Managing Travel for Planned Special Events

Abstract

This paper describes how planned special events have occurred for many years causing varying impacts on traffic. Small events have had a minimal impact and were usually handled by police. As events became larger, more players were involved including traffic engineers, law enforcement, emergency medical services, and fire departments. More recently, the Homeland Security Agency has become a partner in these events. Planned special events often impact roadways more than the normal morning and afternoon weekday peak traffic flow periods. Assuming 250 business days per year and two rush periods per day, there are about 500 weekday peak traffic low periods. Contrast this number with the yearly number of Planned Special Events in the following cities: (1) New York City has more than 5,000 special events a year; (2) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is host to more than 4,500 special events a year; (3) Los Angeles, California has more than 2,000 special events a year; (4) San Diego, California is home to more than 1,000 special events a year; and (5) Dallas, Texas hosts more than 700 special events each year. The impact that planned special events can have on a community or region can be significant and if not properly planned for and operated can cause delays and frustration for the traveling public as well as the event attendees.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.