Center for Transportation Research and Education

About the research

Memorial Stadium at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is the home of the Nebraska Cornhuskers football team. It is commonly referred as the “third-largest city” in Nebraska on game days. The stadium holds the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) record of consecutive sellouts for every game since 1962, a streak of more than 300 games. With the extended capacity of more than 85,000, game days are typically found to impact the travel pattern of Lincoln and its neighboring regions. As a result, improved traffic management strategies need to be undertaken to effectively handle the increased traffic during these days and thereby improve the convenience of the game attendees.

The purpose of this project is to find out the impacts of game day on travel pattern and route choice behaviors. INRIX data available through Nebraska Department of Roads will be used to explore past several years of data to generate travel time reliability curves and thereby estimate shockwave lengths. It is expected that the impacts will vary depending on the schedule and also the opponents.

The project will develop a framework that will provide insights of the possible impacts of the game days and help NDOR to implement active traffic assignment to better effectively manage traffic, and thereby reduce congestion.