I thought it was a great morning. The weather undoubtedly helped, but it was a good turnout. The location up by St Giles worked really well: a fine urban backdrop with just enough room for folk to mill around, whilst also ensuring it looked really busy.
but does anyone have a feel for how the logistics worked and if it might position us well for a TdF grand depart?
I think CEC will/should have learnt some lessons here. The ToB roadbook indicated that the team parking would be on Cockburn Street but when I wandered up there at 9am, only a couple of team mechanic vans had managed to park there. The rest of the parking spaces were occupied by private cars whose owners were either ignorant of the advertise parking restriction for that morning or had ignored all the cones etc. One car was getting lifted at 9am, but there was no danger of them clearing the others in time for the teams.
It looked like the end result of that was that the later-arriving teams had to park up on either North Bridge or South Bridge. Not a disaster, perhaps, but it did put some of the world's best cyclists and the fans in very close proximity to traffic on the bridges.
However, looking through a TdF lens, to accommodate the start village, a lot more hospitality, all the extra team vehicles (at least twice the number we saw at ToB) you would probably need to close off the full set of High Street, South Bridge, Chambers Street and George IV Bridge. CEC could always make a start on that just now to show how serious it is and to reduce the disruption when we do host the TdF... ;-)
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