Transport for London 2012

The Mayor of London’s call for IOC members to “take the Tube” during the Olympics is likely to hit a brick wall for a number of reasons. Not least, the Mayor appears to have overlooked the obligation of the organizing committee, laid out in the host city contract, to

… provide a safe, reliable and efficient system of transport, free of charge, for the following accredited persons: competitors, team officials and other team personnel, technical officials, media, sponsors/suppliers/licensees, Games-related workforce and other persons, as designated by the IOC (Section 20, Host City Contract, Games of the XXX Olympiad in 2012, p. 11, my italics).

Given that organizers already have lined up a fleet of 1,500 coaches and 4,000 BMWs cars and motorbikes to transport the Olymic family through the ‘Olympic Route Network’ this seems little more than rhetoric from the Mayor. Indeed, convincing competitors and the Olympic family to use public transport is a hard task given the hard lessons learned at the Atlanta 1996 Olympics, when competitors and media were badly by overload of the transit system combined with inexperienced bus drivers.