Queue Design for a 900-Person Late Arrival
A 1,200-capacity club has a single 6-metre-wide entrance onto a public footpath. Ticket sales are 1,150, and experience shows 40% arrive in the last 40 minutes before the 23:00 last entry. Tonight there is a road closure 200 metres away diverting pedestrians past your door, and a bus stop directly outside. At 22:30 the queue is 600 long, stretching 150 metres along the footpath, blocking a pedestrian crossing and a shop doorway. Two fights have broken out in the queue in ten minutes. Staff inside report the foyer is congested because bag search is taking 25 seconds per person with two search lanes. You have eight stewards outside and can call four more.
1. Identify the queue-design failures and set out how you would restructure the queue and entrance in the next twenty minutes.
Read the worked answer
Failures:
- Throughput mismatch: two search lanes at 25 seconds each gives roughly 4.8 people per minute, or about 288 per hour. A 600-person queue plus continuing arrivals cannot clear before last entry, so the queue is guaranteed to grow.
- Unmanaged serpentine: a 150-metre single line crosses a pedestrian crossing and a shop doorway, creating conflict with the public and no safe holding area.
- No queue intelligence: fights indicate no visible steward presence within the line and no separation of waiting patrons from passers-by.
Restructure:
- Add search capacity: open a third and fourth lane using the four additional stewards, and move to pre-wristbanding or ticket scanning while people wait, so search time at the door falls.
- Build a serpentine holding area using barriers on the widest available footpath section, keeping the crossing and shop doorway clear. If no space exists, the queue must be capped and arrivals held at a distance.
- Put stewards inside the line, not only at the head - at least one per 50 metres, facing the queue, with a clear radio channel.
- Separate flows: keep a marked pedestrian lane past the queue so the diverted public is not forced into it.
- Communicate: a steward at the tail giving accurate wait times reduces frustration and queue-jumping.
2. At 22:50 the queue is still 350 long and last entry is 23:00. What are your options and how do you decide?
Read the worked answer
Options:
- Extend last entry with the licence holder's and, if required, the licensing authority's agreement. This is a licensing decision, not a steward's, and must be authorised and recorded.
- Hold the line and refuse entry at 23:00 to those still queuing, managing the resulting frustration with clear announcements and stewards present.
- Admit without full search - not an option. Search is a condition of entry and a safety control; suspending it to clear a queue trades one risk for a worse one.
Decision framework:
- What does the licence and the event plan permit? Last entry is usually a condition; extending it needs authorisation.
- Is the queue safe while it waits? If the line is on a live footpath with fights breaking out, the risk of leaving 350 people waiting may exceed the risk of admitting them.
- Can throughput be raised further? If a fourth lane is running, estimate realistic clearance time and compare with any authorised extension.
The defensible answer is usually: seek authorisation for a short, defined extension, announce it clearly, keep stewards in the line, and refuse entry firmly at the new cut-off. What is not defensible is drifting past 23:00 without a decision, or abandoning search.