“We were crammed in there like sardines. All the sudden people started pushing,” Andrea Dutchak recounted.
Dutchak was one of over 9,500 people who used the city’s free shuttle transit service after the Eagles concert at Mosaic Stadium on March 17.
She also watched as her 69-year-old mother was nearly trampled in the crowd.
“My Mom, who is about five-feet-tall was right in front of me and she got shoved to the ground. She didn’t make it all the way to the ground, I was able to kind of grab her, and she just looked at me and said ‘I can’t breathe,’” Dutchak continued.
“I just grabbed her and I said ‘no, we’re moving, we’re moving’, and pushed our way through to get out of that crowd as opposed to further into the crowd.”
The crowds were lined up outside Mosaic Stadium and stretched around the building, some bus riders saying it took over an hour and a half to get on the bus.
“We ended up waiting about 45 – 50 minutes for a bus, but I mean, when you looked across the street where other buses were lined up, people were lined up around the entire building,” Dutchak continued.
The city said they had 57 buses picking up concert-goers, seven more than they had originally scheduled.
“Based on how many people we get in, we do react to that to see if we can get more buses in to accommodate the amount of people going. We had our buses all going – as many as we could – to accommodate those people,” Nathan Luhning, Regina Transit’s manager of business development explained.
Luhning acknowledged that 57 buses isn’t the city’s maximum and that they allocated the buses based on perceived need. Despite the March 17 train wreck transit usage breaking shuttle ridership records by over 1.400 people, the city wouldn’t commit to using more buses in the future.
“We want to try to get as many people out of the stadium as quickly as possible. We’ll take a look at the operations and see how that is. Maybe we’ll take a look at how many people we can load at one time at the front of the stadium, so it may not necessarily be more units,” Luhning noted.
When asked about the complaints of people being crushed in the crowds. Luhning said he couldn’t comment as he had not heard of the situation, but did note that Regina Transit could look at how the lines are organized in the future.
“I think if they want people to take transit, they really need to start thinking about where people are going to be exiting from the stadium and how to direct traffic and I think that they need a stronger security or police presence to be able to move the crowd along,” Dutchak said.
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