Dorset County Council leader and transport spokesman Angus Campbell tells the Echo why he thinks the disruption caused by the Weymouth Transport Package was worthwhile and how he thinks negotiation with Olympic organisers to scrap the park and ride fee turned the tide for the borough during the Games.

  • Were the delays caused by the Weymouth Transport Package worthwhile, considering the amount of frustration it caused?
  • I’m convinced that we wouldn’t have got the Weymouth Relief Road if it wasn’t for the fact that the Olympics were coming.

The Weymouth Transport Package was 20 years of improvement jumped on with encouragement by the utilities companies because we were digging up the roads anyway.

That made it even worse probably.

Doing 20 years of improvements in one year is bound to be hugely disruptive.

I think 20 years of improvement in the transport system in one year should be a good thing.

  • One of the last minute changes during the Olympics was to drop the park and ride charge for the Monkey’s Jump site. How did that come about?

We had to discuss it with the Olympic Delivery Authority and the Highways Agency.

It was everyone working together.

They played ball.

They really started loosening up when they realised that we weren’t going to have huge problems and the place wasn’t going to close down which was something they were worried about.

By August 1 things started moving in the right direction.

  • Was it Dorset County Council pushing for it to be free?
  • That was our stance and I don’t want to let anyone else down with these statements as it’s all about working together, but we were on the spot to loosen that up. If we hadn’t done anything it probably wouldn’t have happened.

Our job was to read the situation on the ground.

Our concern was to make sure the local economy gets as good a kick out of it as it can.

  • One thing that struck many people was how quiet the roads were.

Many were preparing for all hell to break loose but they found that coming into work and going home the roads were quieter than ever before.

Was that the intended result?

  • There were times when there was a bit of congestion but there weren’t many issues.

When there were accidents, we had all these people there teed up absolutely keen to deal with things. It was all dealt with smoothly and quickly, which was the intention.

Peak times of travel were different so you didn’t see the usual traffic build-up.

  • In hindsight, would you have done things differently to prevent the quiet lull at the beginning of the Olympics?
  •  I might have wished it to be fractionally different but the fact is we didn’t know how many people were going to turn up on the day.

There were areas of advertising I wouldn’t have used.

The big whole page advert of roads being blocked.

By the first Wednesday, with the media and everyone else, we were able to control things.

If people had come to Weymouth and been miserable because of the traffic, what would that have said for the tourism industry?

I think it was done exactly right really and in sequence and I think we reacted very quickly at a time when there were always going to be fewer people coming in as we’d just got going.