In a regrettable failure on the nation’s biggest stage, one of the defining images of a forgettable Super Bowl will be hordes of attendees swarming transit platforms in futile attempts at ingress and egress.
The Super Bowl was billed as the “first ever Mass-Transit Super Bowl”: “With parking spaces at the stadium severely restricted for the game, Super Bowl organizers decided to rely heavily on trains and buses, which are usually used on a considerably smaller scale for Jets and Giants games,” reports Matt Flegenheimer.
In another article, Mike Frassinelli and Ryan Hutchins claim the 28,000 people who used transit to attend the game totaled “far more people than officials had expected, and it proved too much for the transit system to handle.”
Taking the brunt of the traffic (and the complaints) was New Jersey Transit: “Crowds boarded en masse at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan and traveled to Secaucus Junction, where people were then required to show game tickets before boarding connecting trains to the stadium, which is in East Rutherford. It took a while,” says Flegenheimer. Delays were so bad after the game, in fact, that attendees were encouraged to stay in the stadium. Lines weren’t fully clear until 2.5 hours after the game. The transit system even lucked out that the game wasn’t closer: “the situation would probably have been worse if the game had been closer and a lot of Denver fans had chosen to stay to the end."
