Without a successful Commonwealth games bid, there was probably only ever going to be minimal public infrastructure investment for this project. Without that, It was always going to be difficult to attract major investment for a once a fortnight sports venue from local or national government, unless you could somehow mobilise massive local and national political support at that time (Let's face it, much of this was happening when Joe was going cap in hand to secure a special-funding vehicle for the project as a whole, so who knows where infrastructure fell in those priorities at the time). This applies to any new stadium project, hence the reason why Spurs and Arsenal had to fund much of theirs on their own. Plus remember, Spurs stayed on their existing site and Arsenal only moved a few hundred metres, so established infrastructure (and match day travel routines) were already in place and very much known quantities.
The result was the vacuous, box-ticking transport strategy that accompanied the planning application, prompting far more questions than it answered. It pretty much openly admitted the poor public transport provision on site.... while simultaneously demanding that far more people would have to leave their cars at home than do at present, at a smaller capacity stadium. The only "get out of jail card" has always been the walking distance to town.... the public transport nirvana that handles multiples of the stadium's capacity every Saturday and every rush hr. Tbh, this argument has only been reinforced many times on these pages, with people quoting their best speed-walking times from various key locations, and there was very little clamour before the first test event exposed the obvious issues, more so the second one. Neither events anywhere near a capacity stress test.
Tellingly, both Rotheram and the club have presented a united front, declaring the 2nd test event "a great success". Obviously, they are desperate to get the safety certification across the line. They're probably hoping for funding from the likes of the Euros/Ashes to provide more infrastructure and the arrival of the Gliders in 2028 to act as a better city-centre-connecting people-mover. With the longer term intention being that beyond that period, the whole Liverpool Waters/Ten Streets and other associated developments will prompt much more permanent infrastructure solutions nearby. In the meantime there are lots of glaringly obvious lessons to be learnt and acted upon.... but I do think that there may be some relatively easy quick-fix solutions for in the shorter term too.
