Car Parking

Received this email in reply to mine sent yesterday.

Many thanks for taking the time and trouble to contact us regarding the Hop Farm concert on Sunday 6 July. We are endeavouring to respond to all issues rising from this weekends events and hopefully explain to you the circumstances and the systems put in place in an attempt to ease the traffic congestion after the concert.

As is the case with any event with up to 30,000 attendees in a semi rural location it is inevitable that there will be a high volume of traffic wishing to park on site in order to make attending as easy as possible. We anticipated this demand by providing free parking for up to 12,000 vehicles. It is our estimation that in the region of 9 ,000 cars were successfully parked on site. In order to accommodate the predicted number of vehicles an additional access gate was created and a combination of pedestrian and vehicle bridges were installed over streams and ditches within the site.


It has been confirmed by our Traffic Management team that it took three hours and seven minutes to clear the car parks on site on the Sunday evening - seven minutes over our goal of 3 hours. This means that we were able to move in the region of 1000 cars an hour through each of our three exits from the site, along with numerous buses, coaches and taxis - all by 2.07am. Whilst this may appear to be a long period of time, it is comparable to the exit times for a great many similar types of events at other venues.


It was recognised in advance that the location of the Hop Farm site could possibly result in delays with regard to attendees in their quest to return home as quickly as possible after the event . With this in mind we worked very closely with the Local Authority and Kent Police Traffic Division to develope a robust traffic management plan and we feel that our advance planning in closing the A228 road to public traffic, the creation of extra exits and utilisation of Traffic Police enabled us to keep the traffic flowing on the main road and allowed us to empty the car parks within an acceptable period of time. We did experience some unpleasant scenes in the car parks and several members of staff were assaulted. This resulted in our having to temporarily withdraw the marshalls prior to re-assigning them in a monitoring and reporting role. However, we have taken on board comments that we have received about the apparant lack of marshalls within the car parks themselves, the apparant failure of the designated traffic lanes leading to the exit routes, lack of information and toilet facilities in the car parks themselves and these will be considered further with regard to any future events on this site.


We are disappointed if the car park egress caused frustration for our guests and had a detrimental effect on anyone's enjoyment of what has been widely acclaimed as a hugely successful event and take complaints very seriously. Hopefully the above allows you to see the effort that was put into attempting to make the exit from site as painless as possible and we will, of course, be looking to learn, build and improve our systems and operations in the future.


Kind regards

Dick Tee

Operations Director on behalf of The Complete Kent Festival Ltd

DICK TEE

web: www.dicktee.com