Bars struggle to cope with crowds

Hornby is struggling to cope with crowds of partygoers, businesses say.

Snafu Bar and Restaurant owner Ian Edwards said the suburbs were not equipped to cope with crowds in the same way the central city could.

‘‘It’s the same problem that they used to have in town, but it was less of a problem because all the police and services were in one place. Now they’re spread out all over the city,’’ he said.

Problems had arisen when people left the bar and had no way of getting home, Edwards said. There had been an alleged assault on four women by up to 10 men.

‘‘When the bar closes there are about 250 people suddenly all on the road and they have no way of going anywhere, apart from the people who drive,’’ he said.

‘‘There are no buses that run out there and taxi drivers refuse to come out to Hornby.

‘‘Often these people are just standing around for several hours. The population is going to keep increasing and I think they really need to look at what can be done to the infrastructure before that happens.’’

Edwards thought problems arose from people from different sides of town mixing. ‘‘There is a bit of an east meets west, north meets south feeling. These are people who wouldn’t usually have interacted being thrown all in together.’’

Hub Hornby centre manager Jason Marsden said that although the number of bars in the area had halved over the past five years, there was often a queue of up to 30 metres to get into the bars at weekends.

The mall was looking at fencing its car park because of problems with drunks.

‘‘People are parking up their cars in our car park in the very early hours of the morning after the centre has shut. Fencing off the car park at night could stop that.’’