Bubbaworld

And it was a fiasco.

On Monday morning the shiny new BOK Center hosted the Get Motivated Seminar featuring among its speakers General Colin Powell, Zig Ziglar, and Joe Montana.

In some media reports the attendance was reported at 16,000 while in others it was reported as 18,000.

In any case it was way too many if you were trying to get to work or conduct business in downtown Tulsa.

How bad was it?

Reports at the time indicated it was taking up to an hour to move two blocks in the vicinity of the BOK Center which is also the vicinity of the Tulsa City Hall (at least for the next few days), the Tulsa County Courthouse and numerous “big name” business and banks located in downtown Tulsa.

Tulsa County District Court Clerk Sally Howe Smith said she has never had so much difficulty in getting jurors into the courthouse as she had on Monday. Others required to appear at court for trials were also “hung up” in the massive traffic jam and confounded by a lack of parking.

Many with business in downtown were forced to park great distances away from their destination and “hoof it” through the traffic jam and a whole lot of angry motorists.

For their part spokespersons for BOK Center, Tulsa Police and the City of Tulsa have tried to downplay the fiasco but apparently they did not discuss or plan much for this event beforehand and it shows.

Two of the three “park and ride” locations were downtown; one at the OSU-Tulsa campus and the other at Archer Street and Elgin Avenue.

These two locations where event attendees could park and ride a shuttle to the BOK Center required attendees to travel the Inner-Dispersal Loop into downtown and exit onto streets already jammed with traffic heading to the event.

Why bother fighting your way through traffic to the park and ride location when you are already stuck in traffic heading toward the event location? Sometimes its easier just to go along to get along and that is what happened with arguably the largest traffic jam in downtown Tulsa history.

This explains why the OSU-Tulsa parking lot was under-utilized. Many that might have wanted to park there and ride the shuttle could not get to there owing to the traffic jam which pretty much occupied the area inside the Inner-Dispersal Loop.

Tulsa’s first daytime event at the new BOK Center while frustrating for many will hopefully be a learning experience for those that failed so miserably on their first trip around the track.

The lessons are fairly simple:

Set up “park and ride” locations, several of them, all outside the downtown area.

For days before the event get the word out about the “park and ride” locations. The city putting out a press release announcing park and ride locations on a weekend for an event on Monday is not adequate notice. And for gosh sake, use clean buses.

Provide reserved parking in the Civic Center Parkade for those summoned to jury duty and those summoned to trials. How would you like to have a case heard by a jury that just sat in a traffic jam for an hour or so and then had to walk a mile or more through traffic to hear your case? The reserved parking could be handled via permits valid for the first day of jury service or trial and issued with the summons, subsequent permits could be issued by court personnel as needed for second and subsequent days.

Fortunately for Tulsa there are not many daytime events currently scheduled for the BOK Center. The next will be the “Radio City Christmas Spectacular” scheduled for December 22 – 24. However with time it is likely that more and more day time events will be hosted there and unless some common sense changes are made before hand it is likely that each will be yet another fiasco…