Super Bowl Rail Service

I stayed away from the station (I took a train that didn't stop there into NY in the morning and took PATH via WTC home at night), and essentially had options for doing that no matter what the day held (take a local bus to Rutherford to go farther out on the Erie lines for example), but what a drag for someone who just wanted to use that station as a normal part of their day. I can understand stupid TSA-level security somewhat for the Superbowl -- though thankfully the result of this is perhaps we've realized how stupid it is to try it for local train travel, but no one has any business screening me for my usual travel from Newark to Ramsey or wherever I'm going; I did not sign up for the Superbowl and don't see why public mass transit should be completely co-opted for such a thing.

Incidentally, I'm sure this wasn't the NFL's motivation, but it at least seems considerate somewhat to the neighbors to not invite an influx of private autos into the area. I remember for years we had to be careful about the route we selected home on Sunday when living in Rutherford. The stadium has never been a very good neighbor.

JoeG wrote:The trip to the game was messed up partly by bad security planning, and in the post 9/11 world, security rules and not much can be done about it, at least in the short term.

If we had leaders with a spine and citizens who chose not to put up with being treated as prisoners to attend a sporting event, you can bet that a lot can be done in the short term.

But we don't, on either front. Keep in mind these are the same fans who had no problem with draconian NFL bag restrictions throughout the season.

It's quite amusing (in a sad way) how the recent Volgograd train station attack was trotted out as an example of why fans needed to be screened.

Too bad no reporter pointed out that said attack was perpetrated by a suicide bomber in front of a security checkpoint.

Something tells me that amassing thousands of people in a confined space, with few means of egress, provides any "security" whatsoever.

If fans were allowed to freely move between trains at Secaucus, the massive crowding and delays there would have been greatly reduced.

I think once again we see that NJT has trouble with 'forecasting'. They wound up with 30k passengers where they were anticipating 15k. I'm not sure why they thought they would only get 15k when EVERY announcement about the game essentially said you had to take the train. I think that was the major failing. On the other hand once that many people show up all at once it's going to take a while to transport them all no matter how good your planning is especially when you are working in an area with limited capacity to stage empty trains.

bleet wrote:I think once again we see that NJT has trouble with 'forecasting'. They wound up with 30k passengers where they were anticipating 15k. I'm not sure why they thought they would only get 15k when EVERY announcement about the game essentially said you had to take the train. I think that was the major failing. On the other hand once that many people show up all at once it's going to take a while to transport them all no matter how good your planning is especially when you are working in an area with limited capacity to stage empty trains.

NJT had no trouble 'forecasting.' How about you read the articles where the NFL and the Host Committee told NJT to expect 8,000 to 12,000 people. Seems to me like they were the ones that had trouble 'forecasting.'

-NO BS

think the NFL deserves part of the blame for this. Here is a comment from http://www.nj.com/super-bowl/index.ssf/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ... again.html:

Agreed 100%. I have been to the "Meadowlands" countless times since the 1970's. Springsteen Concerts, Giants games, USA vs Brazil soccer... several of them 80,000-plus events, especially since the new stadium was built. With a car it's totally manageable. I actually considered buying a ticket for the game (there were many available on stubhub and other trusted resources) but I KNEW that no matter how great an effort NJT was going to put out, there was no way I'd get home in any kind of reasonable manner if I was forced to take the train. Of course I should have just bought a parking pass but on the secondary market they were going for upwards of $250. I decided to use the $ for a vacation and just enjoy the game from home (and considering the quality of the game, I'm glad I did ...). NJT can only do "so much" with limited trackage, trains and possible flow. They did what they would have had to do and you couldn't ask for more. Thank goodness the weather was so amazing - because had their been snow/ice/sub-zero temps and people were standing out there for 2 and a half hours, it could have become a medical issue with exposure.
Can you say lawsuit?
Had there been the normal amount of parking available and if car services drop offs were allowed, it' would have been MUCH better. That's a no-brainer to anyone who's ever been there for an event. Yes, after Springsteen you hang out at your car for 30 or 40 minutes, until some of the flow is gone, and you have a few snacks and chill. Same would have happened here. Or you do like I do and position yourself near an exit and park facing outward so you can "zoom". NJ will probably never get another superbowl, at least not in our lifetime, but if they do in the next 20 years, the NFL has to make allowances for people driving. You cannot possibly push 30,000+ onto mass transit and hope it works in a timely fashion. The articles blasting NJT are infuriating when it was OBVIOUS to anyone with any common sense that it couldn't possibly work out any other way.

It took time, but I believe EVERYONE got home safe, yes?

i just think it would have been better if people weren't trapped in secauces. Also when the game ended, they knew it was going to be avalanche of people . Next time they can add some overflow plans, so its not so chaotic.

srock1028 wrote:

bleet wrote:I think once again we see that NJT has trouble with 'forecasting'. They wound up with 30k passengers where they were anticipating 15k. I'm not sure why they thought they would only get 15k when EVERY announcement about the game essentially said you had to take the train. I think that was the major failing. On the other hand once that many people show up all at once it's going to take a while to transport them all no matter how good your planning is especially when you are working in an area with limited capacity to stage empty trains.

NJT had no trouble 'forecasting.' How about you read the articles where the NFL and the Host Committee told NJT to expect 8,000 to 12,000 people. Seems to me like they were the ones that had trouble 'forecasting.'

-NO BS

Seems everyone -- including NJT -- had trouble forecasting. If they averaged 12k for Giant games and had 22k for one concert without the announcements that you had to use mass transit to get to the stadium it doesn't take a genius to assume the number would be greater for the Superbowl. Prudence tells you to plan for the worst. And for the most part I'm not knocking NJT... the security problems weren't their fault and as someone else pointed out the math of how many people will fit on a train meant it would take awhile to clear the stadium area.

BigDell wrote:Agreed 100%. I have been to the "Meadowlands" countless times since the 1970's. Springsteen Concerts, Giants games, USA vs Brazil soccer... several of them 80,000-plus events, especially since the new stadium was built. With a car it's totally manageable.

An interesting point, but you also have to consider those events all cater to a local crowd. When Seattle and Denver people want to see Springsteen, they wait for him to come to Seattle and Denver. When NYC folks want to see Springsteen, they go to Meadowlands on roads they somewhat know and in cars they own.

As a Cubs fan and Chicago resident, we move thousands upon thousands of people in and out of the area by train for each game. Same for the Sox game - there is (2) CTA stops and (1) Metra stop within blocks. It' a coordination issue - the team, the city, and the transit agencies know the drill, they communicate, and the crowds are handled. It's not exactly fun, but it sure beats driving through the area. Because it's routine, it works. They've been iterating for decades to fine tune the process. A big part of the fiasco is not only NFL predicting half the loads, but NFL and NJT don't have a normal relationship and this event only happened once. There was no dry run, no iteration from the last season...

Hi. -_- I'm watching...

Seriously, I scanned the topic, let's keep it to transit and only directly related politics, and not anything ad hominem. If I missed anything or have deleted a post, no harm no foul to this point, and please use the report function and do not respond.

Clearly there was a problem "on the top" with the planning and design (NFL, NJT, etc) , and some of those must take some blame, but those in the trenches actually moving the trains and handling the crunch of people deserve congratulations for moving 3 times the crowd they signed up for, with an inadequate infrastructure to boot. JS

morris&essex4ever wrote:I think the NFL deserves part of the blame for this. Here is a comment from http://www.nj.com/super-bowl/index.ssf/ ... again.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;:

And by the way - the reason there were transit problems was becuase of congestion. The NFL forced basically only two modes of transportation to the game - either the NFL sponsored Fan Express bus or NJ Transit train., The did not allow hotel shuttles, the only had 10,000 parking spaces, they did not allow people to be dropped off at the stadium and they didn't even allow NJ Transit buses to drop off at the Meadowlands like they normally do.

So it isn't that NJ couldn't handle the Super Bowl - it is the fact the NFL cut off all normal modes of transportation that most people use to get to and from the stadium

Look at that, a sensible comment on nj.com. Who'd a thunk?

nomis wrote:

lirr42 wrote: One of the reasons things work so well at Mets-Willets Point and Yankees-E 153rd Street is the considerable distance from the venue to the station. In both of these cases, it's about a 0.3 mile walk to each of those stations.

By comparison, it's only about 400 feet at the Meadowlands. On Belmont Stakes Day, Belmont Park is frequently overrun with bad crowding at the station gates, and the platforms are 700 feet away from that venue.

To add (as an aside): Philadelphia's stadiums fall into the long distance walk category, while Wrigley and Fenway are not that far of a walk from their transit stations. Only thinking of mass-transit centric cities for now. Maybe a spinoff topic is in order ...

I did some further analysis of how the distance between the venue's egresses and the station makes a big difference here: http://www.thelirrtoday.com/2014/02/a-l ... etter.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Having read a lot of comments on a railroaders blog I think one of the basic problems was, NJ Transit's Meadowlands station. The station's design is not suited to handling really huge crowds. They can't load, move trains and platform the next trains quickly enough to keep up with the kind of surge they had following the Super Bowl.

Transit needed to come up with a figure on how many people they could handle at Meadowlands (with maybe people having to wait 20-25 minutes) and then have told the NFL or whoever: this is what we can do. Anything over that we're going to have major delays.

The criticism I have heard on sports radio -- where many callers said it took 4-5 hours to get from the stadium to Manhattan after the game -- is what kind of numbers was NJ Transit planning for? What were their estimates? Were they realistic?

NJT built a double track heavy duty railroad that apparently has a surprisingly small passenger capacity. As they run it, they apparently can only run 6 trains an hour with a capacity of 1500-2000 each. If the problem is the station, it can probably be fixed. But if the problem is at the other end, that the NJT system infrastructure can only absorb that many passengers per hour, then the problem might be very difficult. In that case it would lead me to say (for the only time in my life) that they should have built a bus lane, because the buses wouldn't be constrained by the "what happens at the other end" problem since the buses could have many different origins/destinations. I am assuming that they could run more than 6 trains an hour if they could figure out where to put them when they left the Meadowlands spur; that is, I am figuring that the railroad could run at least 12 trains an hour on each track. I think running some nonstop (bypassing SEC) would help. One problem with SEC is it is not designed to accommodate large waiting crowds. It has virtually no seating and has no real restaurants. And events that cause large waiting crowds are rare, so I don't know if it would pay to built an infrastructure to accommodate them.
Maybe, in retrospect, they should have put up a giant tent next to SEC to accommodate waiting passengers, having food, maybe some entertainment, etc. But I suspect it will be a long time before a super bowl comes back to the Meadowlands.

JoeG wrote:NJT built a double track heavy duty railroad that apparently has a surprisingly small passenger capacity. As they run it, they apparently can only run 6 trains an hour with a capacity of 1500-2000 each. If the problem is the station, it can probably be fixed. But if the problem is at the other end, that the NJT system infrastructure can only absorb that many passengers per hour, then the problem might be very difficult. In that case it would lead me to say (for the only time in my life) that they should have built a bus lane, because the buses wouldn't be constrained by the "what happens at the other end" problem since the buses could have many different origins/destinations. I am assuming that they could run more than 6 trains an hour if they could figure out where to put them when they left the Meadowlands spur; that is, I am figuring that the railroad could run at least 12 trains an hour on each track. I think running some nonstop (bypassing SEC) would help. One problem with SEC is it is not designed to accommodate large waiting crowds. It has virtually no seating and has no real restaurants. And events that cause large waiting crowds are rare, so I don't know if it would pay to built an infrastructure to accommodate them.
Maybe, in retrospect, they should have put up a giant tent next to SEC to accommodate waiting passengers, having food, maybe some entertainment, etc. But I suspect it will be a long time before a super bowl comes back to the Meadowlands.

I feel like an idea on the infrastructure would be to construct a 5-8 track layup yard on the spur (I see plenty of land just west of the racecourse, although given that it is marsh, it would probably need to be an elevated yard, thus incurring a large capital investment). I'm not sure whether that would help capacity issues or reduce head ways, which I think is more constrained by loading rate (how fast you can board passengers though those small MLV doors), and the signal system. To be honest, I don't see them being able to reduce head ways much more than 2-3 minutes. If anything, what would be (theoretically) better for reducing head ways would be to have built the spur line as a 3 track line all the way to the junction, instead of just having the 3 track setup end just outside the station. This way, when you had to shuttle 30k people out for an event, you could have the incoming shuttles lined up on track 1, while loading from all three platforms. Then, when shuttles were loaded, you would have the trains on track 2 and 3 depart around the same time, parallel to each other until they got to the junction, where priority would be given to one of them to proceed. At least that way, you could pull 2 more empty trains into the platforms around the same time and begin loading those before having the 3rd train sitting on the track 1 platform depart.