An organised charity ‘fun run’ event held in Blackpool on Sunday 13th May has brought the Blackpool tramway into the spotlight for all the wrong reasons with some disgruntled participants venting to the local press about the interruptions to the event caused by the continuing tram service.
The 10km fun run was mainly routed along the Blackpool promenade road, which was closed to all traffic for the event’s duration. However, runners were expected to cross the tramway at Gynn Square to reach the finishing line. An inspector was stationed at this location to ensure that trams could progress safely, but this resulted in some unpleasantness as some of the runners refused to stop to allow trams to pass through, and simply carried on running into the path of oncoming trams! Worse still, alongside the Metropole Hotel many of the participants strayed onto the tram tracks despite this section of line now being segregated from road traffic, meaning that trams often had to wait at North Pier due to people running straight towards northbound trams. As well as being potentially dangerous, the situation created many delays resulting in several trams being turned short to recover lost time.
The Blackpool Gazette sadly decided to take an anti-tram viewpoint when reporting on this debacle, with the newspaper quoting some of the runners who claimed that Blackpool Transport’s attitude to the event was ‘disgraceful’ and suggesting that the tram service should have been suspended, at least in part, for the duration. This seems like an overreaction in the extreme as better organisation could have diverted the fun run so that it steered well clear of the tramway. Likewise at Talbot Square, some barriers could have been used to prevent the runners from passing over the rails which would not only have kept everyone safe but would have also ensured that passengers attempting to use the trams as a means of transportation would not have been subjected to this unwelcome disruption.
With £100 million having being invested in modernising the Blackpool tramway over the last few years, it seems ridiculous if an event such as this can be allowed to prevent Blackpool Transport from operating a tram service. The company has a duty to serve its customers, and deserve to be applauded for attempting to maintain a reasonable level of service in spite of the unreasonable actions of some fun runners who seem to have completely failed to grasp the danger that they were placing themselves in. Hopefully this will not be repeated and any future events of this type will be more professionally planned beforehand.
There seems to be trend these days where people involved in “fun runs” or charity events think that the whole community should come to a complete standstill for them. They seem to think that the fact that they are doing it for “charity” makes them more important than anybody else and this attitude needs challenging. Even worse, a member of the council commented that they need to look at whether to stop the trams in the future. Sorry, the trams are a public service and the council should not even consider suspending the service. Events like this could easily be arranged at places where public transport won’t be disrupted, (and already-struggling traders won’t lose much-needed revenue) such as x times round Stanley Park to achieve their 10k run. It was notable in the Gazette that the organisers declined to comment, obviously too ashamed of the bad press their event had received because of the “me-me-me” attitude of some of their participants.