SEPT 5th 2008
 Commuters arriving at Liverpool's Lime Street Station were greeted by a 50ft (15m) high mechanical spider clinging to a nearby redundant office block. The 37-tonne beast heralded the start of a five-day piece of street theatre as part of the Capital of Culture year.
Built by French company La Machine, which in 2006 brought the streets of London to a standstill with the Sultan's Elephant, the spider descended from its current position on the side of Concourse House and moved to the city's new arena, before eventually coming to life later on the Friday after which it began its 3 day exploration of the city.
Liverpool Culture Company artistic director Phil Redmond hailed the show as "fantastic." The creature stopped the city in its tracks and captured the hearts of Liverpudlians and visitors alike." He added that the planning for the event had taken a full year and involved 350 people.
Lancashire based A1 Traffic Management Ltd played a crucial role in the events success. Charged with the task of event traffic management from the embryonic stage through to site clearance afterwards, they worked closely with the City Of Liverpool and other joint agency partners with the goal of handling a major 5 day event that called for a large number of road closures, parking suspensions, loss of taxi ranks, restrictions for local businesses and car parks, without being able to tell people what it was all about!
A1 Traffic Management Ltd Managing Director Mr Simon Gilford said, "In all we produced 147 separate Standard and Relaxed type drawings ranging from traffic management layouts to traffic stewarding points.
"The actual implementation of the works started on the Friday night and this involved switches to the traffic management every 3 hours including the closure of some roads and the reopening of others, on the Saturday we had no less than 46 separate road closures in place over the City including the closure of the Strand, this being one of the major roads within the City. We also had 2 teams on stand by to close down other roads should crowd numbers increase beyond a safe level.
"In total we had 22 traffic management operatives involved over the course of the event, including a management team in the event control room. In all our years of traffic management ranging from motorway widening schemes through to massive city centre projects this has to be the biggest scheme we have ever been involved with.
 "There is no doubt in my mind we would not have been able to meet the very tight time line in designing all of the drawings without the use of CONE. We have in the past used other traffic management software, but I have to say CONE is by far the easiest to use and produces the best results.
As part of this project we purchased a additional CONE licence for a new team member who had never used the software before, yet in less than 2 days he was producing top quality drawings.
"When I worked on the building of the M65, I personally created a large number of traffic management drawings by hand, these drawings used to take on average 3 to 4 days to complete. I can now draw up the same type of drawings in hours, now to me that speaks for itself.
Without CONE software we would not be able to offer our Clients a super fast design time."
Commenting on the role played by A1 Traffic Management Ltd, Mr Andy Barr - Team Leader - Liverpool City Council Traffic Management said,
"What most people don't realise about staging and delivering such a fantastic event is the months of planning and sheer hard work that goes on behind the scenes. The professionalism shown by you throughout the whole joint agency process was exemplary and the quality of the traffic management drawings that you developed are the best that I have seen and made it easy for everyone to understand what was happening and when." |
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