I park near ground (blue badge) but appreciate it just takes a while to get out. If people want to walk up middle of road so be it. You only have to sit in your car five ten minutes and the crowds die down anyway. What I will say is the road closures seem to get more absurd. I once heard a (very entitled) bloke in brand new range rover screaming at staff on road block cos he was a "sponsor" at bottom of Grove street. But then again they shut the road that goes to the back of the east stand car park for no good reason. They have hardly any disabled parking. What strikes me as really stupid is shutting Queens Road. Wigan game there was an away coach stuck at the top of bala street who really should have been allowed to go straight up queens road and into away car park. Why send them and other away traffic up bala street where everybody walks. They aint doing all this for pedestrian safety that is for sure
But if no-one makes em aware of the issue. Then nowt happens. Nowt may happen anyhow but at least they will be aware. If folk are going to Barnsley online email address. You are relying on someone passing the information on. It appears according to reports on here, confrontations are becoming the norm.
Head of Highways??.....well this bloke needs holding task for more than Oakwell lane!, getting around Barnsley these days has never took so long and been so chaotic!.....traffic congestion ridiculous and bad planning must play a big part in this.....rant over ha!
Both replies to my thread are valid but impute more common sense in Barnsley council than I fear exists.
No issues at all on Oakwell Lane after the match last night. Hardly any fans or cars there to use it. Problem solved!!!
I wonder why its got so bad? I've always walked up and down there every match, back in prem we had 20k fans in the ground and no such hassle, it seems to have really started about 6-7 years ago to get worse and now its a real problem. More people coming from that direction? More cars? I notice more people trying to park on the road then there ever used to be, they need to probably restrict that to residents only on match day as a start.
Lots are suggesting the road should be residents only on match days but who is going to police that? It would be an impossible task and, besides , it’s a public road so if some idiot decides they need to go up or down it at 5pm nobody can really stop them. It’s going to take a fatality before the police or council do anything about it. Even then there’s no easy answers. The whole business of getting people away from the ground in their cars or on foot is a bit of a shambles and it seems to be a case of “let’s hope for the best” all round
It's since more restrictions were put in place around oakwell that started with the closure of the railway crossing. Since then they started closing off slip roads on the flyover, put cones out all the way down Pontefract road as far as the lightspot and essentially kettled all vehicles into smaller areas. They've then made it much worse and more unsafe by making the oakwell carpark practically unusable which again forces more vehicles to park around the ground. Not helped by the fact that the no parking cones put around the ground are legally unenforceable and so essentially useless. In some ****** up weird idea of reporting themselves to the council and suggesting that carparking and traffic management undergoes more restrictions the club have managed to make oakwell harder to get to and much less safe for pedestrians.
Yes, seems that way - this overzealous use of Health and safety has in fact made things less safe for the thousands of people who walk up and down Oakwell Lane before and after games.