Footfall at Edinburgh Waverley station set to rise by 60 per cent during the festival period

Edinburgh Evening News

Waverley Station is gearing up for a busy month ahead - with footfall expected to double compared to an average week. We spoke to station manager, Chris King.

Transcript

00:00For us we need to get our staff ready to cope with the increased passenger demand. It really

00:24does ramp up. We average roughly 63,000 people a day on a daily basis until we get to the

00:29festival time and then it goes up to over a hundred on occasion. So we really do have to

00:33kind of step up our game in response to customer service, passenger assist and maintaining security

00:37of the station. We gain an extra 30 to 40,000 people a day and that's not just using the

00:43station facilities, it's a pass-through for the Old Town to the New Town so we really have to be

00:46able to cope with that. Last year if I remember correctly our passenger numbers for, two years

00:52ago the passenger numbers for the festival were 2.8 million, last year it was 3.3 so again that's

00:57half a million a rise just for the month of August. So again if we can see something like

01:01that we could be looking at 3.8 to 4 million people through the station in one month which

01:05is pretty phenomenal when you think of the size and the space. Security is significantly more

01:10challenging with more footfall. We have several PFT criteria we need to meet and part of it is

01:15watching the behaviours of crowds and watching the behaviours of people within the station and

01:19when you're doubling and actually increasing your footfall to a hundred thousand people a day

01:24it's significantly imposed bigger risks so the staff again have to be more aware,

01:27more alert and more on the ball. We work really closely in conjunction with the

01:31British Transport Police who have got greater sources of intelligence for these

01:35type of activities and they can let us know if there's anything on or around the facility

01:38that you're aware of but they're our first line of defence for that.

01:50One of the services we provide is passenger assistance for people who aren't able to

01:54manage a journey on their own. We normally average in Edinburgh Waverley because of the

01:57size and shape it's a heavily reliant service because we are such an awkward facility but we

02:02normally average 3,000 a month during the course of the festival and at Christmas time specifically

02:07we get up to 6,000 a month so we double the capacity there so that the workload on the staff

02:12the staff normally summer holidays people kind of chill out and relax a bit for the festival

02:16season and for the festive season my staff kind of need to up their game and ramp up that's the

02:20peak times for us throughout the year. We've recently also introduced the east west walkway

02:25that was 1.8 million pounds of investment there to link both sides of the station without having

02:29to traipse around about the outside of the building. We've also recently had an upgrade

02:34to our CIS monitors we've went from the the old yellow to the black and white which is again it's

02:39clearer and visually it's more impressive and on top of that we've also recently upgraded our CCTV

02:44package to drag it into the modern day tech area where previously what used to be high

02:49def is no longer considered high def so now we can truly report that we've went high def with CCTV capability.

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