Dougie Belladrum Interview

  • last year
Transcript
00:00 I'm here with Dougie Brown, the organiser of Belladrome.
00:04 Yesterday, there was a lot of people stuck in traffic.
00:07 Do you know what caused that?
00:10 We're still going to do a proper full debrief of what happened.
00:13 It was a mixture of factors, people arriving exceptionally early,
00:17 which meant staff couldn't get on site because the road was already blocked.
00:20 Unfortunately, people weren't agreeing to move,
00:23 so it took a while to get the staff in and then get the site fully operational.
00:27 The weather didn't help, people were getting quite wet.
00:30 There were a few delays there.
00:32 We were one of those things where we had to just let it run its course and get people in.
00:37 Unfortunately, there wasn't a great deal we could do once the queue had gone,
00:40 apart from staff trying to get people in as quickly as possible.
00:43 But we're all in now, and today's got a completely different story on the roads.
00:47 Obviously, a lot of locals who weren't coming to Belladrome were stuck in that traffic yesterday too.
00:51 Is there anything you've got to say to them?
00:53 Definitely. That's the last thing any of us want to do.
00:56 We want the festival to cause gridlock out on the roads.
00:59 We've been very fortunate over the last few years, it's run a lot smoother.
01:03 It's one of those unfortunate things that happen.
01:05 It's something that we're going to fully look into, along with the police and traffic.
01:10 We're going to look into trying to make sure that doesn't ever happen again.
01:13 What about people coming in tomorrow to the festival or tonight?
01:17 Are you expecting the same again?
01:19 Not at all. The ads for Belladrome, the majority of our audience camp on site.
01:23 Everyone's here. The roads have been pretty much seamless today.
01:27 It's slowed down slightly as you come into the festival site, but that's nothing out of the ordinary at all.
01:32 Have you had more cars at all?
01:35 We have had more cars. That's something that we've looked at.
01:37 Interestingly, the ratio of people per car has gone down this year.
01:41 There's less people per car, which means more cars on the road.
01:44 That's something that we need to look into, about why the reasons that was.
01:48 We'll talk about this for weeks, about ways to improve that next year.
01:53 Whether we can encourage more car sheds, so cars are coming more full on site.
01:56 There's not as many cars with only one or two people in them.
01:59 I think there's lots that we need to be fair that we'll be looking at in the coming weeks.
02:02 Can you promise people on their way home as well that the system will be in place for them and not be stuck in the queues?
02:07 Obviously, going home, there's still a lot of people to get off the site.
02:09 The reality is that traffic will be slow.
02:12 What we hope is that it will be a constant flow of slow moving traffic leaving the site from early Sunday morning.