Episode 87. Revisited: At the Intersection of Engineering and Psychology — How a diverse team manages special event traffic.

Bernie Fette (host) (00:14):

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Thinking Transportation. Conversations about how we get ourselves and the stuff we need from one place to another. I’m Bernie Fette with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Earlier this summer, country music superstar George Strait performed at Texas A&M University for 110,905 fans–setting the record for the largest single concert in U.S. history. With that many people gathering in a confined space–all arriving and departing at basically the same time–it’s reasonable to expect traffic turmoil on a grand scale. To make events likes that one a success, you need people like Debbie Albert, a research engineer at TTI, with solid experience in special event traffic management. As Debbie would tell you, she’s an expert at managing chaos. And as we get set for a new season of Division I football and the traffic that comes with it right around the corner, it’s a good time to revisit our conversation with Debbie from last year to hear again about the work that she and her team do. Deb, thank you for setting aside some time to talk with us, especially on a day when you’re obviously in between special event traffic assignments.

Debbie Albert (guest) (01:13):

Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you.

Bernie Fette (01:18):

So as I was getting ready for our conversation today, I was trying to get a sense, almost explain to myself what exactly it is your expertise is, and these are just my words, but it sounds like you’re an expert in what we might call non-daily traffic challenges that have lots of moving parts and lots of minute-by-minute changes. Please tell me if I have that right or how you would describe what you do — especially explained for people who are unfamiliar with what traffic engineers do.

Debbie Albert (01:51):

I pretty much usually tell people I’m an expert in managing chaos. That might be an appropriate …

Bernie Fette (01:56):

Okay, great.

Debbie Albert (01:57):

… appropriate term for what we do, um, or you know, give people a good visualization of what we do. But it’s a little bit, you know, traffic engineer, a little bit traffic planner, part psychologist, trying to figure out what it is that people will do and how they’re going to be arriving or departing events and then even throw in a little bit of marketing or public information officer twist to it.

Bernie Fette (02:21):

Okay. That sounds like no small task at all, but can we start with a definition from you? Can you tell us what makes a special event special? Maybe cite some examples.

Debbie Albert (02:33):

I think there’s a couple of different things. One is that generally events are, you know, something that people are really looking forward to, things like graduation, like A&M is hosting today or you know, concerts or the football games and people have invested quite a bit of their time and money into those and the parking part of it or the traffic part of it can be their first and last impression and how well things go. So if you think back to maybe the last time you went to an event and how difficult or easy it was for you to get there, that can really make or break that event. And so what we do is kind of under a microscope for people versus kind of your more day-to-day traffic commuting. The other thing I think that makes it a little bit different is a lot of times you get people who are doing things during these events that they might not normally do and so they may not take the time or effort to go out and do some extra planning when they’re going to these events. Um, you know, not checking their traffic app to make sure that they know the directions of how to get to where they’re going or even planning and not coming until the last minute when they need to plan on a little bit of extra time or even stopping on the side of the road to let people out of their car. You know, most people wouldn’t do that on the side of a roadway when they’re driving during normal daily conditions.

Bernie Fette (03:54):

It sounds like some people are expecting things to be predictable when someone in a position like yours knows that they’re going to be anything but predictable.

Debbie Albert (04:03):

Yes, absolutely. We do a lot of planning and then have to think on our feet and respond or make changes based on what happens for that specific event.

Bernie Fette (04:14):

Okay. I think that the answer to this might be obvious on some level, but why is it that the traffic is so congested with these events, the major university graduation ceremonies, concerts, big sporting events? Why is the traffic so congested with these events? Not only once people get to the event, but for everyone who’s on their way there? Could you explain that a little?

Debbie Albert (04:41):

Well, I think what it is is we end up with these kind of intense periods of demand and we kind of categorize the events into two different categories. You may have your events where a football game for example, everybody comes and arrives, you know, kind of at the same time. They all wanna be there for the beginning of the football game and then they all leave at the same time at the end of the football game. But then you also have the come-and-go events. For example, in the city of Glendale where I worked in Arizona, we hosted the NFL Experience back in 2008. And so you had people coming and going all day long. Um, they weren’t going to be there just for that specific timeframe of an event. So you get these intense periods of demand and they’re different for each of those two types of events. And a lot of times the roadways and the operation systems, the traffic signal systems aren’t meant to handle those really intense periods of traffic.

Bernie Fette (05:37):

And you were talking about demand, and maybe to simplify this a little bit for some people, if we look at this as a supply and demand picture, the demand that you’re talking about is the demand for roadway space and the supply is just the amount of that space that’s available?

Debbie Albert (05:53):

Well I think it’s that and it’s also time. Think about a traffic signal. There’s only 60 seconds in a minute and if you have to divide up the time that you’re giving to each direction of traffic, that may change depending on what the event is and how long or how much time you wanna give people coming into the event versus that background traffic or the people who are trying to get around and do their daily business.

Bernie Fette (06:17):

I’m glad you mentioned the background traffic there because that’s another thing I was wondering about. Apart from the event that’s causing a lot of the chaos as you describe it, you still have people every day trying to get to other places that might be sort of near the event or at least near that chaos within that radius. They might be going on an errand or to an appointment, but their more mundane travel (if we could call it that) just adds to the difficulty that you face. Is that an accurate way of looking at it?

Debbie Albert (06:47):

That certainly can contribute to it. Again, if you think you know football here at Kyle Field at Texas A&M University, you know, we’re trying to get everybody into a certain area of the campus. Well if somebody is wanting to go out and do some grocery shopping or meet friends before a tailgate or meet friends off campus, they may be going in the opposite direction of where we’re trying to move the mass amounts of people. And so that creates a special challenge we were talking about earlier with this, what makes a special event special.

Bernie Fette (07:22):

Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> The answer to this question might be a bit obvious too, to some people, anyway, but there are those who might wonder, why don’t you just build wider highways and streets so everybody can get to the big game or the big concert or the big event without so many traffic headaches? What do you say in response to people with that question?

Debbie Albert (07:40):

Well, despite their names, freeways are not actually free. It does cost a lot of money to be able to build the infrastructure, the roadways, the traffic signals, even to run some of the transit operations that we run for special events that cost a lot of money to be able to operate or to build and maintain. And so we are part of the public service industry and we wanna do good by the people who are paying taxes and funding these facilities. And so it, it’s just not financially practical to be able to build the roadways as big as what you would need for these special events.

Bernie Fette (08:22):

And not only the financial side of it, but then there’s also just the space issues and the environmental issues that you would have to deal with in building roads that big. Right?

Debbie Albert (08:31):

Yeah. Nobody wants to live next to the 10-lane freeway or the giant arterial street or major street that feeds these stadiums and then if they’re just sitting there not used during a normal day’s traffic, it’s just a waste.

Bernie Fette (08:48):

Right. Okay. Please walk us through what you do when you tackle an assignment like the ones that you work on. Where do you start, when do you start and how do you proceed through the major steps on the way to D-day?

Debbie Albert (09:04):

It really does depend on the different type of event we talked about earlier. You’ve got these large special events that have everybody coming at one time versus the come-and-go event and you, so it depends on how big the event, what type of the event it is. Just for example, with Kyle Field, it’s pretty much a year-round ongoing thing. We’re meeting with people year-round talking about what to expect for the next season, where are we going to have to adjust our plans? But the intensity of that really, you know, starts to ramp up in the late spring, early summer timeframe. Just to give kind of an example for you, some of the major steps or milestones that we go through, you know, identifying, you know, what are the needs and expectations, how much parking is going to be needed, what are the expectations as far as getting people into and out of those parking spaces, is there a priority that needs to be placed on certain areas?

Debbie Albert (10:05):

Another key element is identifying what the traffic routes are to and from those parking spaces and in particular those routes out of the parking spaces. You know, we wanna try and maximize the efficiency in getting people out of those parking spaces using different things like contraflow lanes where we may have traffic running in the opposite direction than it would normally be running on the street. Then if there’s some available or unused sections of roadway, you know, those might be good places to be able to put bus routes to be able to move more people. Those then culminate in the development of what we call traffic control plans and those are the roadmaps, if you will, of where you put each of the barricades, where you put all of the signs, where you put the staff to be able to help direct traffic. Throughout the whole process, there’s a lot of communications and engagement with all sorts of different stakeholders. It’s not just the traffic people who sit in an isolated room who are developing the traffic plans. We’re talking to law enforcement, we’re talking to the stakeholders, business owners, the business community; what are their needs? And then that process is just kind of iterative over and over. You develop your plans, you let people know what it is you’re planning to do, educate them on it, take their feedback and make adjustments as needed.

Bernie Fette (11:30):

You do a really nice job of describing all of this in a very systematic and logical fashion and I know that what you actually face once you are out there on the roadway and watching as things unfold, that it’s not quite as neat. I think it probably gets a little bit closer to that chaos that you were mentioning earlier.

Debbie Albert (11:54):

Uh, yes, we do start with a plan and we actually try to come up with, you know, some scenarios that we expect might happen so that we’re prepared and can react quicker if things don’t go exactly the way we want them to. But you do have to make split decisions. We say don’t fall in love with the decision you make because chances are you’re going to be making a new decision as more information becomes available and you have to adjust to whatever is thrown at you.

Bernie Fette (12:21):

Can you share some examples of the various disruptions or the changes in conditions that you might face when you’re actually, you know, past the planning stage and you’re in the execution stage, maybe a, an example or two of something that was unexpected and how you and your team managed to shift gears?

Debbie Albert (12:41):

So a great example is, you know, something that you hope doesn’t happen but is not necessarily unexpected and that’s just a crash. I mean if we had a crash on one of the major roads into or out of the stadium either before or after that can have a pretty significant impact on how people are able to get to or from the event. And we’ve done things like making sure that we have extra police officers in the area that are assigned as kind of roamers so that they can quickly respond to whatever that crash is. Or coordinating with some of our stakeholders, the the other local communities in the area to make sure that we have tow trucks that are in close proximity so that they can respond again rapidly. We wanna make sure everybody is safe, but then we also wanna quickly clear the incident and get people moving in on their way. Other things would be like traffic signal malfunctions, if the power goes out, making sure we have technicians that are on call to be able to respond to those. One of my favorite ones was from an Arizona, the very first Fiesta Bowl we hosted. The Budweiser Clydesdales showed up and didn’t let anybody know they were coming. So where do you park the Budweiser Clydesdales and make sure that they can help people have the great experience that we all know and love with those sort of pageantry things that go on with large events?

Bernie Fette (14:06):

You mentioned that example from your work in Arizona. I’m curious about what else you might have picked up in your previous gig at the City of Glendale that you might have been able to apply here. I guess each of these events is distinct or unique in its own way, but maybe there are things that they share in common.

Debbie Albert (14:26):

Yeah, I mean there are some kind of what I would call maybe guiding principles. Things like after the event, it may not be intuitive to the people who are leaving the event, but you know, trying to get people away from the stadium or away from the parking areas kind of as quickly as possible. So you may end up having to send people in the wrong direction of what they would normally wanna go because it’s in everyone’s best interest to not cross vehicle paths. We were talking earlier about creating time and space, but every time you have to stop people to allow a different direction of travel flow, that just creates inefficiencies in the system. So kind of sending everybody out in a different direction. We did a lot of that in Arizona. They do a lot of that here, which I think helps make the plan flow a lot smoother.

Debbie Albert (15:19):

The use of command centers to make sure that you’re communicating with everybody and letting everyone know what those decisions are that you’re making. There’s a lot of similarities uh, with those, the use of reversible lanes or contraflow lanes such as what we do here on Wellborn Road. Normally Wellborn Road is two lanes in each direction with a center turn lane. For post football games, we have four lanes headed south out of town or away from the stadium. We allow one lane to come in, but we try to move the majority of the traffic away. Those are some of the key elements that you’ll find similar in a lot of different venues.

Bernie Fette (16:00):

Part of how you manage chaos.

Debbie Albert (16:02):

Yes. One other thing would be kind of that close coordination and collaboration with the stakeholders, law enforcement to make sure everybody’s on the same page and we can all respond.

Bernie Fette (16:13):

That’s actually what I was going to ask you about next, so I appreciate you taking that turn. I’m interested, since you’ve already talked about coordinating with law enforcement agencies in the event of a crash and other parties, can you talk a little about the challenges that don’t have anything to do with traffic — like the ones that emerge when you have close to a dozen different jurisdictions or government layers, all with some degree of ownership in making these events a success?

Debbie Albert (16:45):

Yeah, I think it’s key to really first recognize that there are different needs or there are different competing needs and it’s not that one is right or wrong, it’s just everybody has a different perspective. And so really working hard to bring everybody together to try and understand what those needs are and do your best to get to yes. You may not necessarily always be able to say yes or you may not be able to give them exactly what they want, but being able to deliver on what their needs are and, and get to that yes. We have great partnerships with all of the stakeholders and it’s because of years and years of that close coordination and follow through on what you say you’re going to deliver is key to making those partnerships and making those relationships work.

Bernie Fette (17:38):

I’m not asking you to run through necessarily a long list, but whenever we talk about stakeholders, I’m wondering if the people listening could get a sense from you about how many organizations and different layers of players that we’re talking about here. Could you just give us a sense of who we’re talking about?

Debbie Albert (17:58):

Well, in the case of the Kyle Field Transportation Plan, you’ve got the university partners, which is transportation services, athletics, university PD, university emergency management, the marketing and communication. So I mean there’s, there’s a bunch of folks just within the university. Then when you step outside the university footprint, you start to work with the City of College Station and their law enforcement, their fire department, then Texas Department of Transportation, the City of Bryan, local merchants and businesses, the Chamber of Commerce. It just kind of expands exponentially in, in addition to working with them to develop the plan to try and meet everyone’s needs, they’re also great resources and being able to communicate to all of their different channels what the plan is, why it is that way. And so it really is a two-way street.

Bernie Fette (18:55):

Where else have you been able to take what you’ve learned here; well, learned here and your previous uh, position in Arizona? Where else have you been able to take this expertise beyond football game traffic?

Debbie Albert (19:10):

Obviously, A&M; they host somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-ish different events each year, so football is usually the highest profile of them, but things like graduations, baseball games, basketball games, so all of those special events. But then beyond that, there’s a lot of things that happen in the community that are not special events, but they kind of act like ’em, like large construction projects. And so we’ve been able to take these relationships and the tools that we’ve been able to develop and apply them to those construction projects and making sure that we’re coordinating with our partners and communicating out to the public what’s happening to them or what’s happening for them related to traffic.

Bernie Fette (19:57):

What about things outside of the home base here? I think I recall that you’ve helped people with events like the San Antonio Rodeo or maybe other sporting events elsewhere.

Debbie Albert (20:08):

Yeah, there are folks that are on our team that are working with the San Antonio Rodeo, who’ve gone to other SEC schools to be able to help them come up with ideas for their traffic plans. I’ve worked closely with the Super Bowl folks on different traffic plans, so there’s just a variety of of different users.

Bernie Fette (20:29):

You sound like you almost understated that Super Bowl reference a little bit. That sounds like a big deal. How did they come to contact you? Did they just hear through the grapevine, what a great job you guys were doing, managing chaos and said, Ooh, we’ve got some chaotic mess here too that we need some help with?

Debbie Albert (20:45):

Well, that really comes back through the work with the City of Glendale and because we’ve hosted a number of Super Bowls and the company that provided our shuttle service, our shuttle operations at the City of Glendale, they were the transportation consultant for the NFL, and so we’ve just maintained relationships with them.

Bernie Fette (21:05):

I’m wondering what you might have expected me to ask you about that I haven’t asked you about.

Debbie Albert (21:12):

One thing that we really try to do as part of our special event planning is to really encourage people to take ownership of a kind of their event or their experience in traveling to, whether it’s a football game or graduation or concert, and to take some time to do a little bit of planning. And that’s that messaging and managing expectations I think is really one of the key things that the engineers don’t necessarily typically include as part of their toolbox. And so, you know, if you’re in a position to be developing plans for these large special events, keep that communication and outreach in the forefront of your mind. And repeat and repeat and repeat on that element.

Bernie Fette (22:04):

My last question: what is it that motivates you to show up to work every day?

Debbie Albert (22:11):

That’s a great question. You know, it’s a lot of fun. I said earlier we are under a microscope. It’s so, you know, you can take a lot of heat on it, but it’s a lot of fun to be able to work with an amazing team and find success in being able to deliver on your plans.

Bernie Fette (22:28):

And where else do you get to have a job that actually somehow from what you were saying earlier, brings notes of psychology into the mix?

Debbie Albert (22:39):

Yeah, <laugh>, my mom told me when I was studying school that I needed to stay away from the “ologies.” <Laugh>

Bernie Fette (22:44):

<laugh>. Well, I’m sure she would be proud, nonetheless. Debbie Albert, research engineer at TTI and an expert in managing roadway chaos. Thank you, Debbie, so much for sharing your time and expertise with us. We appreciate it.

Debbie Albert (23:01):

Thanks, Bernie.

Bernie Fette (23:04):

We can’t build transportation infrastructure to accommodate year-round the kind of travel demand that’s associated with infrequent major events. Doing so would be prohibitively expensive and environmentally problematic. So, the most prudent solution is to make the best use of the infrastructure we do have, using every technology tool available. That’s an approach that experts at TTI have spent years refining. It takes a diverse team, highly skilled in traffic planning and communication, to make a special event successful–from the first car in to the last one out. Thank you for listening. Please take just a minute to give us a review, subscribe and share this episode. And please join us next time for another conversation about getting ourselves and the stuff we need from point A to point B. Thinking Transportation is a production of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, a member of The Texas A&M University System. The show is edited and produced by Chris Pourteau. I’m your host, Bernie Fette. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.