Long Street Road closure for New Years Eve

The ONLong business owner association is a collaboration of several business owners from Long Street, Beerhouse being one of them. We identified a number of key areas where we can help improve Long Street, making it into the heart and soul of Cape Town and a more attractive and secure place.

Update: Today on the 30th of December there’s finally the Certificate of Temporary Closure and the following media release by the City of Cape Town:

CITY OF CAPE TOWN 30 DECEMBER 2013 MEDIA RELEASE

Portion of Long Street to be temporarily closed on New Year’s Eve
The City of Cape Town has granted an application for a portion of Long Street to be temporarily closed to traffic tomorrow evening, 31 December 2013.
Long Street, between Wale Street and Buitensingel only, will be closed from 20:00 to 04:00.

The following intersections will be affected:
· Loop and Dorp Streets
· Loop and Pepper Streets
· Loop and Leeuwen Streets
· Loop and Buiten Streets
· Loop and Bloem Streets
· Keerom and Bloem Streets

Emergency vehicles and MyCiTi busses will still be able to travel on this route, but it will be closed to all other vehicles. Traffic officials and CCID officers will be on duty to manage traffic flow.
This section of the street traditionally accommodates a large number of pedestrians on New Year’s Eve and the closure was therefore granted as an additional safety measure, following an application by affected businesses.

Issued by: Integrated Strategic Communication and Branding Department, City of Cape Town

New Years Eve 2013 is the perfect opportunity for ONLong to work together to help create the environment that we and our patrons want to be a part of. Previous experience has shown that the sheer number of people coming to the CBD to celebrate New Years causes havoc in Long Street. This is further aggravated by cars moving down Long Street trying to move through thousands of unmanaged people, drinking and partying in the streets, making the road their dance floor.

By voicing our joint concerns and partnering up with CCIDs Security Manager, Mo Hendricks, we approached the Ward Councillor, Dave Bryant, for assistance in escalating our concerns and identifying NYE 2013 an opportunity to make Long Street a ‘No Car Zone’.

Long Street will be temporarily closed to general traffic between 20h00 on Tuesday 31st December 2013 and 04h00 on Wednesday 1st January 2014.

Through ensuring that the only vehicles to travel on Long Street from 8 p.m. 31st December to 06:00 on the 1st January to be MyCiTi we identified a number of benefits to the public including:

• Increased response time for emergency vehicles
• Better observation opportunities for security officials
• Increased control
• Less congestion reduces opportunity for theft, damage and injury
• Better experience for patrons on Long Street
• Increased safety for patrons and local businesses

We came up with a three-pronged strategy to drive forward this closure:

1. Approach SAPS to support the closure by submitting an application for the closure of Long Street to the City of Cape Town.
2. Gain support from the Event Organiser of CPT Design Capital 2014 and Ministrel NYE events to extend the scope of their current plans to keep Wale/Long St closed and also close of all side streets leading to Long St.
3. ONLONG business owners association to provide additional resource to firm up existing resource provided by CCID and ONLONG

We have managed to achieve all 3 of these activities. As part of this application the ONLONG business association has committed to contribute up to 20 private security officers to patrol Long Street on NYE on top of their existing security for their own venues and CCID officers on the road. These guards will be managed over radio by CCID and hired in addition to the private securities of each venue.

We would like to thank the business owners of the following venues to commit to sponsor 19 additional guards so far: Bob’s Bar (5 guards!), The Dubliner (3 guards),  Beerhouse (3 guards), SGT Pepper (3 guards) Jo’Burg, Marvel, Nomnom/Clay Oven, Fiction, Arriba sponsoring one guard each and we are awaiting some more confirmations to get to the 20 guards on duty during NYE. Long Street Venues, that would like to join this effort, are asked to contact us immediately via Email.

By sponsoring additional security guards each business is showing their commitment to making Long Street a safe and secure environment for all visitors and not just those who come to our venues!

Starting this process spontaneously only two weeks ago, we are chuffed, that we got this far in such a short time and thank all public and private stakeholders for their very cooperative approach.

Hayley Slater and Randolf Jorberg for the ONLong Business owner association