First Posted: 11/1/2014
COLUMBUS – The game plan is in place long before kickoff.
That’s true for Urban Meyer and Ohio State’s football team. And it’s true for the people who orchestrate traffic and parking when 108,000 people converge on Ohio Stadium for a Buckeyes game.
One of the key players in planning how all those cars, vans and RV’s get in and out of the campus area on game days is Beth Snoke, a 1983 Elida High School graduate, who is OSU’s director of transportation and traffic management.
An Ohio State football game brings an estimated 36,000 to 38,000 cars into the area around the stadium, not including people who might park and walk some distance.
And it’s not just the people who have tickets for the game who are driving into and out of the area. “We estimate at any given game we have another 50,000 to 80,000 sitting outside (the stadium),” Snoke said.
Unlike some schools which have banned tailgating during games, Ohio State permits the parties outside the stadium to go on uninterrupted while the game is being played.
The job of getting everybody into campus or nearby starts hours before kickoff and ends long after the game does.
For a night game like Saturday night’s match-up with Illinois, traffic management personnel start work around seven hours before kickoff and are on the job until around 2 a.m.
Much like OSU offensive coordinator Tom Herman calls plays from the press box high atop Ohio Stadium, there is a command post on the press box level where representatives of the Ohio State campus police, the Franklin County sheriff’s office and the Columbus police and fire departments oversee traffic flow.
There are around 250 police officers directing traffic at any game. There are another 280 people working the parking lots and garages for day games and around 400 working those lots for night games.
Ohio State is a high traffic area on any day with an estimated 80,000 people on campus every day, counting students, employees, visitors and people going to the university hospitals. But football games are different because the traffic is concentrated in a few hours.
Noon crowds tend to arrive early and get in their seats before kickoff while afternoon and night games seem to have more last-minute arrivals, Snoke said.
Maybe the biggest challenge in traffic control isn’t getting people into the area for games but getting them out after a night game.
“Sometimes it works better than others. When it’s a night game and it’s a two-point difference – nightmare,” Snoke said. “Instead of the noon games where everyone goes back to their parking lot, fires up the grill and has another hot dog, nobody does that at midnight. That is a really tough time to get cars in and out in an efficient manner when everyone wants to leave at the same time.
“All in all it works very well. We hear from people who travel to a lot of away games that we handle it very efficiently,” she said.
While Snoke’s job involves getting 108,000 into the stadium, she hasn’t been able to watch an Ohio State game for years. She spends most of the time on game days in her office on Kenny Road.
“I can’t even remember. Probably when I was a student,” she said, when asked the last time she saw an OSU game. “Once in a while we’ll go up to the command center in the press box and check in that everything is going well. But I’m up there for about five minutes,” she said.
A few other facts and figures:
• The biggest traffic day at a football game was probably the 2006 Michigan game.
“From my personal experience, it was OSU-Michigan when we were No. 1 and No. 2,” Snoke said. “We didn’t have a limit on RV’s, we didn’t have assigned spots then. We had RV’s arriving on Wednesday. There was a men’s home basketball game on Friday night. It seemed like people just kept coming and coming,” Snoke said.
• The biggest traffic day of the school year after football games is freshman move-in day.
“People wouldn’t consider that, but it’s a huge day,” Snoke said. “We are probably here at 5:30 or 6 o’clock in the morning and leave around 5:30 or 6 in the evening. That’s a busy day.
“The OHSAA events — the boys basketball tournament and the state track meet — are busy too because they’re during the day.”
• There are 6,000 season parking passes issued.
• Twelve shuttles take fans from the west campus parking lots to the Sisson parking lot near the stadium, just across the river from the stadium. Four shuttles run from a disability lot and one runs from a parking lot at Don Scott Airport.
• Around 30 cars are towed on an average football Saturday, mostly cars which have not been moved from pass-only lots by 5 a.m.
