SNOW BUSINESS IS SLOW BUSINESS

Masao Kurenuma and his staff may be setting a record for Olympic endurance, even in a country that prides itself on grinning and bearing up under pressure.

Kurenuma is the bus man of Nagano, the person responsible for dispatching about 950 buses for athletes, media and spectators to the far-flung venues and remote mountaintops of the Nagano Winter Olympics.

So far, he has had to cope with heavy snow, fog, sleet, rain and slush, a morass of miserable weather that forced the postponement of the men’s downhill for a third time Thursday, and the nightmarish rescheduling of multiple events on short notice, all on three hours of sleep a night.

“Three hours might be an exaggeration,” Kurenuma said, visibly struggling to stuff his thoughts into sentences that were often interrupted by the summons of his desk and cellular telephones. “I think I got four hours some nights.”

Overall, Nagano Olympic organizers have been receiving higher marks for logistics than the Atlanta Games. But the glitches--not all of which can be blamed on the weather--have sparked some world-class grumbling.

On Wednesday, skies were a stunning blue with not a snow cloud in sight, yet bus delays cost some Japanese spectators the sight of Kazuyoshi Funaki’s silver-medal-winning leap in the 90-meter ski jump. Despite the fine weather, there were not enough buses to pick up the people who had taken advantage of a national holiday to make the trek to Nagano station. At one point there were more than 1,000 people in line waiting for transportation to the ski jump in Hakuba, more than an hour’s drive away.

“It was a nightmare,” said Risako Watanabe, 31, who had come into Nagano just for the jump, at which Japan had hoped to snag at least two if not all three medals. Jani Soininen of Finland won the gold, but Watanabe missed the show.

“First we didn’t get a bus, and then the bus was delayed going up to Hakuba,” Watanabe said, after returning dejected to Nagano station.

“I don’t know what I came here for. I wish they had planned better.”

Hakuba seems to be the most problem-plagued venue, due to snow and traffic jams on the only road in and out of town.

On Tuesday, one middle-aged Japanese man began kicking the slush-splattered bus that finally arrived to get him after heavy snow squashed the women’s super-giant slalom in Happo and traffic snarls caused delays of well over an hour for cold bus riders trying to go home.

“A dirty bus?” the man shrieked. “Two hours of waiting and now we have to get on a dirty bus? Nagano is idiotic!”

Nevertheless, others gave the planners good marks.

“The Japanese cannot control the weather yet, but everything else they have controlled,” said George Masters, who was among the 7,000 spectators who made it up to Hakuba in a near-blizzard Monday only to learn the men’s Alpine skiing had been postponed. “It’s crowded, but they’re handling it very well.”

Last autumn, some Japanese were fretting about whether El Nino might cause too little snowfall in Nagano.

“Maybe now the mountain god is thinking something,” said Ko Yamaguchi, spokesman for the Nagano Olympic Organizing Committee. What exactly isn’t clear; the overdose of thick wet snow early in the week was followed by rain on Thursday, turning some areas into fields of slush.

Some tourists complained about a lack of information in English, while others complained that transportation staff spoke English just fine but misinformed them.

“The English speakers are few and far between, and it’s getting a little frustrating,” Eddie Ramos said. He came from Miami mainly to see the figure skating, and decided to commute from Tokyo on the bullet train, since hotels were booked in Nagano.

But once here, he discovered that there were no bullet trains departing late enough for him to get back to his Tokyo hotel room after the event. He had to sell his prized figure-skating tickets.

Ramos also wanted to see the women’s speedskating, but wasn’t sure Wednesday whether he was willing to give scalpers $96 for standing-room-only tickets.

The street value of the speedskating tickets quintupled overnight after Japan’s Hiroyasu Shimizu skated to a gold medal in the 500-meter race. Tickets that had been going for the equivalent of $64 Tuesday were being peddled for $360 Wednesday in Nagano station--and several Japanese buyers forked over the money without even bargaining.

Even hotter, however, are tickets to see the Canadian men’s hockey team. Scalpers are demanding $600 apiece.

Faced with such prices, crowds and pandemonium, some Nagano residents have decided to skip town for the duration of the Games.

After sizing up the strict daytime traffic restrictions, dubious sales prospects and tough economy, some small businesses, particularly construction companies and manufacturers, have closed up shop for at least part of the Olympics or sent nonessential workers on holiday.

“They’re going to Guam, Saipan and Singapore, and the most popular domestic destination is winter Kyoto,” followed by Tokyo Disneyland, reported Fumiyuki Tsuchihashi, Nagano branch chief for JTB Travel, Japan’s largest travel service.

In an average year, JTB books trips out of Nagano Prefecture for 10,000 people, but this year 16,000 people have left, he said, adding that sales are up 150%.

But Tsuchihashi declined to name names of those defecting to warmer or less harried climes.

“If these companies are named in the newspaper, they’ll be called traitors to their country and their prefecture,” he said.

NAOC organizers and a number of bus riders say that despite the glitches, overall transportation is improving, with more buses on the road and better organization on the ground. Inside the NAOC transportation office Tuesday, about 60 people, including Kurenuma, were working at a feverish pace.

Public transportation planning depends on past traffic flow data, but each Olympics is vastly different from its predecessors, and even simulations aren’t accurate predictors of crowd behavior, Kurenuma said.

“To be honest, we’ve had a hard time figuring out how many people would go where when,” he said. “You can’t do a dry run for an Olympics. . . . What is important is how quickly you can react to the demands of the actual situation.”

And the actual situation is demanding. On Tuesday morning, for example, buses arrived at 4 a.m. to pick up athletes and officials who are required to be on site three hours before an event begins, Kurenuma said. At 7 a.m., he heard on the radio that the women’s super-G had been postponed because of heavy snow.

“The buses were already there,” he said.

A $7.6-million high-tech traffic management system, called the Vehicle Information and Communication System is getting its first Olympic tryout in Nagano. The system is set up to track movement of vehicles using 400 infrared sensors that have been set up at key intersections.

About 200 buses for athletes and media, as well as 1,000 cars for Olympic officials, have been equipped with two-way car navigation systems, while an additional 850 buses and 500 cars have simple one-way beacons that trigger the sensors when the vehicle passes through an intersection.

NAOC computer screens show a live map of all vehicles in the area and how long it took them to pass each sensor along their route. Crowded roads show up in red, so that drivers can be instructed to take alternative routes. Police can intervene by increasing the length of time that lights along a crowded route turn green.

The problem is that each vehicle’s identification number must be entered into the data banks to make the system work, but there hasn’t been time to input the numbers of athletes’ buses. So far, only the media buses and Olympic officials’ cars are in the system.

Still, the VICS system is a big leap forward, and it should improve over the course of the Olympics as its masters work out the human kinks.

“In Atlanta, they could not do what we are doing in Nagano,” said Koichi Katagiri, who heads NAOC’s transportation control department. So is it smoothing the Olympic traffic flow through the snow?

“We won’t know until it’s all over,” Katagiri said. “The system itself is perfect. However, its effectiveness is only about 70%, because human beings still have a lot to do with it.”