Tall Ship Obstacle Course.

The Tall Ships event was a big draw in Belfast, the people of the city welcomed the ships and crews with open arms, and everyone seemed to have had a good experience.
However, the city planners and Tall Ship committee did not plan very well. There were numerous problems. The locations chosen on the north shore of the Lagan for example, was too small for the expected crowds, that with the addition of fun park rides - which took up valuable walking space and ate up real estate that could have accommodated the food stalls and ah-herm "refreshment" tents. As it turned out, Clarendon Dock was a bad choice. The stalls and beer tents were crammed into a small and crowded space, which created bottlenecks as visitors collided while being funnelled into narrow lanes with the stalls on either side.
Security was good, well organised and the staff were polite but firm when necessary but their was a shortage of crowd barriers with gaps being filled in with red and white warning tape or makeshift wire obstacles.
All along the quayside generators-to supply the boats with electricity-caused more obstacles to visitors and obscured otherwise good photo op. locations. People had to snake around these blockages, which could have been located further from the ships’ moorings. It then would have been a case of running cable connections to the ships, but these additional measures would have incurred more spending and the organisers opted out of this solution, leading to more bottlenecks.
Then there was the transport frustration that plagued the event from start to finish when not enough trains were made available on the first day while the local bus situation only continued to worsen as the occasion progressed and private bus companies were recruited into the battle.
On a separate note, this does not bode well for the eco warriors who along with Translink, Northern Ireland’s public transport company, who have been imploring and trying to embarrass commuters to leave their cars behind and to embrace public transport to help save the planet. (Huh)?. This event has put to rest that notion, when, Northern Ireland’s infrastructure could not cope with a major demand for public transport.