Download festival traffic delays to be investigated

For the first time, to mark its 20th anniversary, Download Festival hosted four headline sets

Roads bosses are to review the causes of "unprecedented" traffic delays around the Download Festival.

Thousands arrived at Donington Park in Leicestershire on Wednesday and Thursday, causing severe congestion on roads including the M1, A50 and A453.

Some people reported queuing for more than seven hours to enter the site.

National Highways, which manages the road network, said plans would be made to stop this level of disruption happening again.

The sell-out event opened to some of the 100,000 ticket holders on Wednesday.

Congestion around the site caused long delays and some East Midlands Airport passengers even missed flights.

It prompted an apology from festival manager John Probyn.

National Highways said it would be trying to find out what went wrong.

During the festival Leicestershire Police said they received a large number of accidental emergency calls

Operations director Mark Munnoch said: "The trouble was getting onto the site - everybody funnelling into Download and that was simply backing up onto local roads and all the way back to the motorway.

"It was affecting not just Download traffic but also normal commuters and people using the roads."

He said National Highways worked with Download organisers and East Midlands Airport to try to clear the roads as quickly as possible but the cause of the delays was not yet known.

"It's hard to put a finger on it at the moment but we will be analysing it," said Mr Munnoch.

"What we saw last week was unprecedented in its effect, especially the queuing back onto the strategic roads - the motorways and the larger A-roads.

"To see those gridlocked was very worrying for us, but we will make sure we learn from that and put plans in place so that it doesn't happen again."

The festival hosted four headline sets for the first time to mark its 20th anniversary.

On Sunday, Leicestershire Police put out an appeal urging festival goers to avoid accidentally calling 999.

The force said it received more than 1,000 calls to its emergency number over the weekend compared to about 750 on a standard "busy" weekend, with some call handlers able to hear loud music in the background.