No doubt your social media feeds are filled with complaints and videos from last night’s Ultra Music Festival bus fiasco. What was planned as an orderly exit system quickly fell apart due to a number of factors, leaving police to tell attendees to walk the approx 2 miles from the Marine Stadium area to Vizcaya area and try their luck from there.
People are throwing around Fyre Fest and TomorrowWorld as comparisons, however it was always expected that a task of this magnitude would encounter difficulty on the first go round. Nevertheless, things looked awfully bad and Ultra offered a mea culpa on Saturday.
OFFICIAL STATEMENT:
Last night, many of you experienced challenging transportation conditions leaving the festival. This is unacceptable and inconsistent with the high standards you have come to expect from us. For this, we are sorry.
Today Ultra had a press conference at 11:30 detailing their plans to fix the system for Saturday. Ultra Security Chief Ray Martinez said the issues arose because many more people left early than expected, snarling the bus plan for a mass exit.
We recognize we have to make adjustments and improve the way our plan is working. We’re hoping for, again, a fabulous show on day two and, obviously, improvements in our transportation plan as we learn from being here on a new site on how to make the adjustments and move forward.”
On Friday night, the Rickenbacker Causeway did not reserve a lane solely for bus exits until 1am. On Saturday that will begin at 9.30pm. Ultra will also be boosting the number of busses and adding a plan to better direct pedestrians to south side of Rickenbacker where there is a path.
In what might seem to some as callous, Martinez remarked that the weather was beautiful and it was not the worst thing in the world to walk the bridge in those conditions. Those who went to TomorrowWorld know that if it was raining, it would be an entirely different and much scarier game.
