Olympian preparations as Blighty takes it for Team GB

You don’t throw a party for friends you’re trying to impress by getting a couple of boxes of plonk and a few six packs of beer, and inviting them round to an untidy house. You’ll spend days of preparation and go through real discomfort and expense to throw the party. So the UK has been doing ahead of its big party at next year’s Olympic Games.

As Sydney knows well, the Olympics don’t just mean throwing up a couple of stadiums and letting the world coo over the city for 2 weeks. There’s a lot more to it than that. Over the last 18 months, venue towns and cities for the London 2012 Games have gone through privations that have turned many locals against them.

Wild estimates have been made as to how much revenue will come in as a result – in the sailing events town Weymouth, tourism on an ordinary year will bring in US $150 million. A government department projected that over the week, the Olympics will generate nearly US $2 BILLION. Locals cower in fear at such figures, as the roads network can barely handle the mid summer rush as it is – let alone something over 10 times the normal influx of visitors.

Such projections have panicked councils into completely refurbishing the traffic systems. Weymouth has been in gridlock for 12 months as the council spent tens of millions of dollars ripping out the roundabouts at key junctions, and flying in the face of common transport knowledge by replacing the roundabouts with a traffic light control system. The UK government’s own Traffic Research Laboratory says that roundabouts are the way to go, and traffic lights are an outdated traffic control system – even the US is installing roundabouts to improve traffic flow!

Two outcomes have resulted from this – firstly that to the casual observer, the new traffic system creaks under the strain of the tourist spate just as much as the old system. A member of the public made a Freedom of Information Act request to find out just how much the system had improved? The council responded by effectively stating that they hadn’t done a traffic flow audit before and after the new system was put in!

Directly affected businesses have the right to demand a local business tax rebate. Unfortunately the atmosphere is so bad between locals and the council that they seriously believe that the council will argue the toss and blame a combination of severe weather and the recession for the business losses. One would believe that in a democratic country such councillors would be out of a job at the next election? There was an election in May this year and most of the same old faces are back …

There are two types of opinion polls. The ordinary man's poll where you ask everyone you meet what they think of something, and a targeted, expensive opinion poll run by someone like MORI. MORI show that 75% of the public are fully in support of the primping and preening our towns and cities are going through for the Games. In that case, over the last 12 months I would have found myself in an argument with someone about the benefits of the Games who is not part of the 1/7^th of the local economy set to benefit? My ordinary man's opinion poll has yet to find anyone who think the stress and delays worth our week in the sun, who will not get an increased income from the Games. That would suggest the MORI polls are wildly inaccurate – from what I have seen, something around 86% are against the games coming to town.