Parking Limited to 1% of Attendance
London, England--About 12 million
visitors are expected at the $1.2 billion Millennium Dome exposition and entertainment
complex in the London borough of Greenwich during the year 2000.
To make sure that all the visitors except persons with
disabilities arrive by public transport--a condition imposed on the New Millennium
Experience Company managing the event--a series of unprecedented steps has been mandated.
Restricting parking spaces outside the Dome to persons
with disabilities, just 1 percent of the anticipated total attendance, is one of these
measures. (In comparable European attractions, such as Disneyland Paris and recent World
Expos in Spain and Portugal, more than a third of the visitors arrived by car. In the
U.S., of course, that total is much higher still.)
To achieve the goal of giving public transit absolute
priority, NMEC will be selling combined admission and Underground tickets on the new
Jubilee Line that connects directly with the Dome site. According to company projections,
35 percent of the visitors will come via the Jubilee Line.
For the rest, the following projections have been
announced: 28 percent will travel by shuttle buses from remote park-and-ride lots; 17
percent by bus; 7 percent by "riverbus" boats; 5 percent by taxi; 5 percent by a
new link to be established with a busway linking the rail station at nearby Charlton with
the Millennium Dome site; and 2 percent via a cable car linking the Dockhands Light
Railway East India Station on the north bank of the Thames with the Dome on the south
bank.
The remaining 1 percent of visitors will come to the site
directly by car to claim the spaces for persons with disabilities, or on foot or bike.
(Your editor wonders how such exact projections can be made and whether they will accord
with the real world.)
The combined admissions and Underground tickets will be
sold by more than 25,000 National Lottery outlets and terminals located throughout the
country. The majority of the British population lives within two miles of lottery outlets
that are connected to a central computer, with the network handling more than 90 million
lottery transactions a week.
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