The shuttle service for spectators at the Solheim Cup last week was an unmitigated disaster for the LPGA Tour, marring the biennial competition’s otherwise delightful playing at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Manassas, Virginia.
On the first day of the competition, fans waited for upwards of 90 minutes for what should have been a short shuttle ride from the parking lots. Could the Presidents Cup be in store for a similar fate?
Presidents Cup tournament director Ryan Hart has been prepping for this week for three years and he says the parking and transportation plan has been vetted and they are ready to go.
“I felt for them,” he said of the Solheim Cup debacle. “It makes you look at your own systems and do a gut check to make sure you’re as buttoned up as you can be.”
Hart and his team will have their work cut out for them. The match between the U.S. men’s 12 best and the International Team, which is made up of the 12 best from the rest of the world excluding Europe, is being held at Royal Montreal Golf Club in Ile-Bizard, Quebec, one of the three populated islands within the city of Montreal. The Jacques-Bizard Bridge connects it across the Riviere des Prairies with Sainte-Genevieve on the Island of Montreal.
The bridge is the only way on and off the island and with more than 30,000 spectators expected to the attend the competition daily, what could possibly go wrong?
“Priority No. 1 when I got this job was to make sure that we had a plan to get our people from downtown and surrounding hotels to the property as efficiently as possible,” Hart said.
But despite all that lead time, the plan to expand the bridge from three to four lanes, which is expected to ease the commute for Ile-Bizard residents, remains under construction. While Presidents Cup officials were assured the project would be completed ahead of the biennial competition, which begins Thursday, Sept. 26, that is not the case. The construction project has been delayed and won’t be completed till at least the first quarter of 2025. Hart said that hurdle has been addressed as best as possible.
“We do this for a living and started tweaking our plan when we were given notice in the first quarter of this year,” Hart said.
Royal Montreal previously hosted the Presidents Cup in 2007 and the RBC Canadian Open in 2014, so the PGA Tour, which operates the biennial competition flipping between U.S. and international sites, has dealt with this bridge issue before.
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