The NFL playoffs are an opportunity to see the most compelling athletic performances of the year – packed with excitement, tension, elation, and sometimes, disappointment. But while it can be difficult to watch your beloved team fall, nothing rubs salt in that wound like sitting in traffic for hours after the game, inching your way home. Sometimes, the traffic outside a venue can be so bad that you forget about the game entirely.
Transportation to and from stadiums is an often overlooked and miserable part of the NFL gameday experience, and the challenges most stadiums face get far worse during the playoffs – when the games are always sold out and the crowds flock in from out of town. Most football stadiums (and, in fact, most venues in this country) are designed around the idea that almost everyone will drive in a private vehicle to and from the event.
Unfortunately, private cars are an incredibly inefficient way to move tens of thousands of people in and out of the same location all at once. The result is an inevitable and miserable traffic jam, with wasted time and fuel, whining children, and plenty of short tempers. Large venues require an inordinate amount of space for parking and driving, and no matter how much space is provided, it’s never enough capacity to meet the rush when everyone piles out of the stadium – especially after a last-minute touchdown drive to win it in overtime. And it’s not just sports venues that suffer from this problem. You’ve probably experienced it going to a concert too.
As longtime national transportation planners and data scientists, we work with sports and entertainment venues around the country to ameliorate traffic problems - and often it’s a lot easier than you would think. Sometimes, all it takes is creating new and better options for stadium access, improving signage and information for customers, and handling rideshare more effectively. With the Super Bowl LIX at hand, we were curious as to which stadiums provided the best gameday traffic and access experience for their patrons. By applying specialized data from LOCUS and our partners at TomTom that we use for analyzing traffic across the nation, we ranked each of the 13 playoff stadiums around the country according to their transportation customer experience.
We ranked each stadium based on two sets of measures – community and gameday – each of which had 4 factors. Community metrics included things like how well each venue provides alternatives to driving such as transit and walking, nearby amenities, and whether the stadium area attracts non-game day travelers (i.e. community gathering place). Gameday metrics include measures such as auto travel speeds, traffic delays in the neighborhood and on freeways around the stadium, and the catchment area from which spectators travel from. While any such ranking is inherently subjective, by using observed data near the stadia on gameday, we strove to make our analysis as objective as possible.
We created an alternate NFL championship playoff based on only transportation metrics. In each round, we scored the playoff teams based on one community and one gameday metric each and advanced teams based on their performance on this scoring system. There were several thrilling scores and a few ties to boot (higher seed advances in case of a tie). On the AFC side of the playoffs, Mahomes and the Chiefs were destroyed by the Broncos who were then beaten in a close championship game by the Ravens. On the NFC side, the Lions got their revenge on the Commanders in a blowout and smashed the Eagles on their way to the Super Bowl. In an extremely close game, the Lions (Ford Field) eked out a win thanks to their effective traffic management strengths on major roadways prior to and after the game.
The difference in customer experiences between stadiums like Acrisure and Raymond James are likely quite stark. For example, while Steelers fans face travel time increases on nearby roads that are only slightly worse than normal one hour after the end of their game, Bucs fans travel times almost double in the same time period. And whereas less than 4% of patrons effectively walk in Kansas City or Buffalo, 23% walk in Philadelphia. This means that if you are going to a game in Tampa Bay, you will almost certainly wind up sitting in an inordinate amount of traffic before and after the game. It also means that if you are going to see the Chiefs or the Bills, you are probably going to have to drive and sit in traffic. Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the traffic is manageable, and you have the option to walk. This means your gameday experience will be far superior, even if the game itself doesn’t turn out the way you want it to.
| City and Team (Stadium) | Community Score | Gameday Score | Combined Score |
| Pittsburgh Steelers (Acrisure) | 12 | 11 | 23 |
| Baltimore Ravens (M&T Bank) | 12 | 9 | 21 |
| Detroit Lions (Ford) | 12 | 8 | 20 |
| Minnesota Vikings (USBank) | 11 | 8 | 19 |
| Denver Broncos (Empower) | 7 | 10 | 17 |
| Houston Texans (NRG) | 8 | 9 | 17 |
| Los Angeles Rams/Chargers (SoFi) | 10 | 7 | 17 |
| Philadelphia Eagles (Financial) | 7 | 8 | 15 |
| Washington Commanders (Northwest) | 5 | 10 | 15 |
| Green Bay Packers (Lambeau) | 6 | 8 | 14 |
| Kansas City Chiefs (Arrowhead) | 5 | 8 | 13 |
| Buffalo Bills (Highmark) | 6 | 7 | 13 |
| Tampa Bay Buccaneers (Raymond James) | 5 | 6 | 11 |
These transportation differences do not occur randomly. They happen because of deliberate choices. Admittedly, some locations lend themselves to walking and public transit more than others. A stadium in the center of a city is more likely to provide a pleasant transportation experience for those who are not driving, for example. That said, most venues in the U.S. try to expand parking and use engineering and traffic solutions to fix their transportation challenges. But this rarely works.
Instead, even some of the most challenging locations can take a different approach, including providing their own supplemental transit services. For example, we recently worked to improve transportation at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, which has only one route in and out, and is a long walk up a big hill from the nearest rail station. The Bowl provides an extensive network of bus shuttles from satellite locations to accommodate customers more effectively. Counterintuitively, we raised the price of parking and reduced the overall amount of parking available. These steps helped the Bowl get more people to use those buses which reduced traffic conflicts with pedestrians and buses, in addition we changed how rideshare was handled, and improved signage. The result has been reduced congestion in the neighborhood and better experiences for everyone who attends concerts at the Bowl.
Making the gameday transportation experience work better doesn’t necessarily require building a new stadium, adding parking, expanding roadways or other major infrastructure investments. In fact, many of those expensive options can wind up making traffic worse. New stadiums are often built in areas that are difficult to access by foot or public transit. When more parking is added or roadways expanded, this encourages more people to drive and causes more congestion. This is such a common occurrence in transportation planning that it is known as the “law of induced demand.” Instead of spending gobs of money to accommodate more cars, venues can encourage access by multiple modes by providing effective alternatives to driving and parking, and incentives for people to use those alternatives.
Transportation to and from stadiums is critical, but if we do our job, it should be an afterthought for fans. This Sunday while you are watching the games, we’ll be observing the traffic and thinking of ways to make it work better. Our job is to make sure the only misery you’ll experience will be if your team loses.
Contributors:
Joshua Schank Partner, InfraStrategies
Ishraque Sk Md Data Scientist, LOCUS
Sam Zneimer Sr. Associate, Cambridge Systematics