London 2012 Olympics travel advice on roads, rail and Tube

Sunday, January 8, 2012
3:57 PM

Organising transport to deal with the 2012 London Olympics is Britain’s largest peace-time logistical exercise.

Transport chiefs and Games’ organisers will have to deal with nine million Olympic Games’ spectators as well as two million spectators for the Paralympic Games.

Then there are nearly 300,000 athletes, officials, media and others connected to the Games to take into account.

The Games are being held during the school summer holidays and organisers are counting on the fact that roads, rail and Tube will be quieter than normal.

But even so a number of mainline and Underground stations will become very crowded at certain times, with passengers possibly having to wait longer than 30 minutes to get on trains at the busiest moments.

Among stations expected to be very crowded are London Bridge, Canary Wharf in London Docklands and Bond Street in the West End.

Docklands Light Railway station Pudding Mill Lane, which is the next stop to the Olympic venue of Stratford, will be shut during the Olympics.

On the roads, the Olympic Route Network (ORN) - which includes the so-called Games Lanes - will help speed all those involved in the Olympics, the Games family, to and from events.

Just as there will be no engineering work on main linerail and Underground services during the Games, there will be no planned roadworks on ORN roads, or on most A and B roads in London during the Olympics.

There will be 30 miles of Games Lanes in London, with organisers pointing out that this represents just 0.3 per cent of the capital’s road network.

In the run-up to the start of the Games on July 27, the public and businesses will be given a welter of information about just what the Games will mean for transport and how best to plan their journeys.

“People need to think carefully about when they travel,” said Mark Evers, Transport for London’s (TfL) Games transport director.

He went on: “Yes, some stations could get very crowded. But while Oxford Circus Tube station, say, could be busy, people could choose to walk, for example, to Covent Garden station which should be much quieter.

“We’re expecting London Bridge station to get fairly busy at times during the Olympics. But passengers could instead choose to take a five-minute walk across the Thames and catch a train at Monument station on the Underground.”

TfL is publishing details online on just how much longer some journeys could take during the Games.

There will also be warnings about avoiding air travel on Monday August 13 and Tuesday August 14 - the first two days after the ending of the Games when the vast majority of the Games family heads home.

Heathrow Airport in particular is expected to be extremely crowded on these days.

TfL pointed out that it has experience of coping with major events such as the London Marathon, royal weddings, the Tour de France and Wembley Stadium events - although nothing on the scale of the Olympics.

They can also point to the fact that with the Olympic main site in Stratford having good transport connections, there is no over-reliance on a particular transport mode.

As well as reaching Stratford by bus and Tube and by DLR, spectators have the chance to use high-speed Javelin trains that will whisk them from St Pancras station in London to the Olympic site in just seven minutes.