RWC Opening Night

Auckland put on a hell of a party for the opening night of the Rugby World Cup. The opening ceremony kicked off at Eden Park at 7:30pm, followed by the first game, NZ vs Tonga at 8:30pm. At the same time, there was a world cup opening party in the CBD, with waka arriving, a procession of 600 warriors through the city, a mass haka and free concerts by Dave Dobbyn & the Finn brothers on Queens Wharf. Our place has a great view of "party central", Queens Wharf. We can see the big screens from here, although they are too far away to really be able to see anything. The best view was on TV. We can hear pretty well, so could hear both of the concerts, though. Stephen took a video of the view so will link to it when I can.

Queens Wharf opened at 3pm. My original plan was go to down there and have a look around and then come back up to my place to watch the fireworks at 8pm. However, when I got home from work at 2pm, the queue to get in was already most of the way along Quay St. Most of Quay st was closed, plus all the side roads between here and the Viaduct. I was sitting outside in the sun watching endless streams of people walk away from party central to join the back of the queue. It looked like it was going to be huge. The gates opened at 3pm and people flooded in. It filled to it's 12,000 capacity in under half an hour. Wynyard Quarter was also full, with security turning people away from about 3:15pm. From what I could see on tv, the lower CBD and Viaduct were also completely full. All week, the news had been saying how crazy things were going to be in the CBD and near Eden Park and were warning of chaos on the roads. The very strong message was for people to leave work early and be clear of the area by mid-afternoon, and also to use public transport as the roads were going to be hell. Well, that probably produced the lightest traffic ever seen on Auckland's roads on a weekday. The carpark in front of us was half empty, there was no congestion at all - much lighter than a normal weekday afternoon.

But public transport? That was a different story.Auckland public transport isn't great at the best of times, but they did put on extra buses, trains and ferries to get people to to the CBD and then to Eden Park. By around 5pm, the queue to get on the Devonport ferry was apparently 300m long outside the terminal. And the queue of cars trying to drive into Devonport to get the ferry was back well past Esmonde Rd into Takapuna. There were reports of people waiting for hours on train platforms in Ellerslie & Newmarket as the trains were so full they couldn't stop. Meanwhile, the trains, ferries and buses poured people into the Auckland CBD. With Queens Wharf & Wynyard Quarter closed, people just filled up Quay St, the Viaduct and surrounding streets. It eventually got so bad that all ferries were cancelled, because the area around the ferry building was so densely packed that there was just nowhere to offload the people on the ferries.

The Police and Auckland city started telling people not to come into the CBD and to instead head to vantage points like the Parnell Rose Gardens, Bastion Point, or Mt Victoria or North Head to watch the fireworks. That probably didn't do much to improve the traffic situation around Devonport. People trying to get to Eden Park for the game were particularly stressed as the trains pretty much completely failed. The train company made it clear earlier in the week that they would only stop at Grafton and then Eden Park. But perhaps that wasn't well communicated, because people apparently were trying to use the trains for their ordinary commute home and getting annoyed when the train went past their station and pressing the emergency stop. That means the train has to stop and the staff has to investigate the cause before they can move. Some stops for medical reasons (the trains were packed like sardines) and fights added to the delays. And of course, once one train stops, it holds up all the others. Some passengers just gave up and got out and started walking along the tracks to Eden Park. Apparently 2,000 people didn't make it in time.

I wasn't so interested in either the opening ceremony or the game though: the fireworks in the CBD was what I was waiting for. The plan was for a fireworks show from 10 locations, synchronised to music playing at Queens Wharf. There were 4 barges in the harbour, 4 buildings in the CBD, plus the Sky Tower and the Domain. We were basically right in the middle of the spread of the 4 barges so we had a perfect view.

At the same time, Ports of Auckland put on a bit of a show, with some tugboat dancing and some syncronised driving from their container straddles. I'd seen them practising that a few nights ago and couldn't figure out what on earth they were doing driving around like that in the middle of the night. The tugboats were pretty cool too, doing pirouettes. The fire-fighting one with the blue jets of water was particularly impressive. The show apparently lasted 12 minutes, but it seems much quicker to me. Take a look:

After the fireworks, we had a bunch of people watching the game, none of whom I really knew. I'm not sure Stephen knew them all either. He'd invited his whole division at work, and some of them showed up with friends, who then invited other friends and so on. I left them to it and came and monitored the crowd & traffic situation. The Police issued an emergency notice to tell people not to come into the CBD. They asked Auckland Transport not to bring people here and advised people to make other plans. People were apparently waiting hours at Britomart to get a train home. Buses seemed to be the most successful. From outside my window there was just a constant stream of buses coming in and out of Customs Street. The outbound buses were all completely packed. I also saw an awful lot of taxis, but there were a lot of complaints from people that the taxis took booking but then never honoured them.

The whole city was just crazy. There were just hordes of drunk people everywhere. Apparently pedestrians just spilled onto lower Queen street and made it virtually impossible for anyone to drive through. I'm surprised there was only one incident in which pedestrians were injured (6 people injured in an incident involving a car and a bus on Fanshawe St). The concert at Queens Wharf continued until 2am, but I gave up and hit the sack about midnight. Auckland really needs to sort it's shit out from a transport perspective - I shudder to think what will happen at the final unless they make huge improvements.