Chaos.

[Stuart1000]

Stuart did you camp???

No, but the main issues I'm seeing are to do with day trippers - bus queues, long queues at the entrance, the arena being too small, the roads being blocked at the end of the night etc.

Friday afternoon, we got in the site within 15mins of being off the bus. Sunday morning, we were in within 30mins. Had no issues with crushes or the arena being too small. Only time we experienced poor sound was in the enclosure for Noel but moved to the side halfway through where it was crystal clear. Waited a few hours for a bus on Friday night but kinda expected that. We were only a 20min wait on Sunday night and we were home by 1am.

[Lor1]

No, but the main issues I'm seeing are to do with day trippers - bus queues, long queues at the entrance, the arena being too small, the roads being blocked at the end of the night etc.

Friday afternoon, we got in the site within 15mins of being off the bus. Sunday morning, we were in within 30mins. Had no issues with crushes or the arena being too small. Only time we experienced poor sound was in the enclosure for Noel but moved to the side halfway through where it was crystal clear. Waited a few hours for a bus on Friday night but kinda expected that. We were only a 20min wait on Sunday night and we were home by 1am.

You were probabbly home before people found there campsite mate,it was a shambles.

And Al say again what so called top festival does everything shut down so early,at least in balado you had Palm and the silent disco.

Did you not think the sound from the stages was shite?even slam?

I still had a good time cocktail cocktail was brilliant,tenents arms was...MEH.

I honestly can't see people especially campers going anywhere near strathallan next year.

It just seemed like a big fairground with a couple of stages slapped in the middle.

[Paulk2904]

You were probabbly home before people found there campsite mate,it was a shambles.

And Al say again what so called top festival does everything shut down so early,at least in balado you had Palm and the silent disco.

Did you not think the sound from the stages was shite?even slam?

I still had a good time cocktail cocktail was brilliant,tenents arms was...MEH.

I honestly can't see people especially campers going anywhere near strathallan next year.

It just seemed like a big fairground with a couple of stages slapped in the middle.

It took me over two hours to find my campsite on the Friday night. Every steward I asked had no idea either, I must have lapped the campsite twice at least looking for Red 2. The campsite was a complete maze, poorly lit, and the cartoon map was in no way close to representative of where things were.

[xtrmntr75]

The best way of getting round the traffic is park and ride. There should only be buses on the small roads, not mummy going to pick up little Harry or the like. I wasted about half an hour waiting for a bus then just decided to walk back to Auchterarder as the buses were stuck in traffic. I don't know where they could have the park and ride but there must be areas around there.

[Cammers]

Didn't really notice anything massively bad about the West exit traffic on Monday morning - but I know a lot of the chaos was day tickets / drop offs etc...

 

I think the only thing that really wound me up was Monday morning one scrawny, lonesome crack head threw a chair through my tent. Proceeded to laugh his head off, pick the chair up, throw it again and hit my girlfriend in the head. Luckily for him I was stark b@llock naked, so he got away with a good rounds of Fs and a middle finger.

 

What a top bloke.

[glendvd]

Those who are negative about any subject are those who are the most vocal. While I don't dispute that there are those that have criticised it, any one I've spoken to or seen on Facebook had a great time and are gutted it's over. Being from Auchterarder myself I was camping with 70/80 people and probably bumped into another 200/300 that I knew over the weekend. Not a single one had a bad experience, everyone loved it and will be back. Anyone I spoke to from out with Scotland that was there for the first time loved it

Well that's great to hear.  Always enjoyed myself when i was there too, loved the place.  But i just think based on things that have gone on this year, T's reputation has taken a hell of a knock and will be hard to recover from, and ticket sales may well be severely affected by this next year, that's my prediction.

[Paulk2904]

Another thing that bothered me was the fact that at least in our campsite, red 2, they hadn't even bothered to cut the grass. Putting up a tent in wet knee high grass wasn't exactly fun, grass was always cut short at Balado.

[Red Day]

Restrict parking to weekend campers at limit numbers. Set up loads of park and ride options and only allow access from Friday at say 8pm for car parks. After that buses only with buses for north at one exit and south or west from another

[found home in 2009]

there's talk in the Scottish press (who ironically harped on about the pipeline danger and how it should move) about the licence should be reviewed - i don't think that's likely to happen the licence is in place until 2017 and any festival which moves is going to have a couple of years of teething trouble (look at WOMAD's move to Malmsbury). Ellis has acknowledged it takes a couple of years to properly iron out the problems.

 

Was it really that much chaos? Or is it people going 'oh this isn't as good as it was before, therefore I'm writing it off' queues of traffic arriving and leaving festivals is nothing new.

My personal experience. The day ticket entrance was in front of a busy road. They caged loads of day trippers up in a fenced of area, presumably to manage traffic and people crossing the road. However, the queue never moved. I've heard some people say they never let anyone in till an hour or so after the music started, not certain this is true, but would explain a lot.

Eventually there was a queue all along the road people weren't meant to be crossing to get into the fenced off bit. Was hardly moving at all and the people on the road decided to tear down some of the fencing at the back and force their way into an already really over crowded fenced area. I was stick in this environment for 2 hours before I got in and missed the first 2 bands I wanted to see. It also felt bloody dangerous and that it was sheer luck nobody was seriously injured.

Less serious in my opinion, but annoying was the three main stages were connected by one corridor.Across from  King Tuts, which was the middle stage there was a cocktail bar playing dance music which was really popular. When you had to walk through this area i,e any time you wanted to go between any of the 3 main stages, it took you ages to get through this point. I've heard others say they felt endangered here, for me it was frustrating rather than dangerous, but maybe I was just lucky when I went through.

These were the 2 things that made me wonder about whether they deserved the license. Other shit things about my T experience this year have made me decide I wont be back after about 4-5 years going for the whole weekend and another 4-5 years just getting day tickets.

I'm going to mull it over as don't want to do something I'll regret, but it has crossed my mind whether I should write to the local council and tell them my experiences and that I don't think they should get a new license without changes to the lay out of the site. Why would you have the main road buses were using go through the middle of where you want people to queue to get in?

 

[AfterEight]

Gleneagles was able to handle 45000+ punters each day during the Ryder Cup on those roads with their park + ride system. I'd be very surprised if DF didn't consult the organisers of the Ryder Cup when trying to put together a traffic management plan for T, so its quite amazing how they could fuck it up so much.

 

Its pretty much laid out for them right here > http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/ryder-cup-routes-mapped-out-3284440

[eFestivals]

Gleneagles was able to handle 45000+ punters each day during the Ryder Cup on those roads with their park + ride system. I'd be very surprised if DF didn't consult the organisers of the Ryder Cup when trying to put together a traffic management plan for T, so its quite amazing how they could fuck it up so much.

 

perhaps the plan was much the same but the punters were very different?

 

There's all sorts of possibilities.

[crowie]

Restrict parking to weekend campers at limit numbers. Set up loads of park and ride options and only allow access from Friday at say 8pm for car parks. After that buses only with buses for north at one exit and south or west from another

 

Coming from near-ish the area, and having had mates who attended the Ryder Cup, I was expecting some sort of park and ride schemes to be set up. It wasn't which surprised both me and also our bus company who said they had been expecting it. Saying that they also said that communication from DF etc before the event was shocking, they struggled to get any information out of them on how traffic etc would work. I ended up sending our bus company some traffic stuff i had got off the local residents website.

 

If they want to improve things they have to be in far closer contact with the bus companies who are bringing their punters to T and not just the over priced official Citylink ones.

 

My personal experience. The day ticket entrance was in front of a busy road. They caged loads of day trippers up in a fenced of area, presumably to manage traffic and people crossing the road. However, the queue never moved. I've heard some people say they never let anyone in till an hour or so after the music started, not certain this is true, but would explain a lot.

Eventually there was a queue all along the road people weren't meant to be crossing to get into the fenced off bit. Was hardly moving at all and the people on the road decided to tear down some of the fencing at the back and force their way into an already really over crowded fenced area. I was stick in this environment for 2 hours before I got in and missed the first 2 bands I wanted to see. It also felt bloody dangerous and that it was sheer luck nobody was seriously injured.

Less serious in my opinion, but annoying was the three main stages were connected by one corridor.Across from  King Tuts, which was the middle stage there was a cocktail bar playing dance music which was really popular. When you had to walk through this area i,e any time you wanted to go between any of the 3 main stages, it took you ages to get through this point. I've heard others say they felt endangered here, for me it was frustrating rather than dangerous, but maybe I was just lucky when I went through.

These were the 2 things that made me wonder about whether they deserved the license. Other shit things about my T experience this year have made me decide I wont be back after about 4-5 years going for the whole weekend and another 4-5 years just getting day tickets.

I'm going to mull it over as don't want to do something I'll regret, but it has crossed my mind whether I should write to the local council and tell them my experiences and that I don't think they should get a new license without changes to the lay out of the site. Why would you have the main road buses were using go through the middle of where you want people to queue to get in?

 

 

 

I was there too and would imagine you were describing Saturday? We had a drink for 30 mins after arriving at 11.30. We joined the end of the queue at 12 but by 12.30 we were not moving and people disembarking buses who were just arriving were jumping in where they wanted. It descended into chaos from there. We got in just before 2 but that was mainly due to be carried along in surges at points when fences went over. I felt really sorry for the security guard at the last crash barriers before you headed down to the actual entrance/turnstyles, absolutely no colleague support, no supervisory support that I could see, a mob of hundreds in front of him in a very bad mood, it was a real rabbit in the headlights moment. Whatever he was getting, he wasn't being paid enough.

 

Sundays entry was far more controlled with far more stewarding about including some of the biggest gnarliest buggers I have seen at a festival. They controlled it well and getting in was about 20 mins tops.

 

Gleneagles was able to handle 45000+ punters each day during the Ryder Cup on those roads with their park + ride system. I'd be very surprised if DF didn't consult the organisers of the Ryder Cup when trying to put together a traffic management plan for T, so its quite amazing how they could fuck it up so much.

 

Its pretty much laid out for them right here > http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/ryder-cup-routes-mapped-out-3284440

 

Ignoring the lack of park and ride facilities, they are quite different audiences however. 

 

One of the reasons I can possibly see is that it would be DF's expense to hire and put on all the shuttle buses from the P&R sites to the venue and I don't think thats a cost they fancy baring.

[Paulk2904]

Ignoring the lack of park and ride facilities, they are quite different audiences however. 

 

One of the reasons I can possibly see is that it would be DF's expense to hire and put on all the shuttle buses from the P&R sites to the venue and I don't think thats a cost they fancy baring.

Yup, I think DF would sooner move site than do park and rides.

[eFestivals]

Yup, I think DF would sooner move site than do park and rides.

 

that of course would be dependent on there being another better site available to them.

 

Which, it seems likely, there wasn't when they decided to use this new site.

 

And a new site would have all of the same new learning curve, starting from zero - and so there'd be a decent chance of similar cock-ups to this year.

 

If it was all as easy as you make it sound they'd already be doing it.

[Red Day]

Neil, the access roads around the site are no fit for purpose.  You used Glasto as an example and I agree there are country roads there but there's more than one. Traffic from different directions access the site from a variety of roads whereas with T it seemed to be one way in and out.  

[AfterEight]

perhaps the plan was much the same but the punters were very different?

 

There's all sorts of possibilities.

Absolutely, the punters are VERY different i appreciate that. But the day trippers definitely got the worst of it and i do think that a park + ride would help those people out. Rather than buses just coming in from here, there and everywhere. It won't work for campers because trying to get 50000 people all pissed up with a load of camping gear on shuttles would just create more problems.

 

The biggest mistake they made though was simply communication. For the Ryder Cup the travel plans were everywhere. It was all over local news, television, papers etc. That Daily Record article is just one example of that. I even received a travel guide with my ticket. It was very clear what was going on. For T the only info i heard of was " don't use your sat nav, follow the signs" lol.

[cobaltstargazer]

i had a conversation with a guy from Bell Ingram late last year or early this year. I use them as my land agents, i got speaking to one of there guys and said to him i see your company are doing the drawings for T in the park (meaning strathallan), his answer was yes its a big job moving the pipeline!.

Now i didnt push it as my boss was with us but make of that what you will.

[Paulk2904]

that of course would be dependent on there being another better site available to them.

 

Which, it seems likely, there wasn't when they decided to use this new site.

 

And a new site would have all of the same new learning curve, starting from zero - and so there'd be a decent chance of similar cock-ups to this year.

 

If it was all as easy as you make it sound they'd already be doing it.

Of course new sites would have the same learning curve but this site is simply not up to it. It's fundamentally flawed in so many areas such as size, infrastructure, topography, and those fucking birds.

There are too many constraints with the site and I think DF has put the biggest one of all on itself with its insistence to hold the festival in the Perth and Kinross region. I understand why they do it due to its central location between the major population centres but Scotland has got plenty of space around the country where I'm sure they could hold a festival, and hold it within reach of some more appropriate infrastructure.

[Matt42]

Really won't be surprised if this is the last ever T in The Park.

[KeithDelBasso]

I had a great weekend. Not one of the better ones I've been to but still, an amazing weekend. Loved the lineup this year too, loads of people I wanted to see.

 

We arrived Thursday night about 6.30pm and there was no queues, left Monday morning and our bus was about 15 minutes late arriving due to another bus breaking down - not a problem.

The only problem for me was the campsite. Despite seemingly having a lack of camping spaces, the sheer size of the campsite was enormous. We were camped in Blue 4 and had friends camped in Red. It was a 20/25 minute walk every time we wanted to go see them. The walk from Blue 4 to the Radio 1 stage was absolutely ludicrous. Ended up taking us 45 minutes on Sunday afternoon and made me miss half of Wolf Alice's set.

 

Phone charging points being in the campsite village was dreadful. Another long walk and only being allowed two hours per day charge despite paying £20 for an unlimited pass. I only ended up using it once because I couldn't be assed walking all the way down.

 

Definitely the oldest I've ever felt at a festival, despite only being 24. We were camped next to a bunch of 16/17/18 year olds from Elgin, but they ended up being a great laugh.

 

Not surprised with the negativity as it's like that all year round on here. Always a downside to Christmas with some of the people on this forum.

[devilman]

Elgin loons are the best min! Good job it wasn't happening now, this isn't a million miles away.

 

http://youtu.be/P7lJ9u8Qhi4

[Ahthing]

Paulk2904 you've been spot on with every post.

 

First thing i noticed when i arrived was the huge un-cut grass - summed up the whole prep of this year for me. 

 

One way roads to a 60K+ festival just doesn't happen. And i don't mean city one-way roads either - ones full of potholes and cracks which can't handle bus after bus for days and even weeks with the workers etc. 

 

The one-way roads go on for a good mile or two so it's not like its just a road here or there like you've said Glasto have, Neil. 

 

I personally think if they don't move the site or MASSIVELY re-assure the general public then they won't get the sales for it to go ahead (depending on how cheap they book acts). 

[eFestivals]

First thing i noticed when i arrived was the huge un-cut grass - summed up the whole prep of this year for me.

Whoooa!

I suspect that was left uncut as an anti-mud measure.

(it's perhaps not very effective, but that's something else)

I know for certain that Glastonbury leave their grass deliberately long just for that reason, because I once asked if I could get a patch cut for a charity footie match.

I don't know for certain, but I'd guess that's the advice they give in 'the pop code' (the festie organisers manual).

[The Man with a Plan]

If they are staying at Strathallan then they might as-well just call it a day. With much better festivals down in England and in Europe why should we compromise and wait for them to sort it out. For the price of the festival combined such a small line up, lack of nightlife and stages, paying extra for the set times then why shouldn't we all go elsewhere. 

 

They are also trying to get more money out of us at all points then why should there be a feeling of loyalty when they see you all as "cash cows".

Edited July 17, 2015 by The Man with a Plan

[Matt42]

Whoooa!

I suspect that was left uncut as an anti-mud measure.

(it's perhaps not very effective, but that's something else)

I know for certain that Glastonbury leave their grass deliberately long just for that reason, because I once asked if I could get a patch cut for a charity footie match.

I don't know for certain, but I'd guess that's the advice they give in 'the pop code' (the festie organisers manual).

 

Yeah the grass in oxylers was sooo long when we first arrived!

 

But then.. two days into the festival and it's all stamped down.