Fans stand in security lines outside the 2004 Super Bowl. The public proved patient with changes after 9/11, but efforts have continued to reduce lines at events. (Getty Images)
Space means everything in crowd management, said Todd Barnes, Populous senior principal and senior event architect, who has worked the last 25 Super Bowls. Whether a Super Bowl, Major League Baseball All-Star Game, Olympics or any other major one-off sporting event, Barnes said, the sport isn’t as much of a factor in moving people efficiently as are space and size. “The facility is the facility, and you are trying to get people through the doors,” he said.
Crowd management has always served as a key part of any sport, whether international or national. And though the public proved patient when the world of crowd movement changed after 9/11, fans slowly have lost that patience, requiring a continued effort to reduce queue lines by adding more magnetometers and search areas. All of that requires space.
While fans and staff both find common ground during normal regular-season operations, big events — think Super Bowls — place fans in locations they aren’t always familiar with and with staff that may be newly added for the occasion. Factor in increased levels of screening and additional security perimeters that come with marquee events, and crowd management grows more complicated for security staff and potentially more burdensome for attendees.
Large-scale events add new wrinkles: the additional layers of security further out from the stadium that affect pedestrian flow, special VIP entrances, potential new drop-off locations for buses and transportation, and revisions to parking locations or public transportation timing.
“All of those impact the overall capacity, access and flow to each checkpoint,” Barnes said. “Do we need to look at adding an additional checkpoint because we don’t have enough space to add more magnetometers or has the pattern changed completely where people are entering from access points never used otherwise? Some of that is also related to what happens with an actual security perimeter around the stadium. When you are talking about an event with a crowd not natural to that particular venue, it is a bit of a guessing game.”
One of the trickiest Super Bowls to date, Barnes said, was the one in February at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Because the stadium sits in the heart of the city, moving the security perimeter out to at least the NFL-mandated 300 feet beyond the stadium footprint required organizers to gain access to public and private property. It became an involved proposition to have enough space to construct the area for security, media services and additional back-of-house Super Bowl requirements within the security perimeter but still with enough land and unique checkpoints to get fans efficiently through the gates. In Minneapolis, organizers had to close city streets more than 100 times in January and February to build security fencing or allow pedestrian flow.
Figuring out how to handle the flow of large crowds — Minneapolis welcomed over 67,000, but AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, had a whopping 103,000 in 2011 — requires organizers to estimate timing in relation to parking plans, expected traffic flow, pedestrian movement and even a flow rate of each magnetometer, typically anywhere from 300 to 500 fans an hour. Then, add in variables: How good is the temporary wayfinding needed to keep people moving in the right direction? Will cold weather (we see you, Minneapolis) slow the security checkpoints as fans come bundled up in heavy coats? Will fans bottleneck at key sections of the routes?
“If it is a regular-season game, a flow rate is a lot faster than at a unique event, with customized checkpoints we have to build and with staff who have never worked it before,” Barnes said. “The training aspect of the event is huge in order to facilitate proper access.”
For planning purposes, space remains paramount. At University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., for example, Barnes said the spacious parking lots and less crowded suburban streets make for a much easier proposition, both for traffic flows and, especially, crowd management through the wide-open space.
The Super Bowl that will be played Feb. 3 at downtown Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium provides a new opportunity for organizers. Based off an effort this year in Minneapolis to bring people downtown early in the day to lessen the load on checkpoints, the 2019 event will use the neighboring Georgia World Congress Center to house not only the media center and other required Super Bowl spaces but also the fan-focused Super Bowl Experience. By placing this fan event within the security perimeter for the first time, it will mean only ticket holders can make it into the SB Experience on the day of the game, providing a reason for fans to come to the site earlier in the day and space out the crowds coming through security.
“It is an advantage to drive people into the security perimeter earlier in the day,” Barnes said. This will be the first time in recent memory the Super Bowl has employed this effort, although they have created other smaller fan plazas within the security perimeter in recent years to attempt the same result.
For Mercedes-Benz Stadium personnel, having hosted a College Football Playoff national championship game and other large-scale events, they’ve been able to learn about their site and space ahead of the Super Bowl. “Hosting big events in the stadium has allowed us to test and perfect our model for crowd movement throughout the stadium,” said Joe Coomer, vice president of security at the stadium. “With so many kinds of events, we’ve learned how crowds react to certain areas and have been able to modify and enhance the ingress and egress experience.”