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Thursday, August 21, 2008, 09:41
STOKE City chief executive Tony Scholes is confident fans will spend less time battling the traffic than last season, despite sell-out crowds for the club's return to the Premier League.
The build up to Saturday's opening home game against Aston Villa has been blighted by concerns that supporters could face a two-hour wait to get off the Britannia Stadium site.
However, Scholes expects fans to get away more easily than last season when the wait was sometimes more than an hour.
The police estimate of up to two hours represents a worst-case scenario, but Scholes is confident improved traffic management around the Britannia Stadium will pay dividends.
He said: "We have made a number of improvements. The biggest impact is that, at the bottom of Stanley Matthews Way, and on the bridge over the A50, we have agreed with the authorities that traffic lights can be manually controlled.
"That will maximise the flow of traffic away from the stadium and the Trentham Lakes site.
"The car parks were full for the crowds we had before, so we won't have any more traffic on site this season.
"As ever, I would encourage people to share cars and come by public transport or pub buses.
"But my hope and expectation is that the cars we do have will be able to exit the site a lot quicker than has been the case in the past.
"We will know a great deal more after the Villa game, but this is one of the key things we will be looking at to see how the improvements have worked."
Meanwhile, the club has acted swiftly after some supporters had to queue for seven hours to buy tickets for City's opening league game at Bolton last Saturday. Scholes is determined to avoid a repeat and expects the club's upgraded computer system to help.
City faced huge demand for Bolton tickets with Scholes estimating the club could have sold at least double their 2,800 allocation.
However, he said: "The transaction time for each customer was not as quick as we would have liked.
"Sometimes it was because we were checking people's details or being as helpful as we could to the person at the front of the queue, but to the cost of those further back.
"Sometimes it was because the computer server wasn't operating as quickly as it should have been.
"We are absolutely determined to improve our speed of service. We have a new computer server in now and have more phone lines in to make sure that doesn't repeat."
City fought hard without success to increase their allocation for Bolton. However, they have secured more than 4,000 tickets for the trip to Middlesbrough on August 30.
The Boro tickets are priced £29 adults, £17 over-65s and £15 under-16s. They are on sale to season-ticket holders and will go on general sale next Tuesday.
Tickets for the Carling Cup game at Cheltenham next Tuesday are £18 adults, £12 concessions and £7 for under-16s.
Tickets are on sale to season-ticket holders and go on general sale tomorrow.
City are close to a sell-out for Saturday's Aston Villa game.
STOKE were today hoping to tie up a loan deal for Locomotiv Moscow's Ghana winger Himanu Dramani.
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