Special Event Studies focusing on Visitation Spikes during Texas A&M Football Gamedays 

Date and Time: 8/29/2022
Location: Juniper/Laurel

Presenter: Michael Gerke, , Texas A&M Transportation Institute

  

 

 

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

For six weekends every fall, Bryan-College Station plays host to the Texas A&M football team and their opponents. These games usually occur on Saturday in the afternoon or evening but in some cases, they can happen on Thursday or Friday and as early as 10 am. Since 2017, five of the thirty-two home games have become top ten in all time attendance at Kyle Field (Texas A&M’s football stadium), which seats approximately 102,000 people.

Depending on the opponent, day, and time it can be hard to determine when exactly one might begin to see spikes in visitations to Bryan-College Station and the businesses around the area. One unique tradition that Texas A&M has is ‘Midnight Yell’ where fans gather at Kyle field the night before a game and practice the ‘Yells’, this tradition adds to the uncertainty in the visitation pattern in the area. Generally, the visitation peak is expected to begin several hours before the game but due to events like ‘Midnight Yell’ it might be more appropriate to expect the visitation peaks to begin the day before the games occur.

To better understand the visitor time and location spikes, and to better understand the additional demand on the transportation network for the Bryan-College Station area, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) is conducting an analysis of Point-of-Interest (POI) weekly data. The POI data will allow us to get an understanding of how large the visitor spikes are from a normal day and where the largest spikes occur by time of the day and business types. From this analysis we are expecting to understand how travel patterns change during the week leading up to the gamedays or other special events such as graduation day.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY