Anyone who experienced that last night and thinks this stadium and neighborhood can support 47k week in and week out is insane. It has NOTHING to do with when the lots open. One lane of traffic bringing in 90% of those fans simply isn’t feasible. That traffic is going through a city downtown and residential area where many of the impediments can’t be ‘managed’ by stadium processes because it is regular pedestrian and homeowner traffic of people just trying to go about their day. One person double parking for a minute to run into a store or let someone off on Central completely stops the flow of all stadium traffic, snarling it for miles back.
Yes, letting all that traffic come in and park over seven hours would ‘help’, but aside from the problems that would create in a number of areas, i.e., sanitation, drunkenness, etc., the problems last night were waaaaay worse than that. Let me ask. As I’ve said earlier, I’ve been to every Big Ten stadium with the exception of Rutgers. How many are built basically in a residential neighborhood? I honestly cannot recall. To the poster above who suggested Wrigley as an example, in that light he is right. But as I said, Wrigley gets huge parts of its game day attendance from people walking up who live nearby, there are many more traffic routes to the stadium, the El system supports fans coming from both the North and South, making it a far better contributor to the transportation issue, and it holds just shy of 20% fewer people trying to get in at capacity. And STILL Wrigley is criticized as being difficult to get to, a factor that is largely dismissed because the neighborhood that causes the problem is at the same time is a major part of Wrigley’s appeal. But it’s still an issue and a reason many avoid going there.
At the stadium itself, the problems were almost embarrassing. They locked the gates before the game because “there were too many people on the concourse”, locking out ticket holding fans en masse who had to wait until people cleared out to let more in.
Yes, bathroom lines and congestion on the concourse were intolerable. Lines are long at the end of the quarter or halftimesbery game, but they were out the door and down each concourse for the entire game.
Getting out from the parking was almost worse.
Listening to the ND fans grumble all around was enjoyable. I’ll say that. But one of the more tolerable ones was asking if we allowed more than capacity into the stadium last night to take advantage of the ticket sales, because he had never experienced anything like this in terms of traffic and congestion around and in the stadium.
I wholeheartedly believe that we must decrease the capacity of Ryan, not only to make it a more intimate and intense setting with more sellouts and less embarrassing areas of empty seats, but it needs to be retro fitted to be able to exist in the contrained city geography in which it sits.
The answer is NOT show up earlier and stay later and drink more. If that’s the only way to manage going to Ryan Field, excess attendance won’t be a problem.
