Anyone who has run the New York City Marathon in the last several years has heard about (if not directly experienced) various snafus regarding transportation to the start line. Most notably are the exceedingly long lines to get to and through security at the Midtown Library shuttle buses and, separately, the shuttle buses on Staten Island that bring people from the Ferry to the runner's village.
A sizable part of the problem, at least coming from Midtown, appears to be an excessive number of people showing up well ahead of their scheduled times (likely a combination of paranoia of being late and concern about the excessive lines that they've heard about in prior years' races). This leads to much longer lines and processing time than should be the case for any given wave of buses, often times leading to significant delays in arrival at Fort Wadsworth, and potentially a very limited amount of time for the earliest waves to do everything they need before setting out in the corrals.
Earlier this week, NYRR sent out a notice of their new policy which, if interpreted as harshly as possible, would lead to anyone arriving before or after their assigned time window being subject to disqualification from the race and potentially further sanctions re: future races. Hopefully this is more bluster than anything else, with the goal of getting people to calm down and simply arrive during their assigned time window, to even out the flow/throughput.
It will be interesting to hear the reports from runners in November, to see if there were people negatively impacted by the new policy. And if the excessive lines wind up moderating to a reasonable throughput.
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