London Underground are apparently considering running the tube around the clock for the duration of the Olympics in order to cope with the expected influx of visitors. How is this going to help? How will we persuade these visitors to sensibly stagger their travel plans to make use of all of these extra hours?
We could, I suppose, hold all of the events late at night and time them so that they finish between 1.00 am and 6.00am in the morning, thereby forcing these visitors to travel at the dead of night, when the trains are completely empty.
Or better still, we could simply lock them into the venue, feeding them out into the underground at a steady and regulated rate. Thereby ensuring that the tube doesn’t rattle through the night like the world's least popular and least demanding ghost train.
Or, we could just put up our hands and a say sorry, we’ve made a mistake, we don’t really want the games at all. This last option, although the most sensible, is also the least likely!
In reality, the Games should have gone to Paris in the first place. I’m sure that the average Parisian would have loved the disruption, the crowds, the closed roads and the overloaded transport systems. The added bonus for Londoners would be that they would be paying for all of this for the rest of their lives instead of us!
Of course, some people actually like the Olympics. I'm not one of those people (surprise!) but for the record I would like to wish our athletes every success, we all hope that they will rise to the occasion and that they will be rewarded with fistfulls of medals, especially those nice golden ones, but personally I also expect outstanding results from those responsible for managing the finances and the logistics of the whole affair.
If it ever came down to betting on our gold medal successes versus a financial and logistical triumph, I think that my money would be firmly on the athletes!
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