Buses and Trains Are Backbone of Plan to Get Ticket Holders to the Super Bowl

Courtesy of New York Times by Nate Schweber.  Next year’s Super Bowl will be the first to be played in an uncovered stadium in a cold-weather region.

Organizers, who hope it will be the Super Bowl of mass transit, announced plans on Monday that they said would use buses and rails to move more people to and from the game than for any Super Bowl before.

Coordinators for Super Bowl XLVIII and transportation officials made it clear that driving to the nearby MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford should be the least desirable option on the day of the game, Feb. 2, because parking will be very limited and tight security will make traveling around the stadium difficult. In addition, they said, if the weather is inclement, driving conditions could be hazardous.

About 400,000 visitors are expected to descend on the New York region in the week before the Super Bowl and about 80,000 will attend the game itself, officials said.

New York City subways, New Jersey Transit and PATH trains will have about the same level of service as during weekday rush periods. For the game, the host committee will operate a bus fleet called the Fan Express to carry people to and from five sites in Manhattan and four in New Jersey. The buses will cost $51 round trip, and one lane of the Lincoln Tunnel will be dedicated to them.

“The bus piece is different and new,” Mr. Kelly said. “It’s like the Olympics model.”

Public transit is especially crucial to this year’s Super Bowl because only about 13,000 parking spaces will be available at MetLife Stadium. The rest of the more than 28,000 spaces there will be taken up by trucks used to televise the game and to provide entertainment.

“If there’s any region that knows how to deal with public transportation issues,” said Jonathan Tisch, an owner of the New York Giants and one of the chairmen of the host committee, “it’s this region.”

 

 

Tags: Mass Transit, Superbowl

Category: Featured, General Update, Transit News