Tramlines Festival’s 2024 event played host to approximately 50,000 music fans in Hillsborough Park, in Sheffield, UK. Their management team, Method, utilised Chronosoft’s Chronicler platform as the festival’s full-spectrum command and control solution. Each year, Tramlines faces a common challenge within the urban festival space: funnelling those thousands of attendees through the public roads surrounding the site towards the nearby transport hubs when they’re arriving and departing the event. Ensuring the safe movement of these crowds while minimising the impact on local residents and businesses is absolutely critical for Method. With Chronicler’s advanced mapping solutions, the Method team was able to modernise their traffic management operations from being paper- and radio-based to wholly digital, achieving that key balance between attendee safety and community considerations.
The Challenge
Tramlines Festival’s urban location presents a complex traffic management challenge for Method. The need to manage large crowds as they egress the venue requires temporary road closures and traffic diversions to ensure pedestrian safety – which also impacts local residents and businesses. Historically, controllers managed traffic flow using a combination of paper maps and disparate data sources, making it difficult to efficiently collate information in real time to inform decision making.
Chronosoft’s Solution
The rich mapping capabilities provided by Chronosoft’s Chronicler incident management system collated all critical traffic and event information into a single visual representation, accessible by any Method staff who need it in real time. Detailed CAD road closure drawings from the event plans were composited into a unified overlay on the local area map. This enabled controllers to quickly toggle road closures on and off, giving them an immediate, clear view of active routes. The platform integrated these overlays with rich base maps and live traffic feeds, so controllers could make informed decisions from a single, consolidated view rather than flipping between multiple sources.
Additionally, Chronicler’s map views provided contextual overlays that showed local bus and cycle routes, ensuring that essential public transport services were considered during decision-making. This approach demonstrated the power of integrating multiple data sets into a cohesive visual representation, enabling Tramlines’ traffic controllers to respond rapidly and effectively while minimising disruptions to the surrounding community.
Results
The deployment of Chronicler and its mapping solutions had a significant impact on the success of the festival’s traffic management strategy. The ability to visualise road closures, live traffic conditions, and public transport routes within a single, consolidated view empowered the event control team to make quicker, more informed decisions. Chrissie Gilbert, the Tramlines event controller for Method, expressed her satisfaction with the system, noting that it greatly simplified the decision-making process and improved overall safety for attendees. The success of this integration showcased Chronicler’s capability to synthesise complex data sets into practical, actionable insights, leading to a smoother operation and a positive experience for the local community.
The partnership between Chronosoft and Method at Tramlines Festival 2024 highlights the importance of advanced, integrated mapping solutions in urban event management. By centralising key information and providing a real-time visual platform, Chronicler ensured that traffic management was both efficient and considerate of the surrounding area. If you’d like to learn more about how Chronosoft and Chronicler could streamline your next event, check out www.chronosoft.com.au/.
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