A Playbook to Managing Mega Events

From music concerts to business conferences, major public events can draw thousands of visitors while helping raise a host city’s profile. But helping visitors find their way around a new locality—including navigating an unfamiliar public transportation system—can be a challenge.

Managing the transportation experience for visitors is a task that transit officials at APTA’s TRANSform conference in Boston, MA, said they pay a lot of attention to. Participants on the Ready Set Go: How Agencies Can Capitalize on Special Events panel shared some best practices.

MJ Maynard-Carey, APTA immediate past chair and CEO of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, said that with tourism being such a major driver of Las Vegas’s economy, it is important to make it as easy as possible for visitors to traverse the city. “If we’re going to serve the tourists, we’re going to make it an enjoyable experience (so that) they come back to Las Vegas,” she said.

Maynard-Carey stressed that many of the people who use public transit in Las Vegas and its environs reside locally—sometimes working at the very same attractions that are the object of so much visitor interest. When devising a plan for helping to transport visitors to Las Vegas during a major event, “we’ve got to get the employees there first, because they’re the ones that are doing the work,” she said.

Jay Fox, executive director of the Utah Transit Authority, is a longtime advocate of the “playbook” process also touted by the others on the panel—a comprehensive plan for guiding future transportation system development in the region, as well as devising strategies for dealing with unexpected challenges.

Fox said team members are also key stakeholders in providing good service to riders. He also advocates the importance of team building—one in which each member approaches their work with a sense of accountability. “The most important pronoun to deliver any major event,” Fox told the audience, “Is we.”

Dow Constantine, the CEO of Sound Transit, which serves the Puget Sound area including Seattle, said improving the quality of the ride can be as straightforward as steering riders to different stations during peak service times to prevent overcrowding.

“We’re fortunate to have built our big venues in the valley, downtown, so the train goes right to the baseball park, right to the football, soccer stadium and there’s a station right next to them called Stadium Station. So, if you’ve got all those tens of thousands of people trying to pile off at Stadium Station, you’ve got a challenge.

“But we have two other stations—International District and Pioneer Square—that are just blocks from the venues. We have to figure out how to get people coming from the north to take that first stop, people coming from the south to take their first stop, rather than everyone queuing up to get in the single station,” Constantine said.

India Birdsong Terry, CEO and general manager of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, said that over the years her city has increasingly been chosen as the location for major events—and sometimes multiple events simultaneously. The comparatively smaller size of a city like Cleveland can ease the process of planning major events. “Being able to control all of those at the same time and have a seamless experience, I think is really one of the best advantages of being in a mid-size city where it is easy to get in and out of the airport,” she said.

When it comes to moving masses of people during major events, it is hard to over-prepare. Birdsong Terry recounted how the White House decided on an 11th-hour change-of-venue for a political event to be held in Cleveland several years ago, leaving local officials scrambling. She was glad that the city and agency had already worked out a protocol for handling major events—their playbook—providing vital guidance as they scurried to accommodate the request.

“If you’re given a Secret Service call two days before they come, you need a playbook,” Birdsong Terry said.

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