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New Everton Stadium


Gardocki said:
The fact that our season tickets have been probably underpriced for so long, the new stadium bounce and the fact that we haven't doubled our capacity like West Ham should really see a decent uplift in ticket prices across the board. I don't want to dismiss the financial pressures people are under, but tickets to Goodison are pretty cheap when compared to the market. There's also the fact that the restricted view seats don't have to be discounted.

It will also bring in the tourist dollars. I'm a 'plastic' foreign fan and haven't been in a while as I've been stuck behind pillars in the lower Bullens for the last couple of visits. It wasn't a great experience. Given the overall costs of the trips, I'm going to wait till BMD is open before going again. As I've only been to Goodison 15-20 times I don't have the degree of emotional attachment to Goodison that a local fan would have so I don't feel the pressing need to travel again before it closes.
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I regularly have spare tkts. If you want to have a final unobstructed view of GP, let me know.
 

SingBlue said:
I worked on the appraisal of a number of schemes - Nottingham (marginal in my view, but had private sector funding so got the nod); South Hampshire (Portsmouth-Gosport-Fareham) had one of the strongest cases, but got kicked out, even after they funded £26m for bus priority for the A3, which was part of the same integrated project! Also worked on 4 major transit schemes in London - only one of which in a very diluted form was built.

Leeds had too much local opposition - including from the academic community. Sheffield's tram, with the cost over-runs, was probably the death knell for a lot of schemes - including Merseytravel's. Also I don't think there was unified agreement amongst the Merseyside authorities on alignments etc. Merseytravel wanted it to go where it could act as a catalyst, whereas other agencies wanted a very centre-based tourist-focused service.

I may have worked for that company that had "little or no experience in tram system design". If it was them, they had a fair bit, but also had done stadium redevelopment / access work. They would never have done detailed design / architectural etc. though.

Access / egress to/from stadia is vital (and I know you've forgotten more about this than I'll ever know) - Goodison has a half decent public transport service, but from memory we have (had?) one of the highest rates of walk-ups amongst top flight teams. I hope with the space at BMD they offer a compelling pre/post match F&B offer both to help stagger arrival/dispersal, but also to maximise secondary revenue. I believe Brighton's away end is lit in the colours of the visiting team in the concourse, and they even get local real ale on draft - which they sell. (Dunno if they still do that now they're top flight, but they certainly used to).

Although I haven't worked in UK for nigh on 20 years, I did used to go to a lot of games, and when I lived in London / SE, a lot of aways. One of the worst grounds for access in my view was our National Stadium - Wembley. Although not been since it was rebuilt, I can't imagine things have improved massively.
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I worked on some small mods for Sheffield, Metrolink expansion, Nottingham and as mentioned, the Merseytram proposals. I've always thought that Trams looked the part and certainly have their application, but that they've been very much a mixed bag in terms of delivery/performance. They can be like a fish out of water on city centre or suburban streets if adequate segregation isn't provided or if convoluted/restricted routes are chosen..... and as a result cost:benefits have varied substantially (even varied substantially on different lines of the same network). I think the Lime Line (trackless tram) proposals could better suite our city and greatly improve BMD's accessibility too.

Our particular office was mainly involved with overhead line design, but the company as a whole also did track, stations, transport-planning etc for various heavy and light rail and other transport infrastructure projects worldwide and were comfortably the biggest player in that sector in the UK.

I did the basic mechanical design work and pantograph dynamic modelling for our bids on both Nottingham and Merseytram. The major difference for us was that there was obviously far more local knowledge regards Merseytram. Every street name on every layout drawing was familiar to us. We also co-ordinated all our work very closely with Merseytravel and had access to much of their archived data and research etc. So every aspect was scrutinised to a far greater depth than normal. It was only notionally a "bid" for Merseytram, as it was essentally a one-horse race, and we wanted to make it our best tram job ever. If I remember rightly, almost straight away there were various technical issues and reservations regarding the proposals and even the choice of route for line one. I think discussions about amendments/alterations to the scheme went back and forth for over a year, at which point we had to eventually withdraw. I can't remember the precise chronology or reasons now, but it had never happened before on any other tram job we had been involved with.

As regards access/egress to stadia, I'm certainly not an expert. I began to look into it in far more depth during the Destination Kirkby debacle, which was just after I'd left railway engineering to return to Marine Engineering. I already had some local knowledge, as I had worked in Kirkby for a few years and had obviously been involved in Merseytram too. I also knew a few transport planners who had been involved indirectly with knowsley and the stadium scheme..... and after several discussions the various transport issues became even more glaring. Obviously, that whole aspect of the project eventually descended into farce, to the point where it was literally laughed out of the publically inquiry.

During that whole process, KEIOC were looking at GP and the alternative sites as best they could. Because of my background and connections, I asked a former colleague to look at central Docks and the Loop. He had access to all the local transport data and was able to do a basic model of the sites to assess their natural rates of dispersal, as well as measures to improve that. He had done similar elsewhere.

Wembley is a bit of a one-off. Some of its deficiencies are accepted to a degree because every game there is a "special occasion".... and we generally accept more inconvenience for those one-off occasions that we couldn't possibly afford to miss. There is also the "familiarity" aspect, whereby most attendees have little local knowledge or time-honoured routine and hence some chaos often ensues as a result. That said, I think most Spurs fans were reasonably satisfied with their arrangements there. For me it's always been either a stop-over or the old fashioned footy specials for the Wembley excursions.... (but that's all getting to be a very distant memory tbh).
 

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