Fieldays tackles traffic tangle

Waikato farming event Fieldays is upping the fight against traffic delays by extending free bus rides, with organisers saying more people could have avoided last year’s traffic jams by simply using them.

A combination of crashes and bad weather meant last year’s event was plagued by two or threehour waits for the 120,000 people trying to get into the Fieldays at Mystery Creek over the four days it runs, with some choosing to turn around and head home instead.

This year Fieldays ticket holders will get a free ride on all Hamilton buses, along with the usual free ride for those heading to and from the site.

Waikato Regional Council is sponsoring the free city rides, while Fieldays will spend $30,000 on getting people in and out of the city. Special bus lanes from Peacocks Rd and Raynes Rd should also help speed up the trip according to Fieldays.

Coromandel Fieldays fan Tim McGowan left home at 7am on the Friday of the Fieldays last year, and by 11am was still stuck in Matangi. Without traffic the journey is less than two hours.

McGowan, along with several others in the line, gave up and turned back.

‘‘I was pretty disappointed. It’s a huge international event, really if they can’t get their parking right then there’s something wrong,’’ he says. ‘‘It was just beyond a joke.’’

He understands a crash, and the bottleneck of people wanting to get into the event on the first fine day made things worse, but says ‘‘there has to be contingency plans in place to bypass that sort of thing and keep the traffic moving’’.

That’s why he’s advocating an out-of-town park and ride option.

‘‘There must be a lot of farmers that would happily lease out their paddocks for parking for a fee.’’

However, Fieldays chief executive Jon Calder says any inference event organisers aren’t doing everything they can to ease traffic congestion is ‘‘completely unfair’’.

‘‘We’ve been working with NZTA since last year’s event on a whole range of solutions and bus travel is just one,’’ he says.

‘‘The issue that we had last year didn’t really centre on the need for a park and ride outside of the city, it focused on the need for better information and better alternatives for people.’’

What a review of last year’s traffic troubles showed, says Calder, is that the buses have ‘‘surplus capacity’’.

Getting more people on to them from the city would help get cars off the road.

He says getting information about the free bus rides to the public has been a big focus this year.

‘‘That’s not to say that we won’t be looking at park and rides as an option for the future.

‘‘We’ll keep reviewing what happens, and of course one of the key things is reviewing what happens this year, we feed that back into our programme . . . and then look at how we can make it more efficient for next year.’’