making this decision it was confirmed that other ferry services were running at capacity with an average waiting time of between 1 and 2 hours at the ferry terminal. The queue at East Cowes for the ferry peaked at between 3 to 4 hours and the festival took the decision to temporarily reduce the shuttle bus service for this location which made the wait times longer than planned – however, this was to stop the queues at East Cowes becoming any larger. I therefore felt it appropriate to put more resource into the Ryde service.

Extra bus stops for Ryde were put in place and BGC brought more buses in earlier to help bring this queue down. This increased the numbers of loading bays for Ryde from 3 to 6 (with 5 queues). However, the knock on from this was that the 3 inner queues for Ryde suffered as they appeared to be serviced by less buses. The numbers of buses these 3 queues received remained the same but the outer 2 queues experienced a greater number of vehicles as the outer 2 queuing lanes were able to access the extra 3 loading bays and this meant a much greater number of people per hour were processed through those queues. From the customers I have spoken to, the central queues became increasingly static and it’s clear that waiting times for those queues quickly became on average double the wait of the outer queue. By mid-afternoon this had regrettable peaked at treble the waiting time as the outer lane. What started as an average wait of an hour to 90 mins for the majority of people was reaching waiting times of between 3 and at times 5 hours for some customers to leave the site.

Whilst increasing the numbers of loading bays was well intended, this variation in queuing times was a root cause of the problem for many people. Increased levels of signage and stewarding would have helped improve the situation as would have 'wait-time' monitoring equipment to ensure that queues were being processed evenly. Ultimately human error in a lack of monitoring the differing waiting times is a management failure and should have been avoided.

I have also found that the loading times for each coach were too slow. An increased number of 'baggage loaders' would have also increased the efficiency of the loading times of the buses. Whilst this would have assisted in reducing loading by only a few minutes per bus, it would still nonetheless have decreased waiting times when this is multiplied across the full duration of the egress. It would have also provided greater customer service for our customers as well.

The increases in the numbers of people using the service on the Monday lengthened the service that the buses needed to operate for. The problem was thus further worsened as the day wore on as a larger number of drivers had to take legally required rest breaks. This was especially the case post 2pm.

In the post 2pm period more drivers were on rest breaks which meant less buses running which in turn simply means less people can be moved per hour. Whilst the queue was much less in size, the wait time did not reduce and the problem was then exacerbated by 4 buses that were in operation suffering mechanical failure. Mechanical failure is built into bus numbers booked and is expected, but when added to the problem it further stretched the post 2pm bus resources that were in operation which in turn increased the wait.

There will clearly be individuals whose experience differs from the above and my comments are not meant to apply to every customer who was at the festival or to ignore the individual cases, but to identify the key issues that were the main contributing factors to the delays suffered by the majority of people. The delays suffered by all customers are hugely regrettable and unacceptable, and on behalf of the festival I can only apologise. I do want our customers to take heart that Bestival and Big Green Coach take these issues seriously. They are not swept under the carpet and the issue will not be ignored. We will continue to investigate all the contributing factors fully and a new plan with further improvements implemented for next year.

Jim King, Bestival Event Director

[Bisque]

I really don't blame Bestival, all the fault seemed to come from BGC & their ill or uniformed stewards. Neither do I blame the stewards at all but the fact they needed more info & better comms to help from BGC.

Points I noted?

1) Letting a mass of people fight it out for a coach was ridiculous, I didn't understand why the stewards had not been told to count out the (even a rough) number of people that would have got on the arriving coach to reduce the pushing.

2) The queues were both of equal length but the right hand side queue closest to the perimeter fence was ignored by many coaches arriving (difficult to park coach up in the corner, reduced turning circel?) & thus had about 2 hour + waits compared to the middle queue. Stewards directing coaches would have helped.

3) Coaches backing into spaces was a waste of time & caused bottle necks of people trying to move between the coaches.

4) The bloke getting overly angry about his 6 hour wait didn't help. I felt sorry for him but we were all there for a long time. A nice touch would have perhaps to give out some free water like Glasto does at train stations & queues for coaches.

Anyway, I was expecting a queue, got up early enough, came prepared with music & headphones so this hasn't put me off going again.