Seamless Parking at the University of Houston Improves the Game-Day Experience for Football Fans
By Jaime Snyder, CAPP, and Neil Hart, MBA, CAPP, CASP
Anyone who has ever attended either a college or professional football game can attest that parking is critical to the overall experience. Although some fans park their vehicles and head right into the stadium, others often queue up hours before a game to secure their preferred parking spot to tailgate.
Following the game, thousands of fans and their vehicles concurrently attempt to exit the parking lots surrounding the stadium only to find themselves stuck in traffic. This experience of sitting in post-game gridlock can dampen the enjoyment of even the most enthusiastic fans.
In 2023, the University of Houston (UH) vowed to improve the overall fan experience, from ingress to egress, by redesigning its game-day parking design and strategy.
Game-Day Parking Overview
UH is a large, urban public university located in the fourth largest city in the United States. Established in 1927, the university has a current student population of approximately 47,000.
UH Parking and Transportation Services (PTS) provides numerous programs and services to the UH community. This includes maintaining and overseeing more than 25,000 parking spaces located in six garages and dozens of parking lots, including two satellite campuses.
In July 2023, UH joined the Big 12 Conference, precipitating the decision to reimagine its football game-day parking design and strategy. Crowds upward of 40,000 people were expected for home games against high-powered teams in the conference.
To ensure a seamless parking experience for fans, UH hired Walter P Moore as a parking consultant to create new objectives for the game-day parking strategy. The first step involved recognizing how game-day parking was addressed during previous football seasons. This included a clear understanding of how UH approached parking and traffic, the communications practices it used, any tools and technology employed on game day, and how UH implemented signage and wayfinding.
Effective, Efficient Game-Day Parking
As the parking consultant to UH, Walter P Moore designed a multi-tiered approach to address game-day parking in time for the 2023 UH football season. To ensure 8,000 parking spaces were available to accommodate the 40,000 fans, the strategy included increasing the use of prepaid parking passes, as hardly any single-game ticket holders purchased parking in advance. Improving the “Know Before You Go” information involved complete website updates to streamline prepaid parking purchases while also providing directions to specific parking lots and sending an email to ticket holders with this information in advance of the game. These technological improvements helped reduce or reassign staffing while concurrently improving the overall parking operation.
The next step involved implementing consistent pricing tiers. This entailed clearly delineating the parking areas on campus and identifying specific locations for the pricing tiers. The reassignment of designated lots for donors and prepaid-only, game-day, and cash-only parkers were reflected in the pricing tiers.
A concerted effort was also made to improve parking staff efficiency by minimizing cash transactions and reducing staff redundancy in certain parking areas. Parking staff were also reassigned to various locations throughout the campus to assist at shuttle stops and text-to-pay lots, provide directions to the stadium, remind fans of the stadium’s clear-bag policy, and offer QR codes that included Waze and Google map directions to fans unfamiliar with the campus layout.
Finally, a thorough examination of campus game-day parking strategies at other universities that have comparable attendance and parking spaces was conducted to compare their best practices to those of UH.
Past Parking Pains
Previously, the highest attended UH football game occurred in 2022 against the University of Kansas when 30,317 fans were on campus. Approximately 16% of fans in attendance parked on campus with slightly more than 4,800 vehicles.
During the typical UH game day, donor parking lots were only filled to 60% on average. Cash and credit cards were accepted in all paid lots as well as all non-gated lots. Additionally, parking locations were identified by names — for example, the Elgin Street Garage — and different online platforms labeled parking lots inconsistently. Cumulatively, these factors resulted in a very labor-intensive operation for UH parking staff.
Compounding these problems, game-day parking was only allowed in certain lots, minimizing the available inventory. Furthermore, only 1% of fans prepaid for parking, likely because prepaid rates and game-day rates were the same. Because the process for tracking donor parking passes was outdated, the passes could be illegally transferred to other fans.
Among other issues, no integration existed between the online football ticket sales platform and the prepaid parking pass platform. Meanwhile, game days saw little to no recreational vehicle (RV) traffic on campus. Because higher rates can be charged for RV parking, a potential revenue stream was going unrealized.
Finally, several other game-day parking issues had to be resolved. For example, vendors were parking in the garage located closest to the stadium, and a manual process was used to check them into their allotted spaces, increasing labor expenses and potential for fraud. The UH shuttle system used to transport fans from perimeter locations to the stadium needed an overhaul, while a centralized rideshare area did not exist.
The use of manual hand counts of vehicles complicated efforts to determine accurate estimates of the total occupancy in surface lots. Little to no communication occurred within the traffic control team as no pre- or post-event meetings were conducted, and the university lacked the ability to communicate with traffic officers during game day.
New Parking Plans
The new UH game-day parking management system implemented for the 2023 football season was divided into four separate strategic components: a communications plan, operations staffing and planning, technology, and signage and rideshare.
To increase the sale of parking passes ahead of game day, the communications plan included wording to encourage fans to purchase prepaid passes when buying single-game tickets on the UH website. This option took the form of a notification box that appeared when fans did not purchase parking when buying single-game tickets. Similarly, the ticket confirmation email was modified to include a link to purchase parking.
The three UH websites were also streamlined to enable fans to purchase parking in their choice of available lots with their game-day tickets. For the 2024 season, a Waze link with an interactive map will be included in the parking pass confirmation email to guide them to the appropriate parking garage or lot.
The communications plan also called for sending fans a “Know Before You Go” email in the days before the game that included detailed information about parking locations and for using hangtags that included the parking location and assigned lot color to sort donor vehicles and season-ticket-holder vehicles to their proper lots.
Separate communications were developed and executed to educate students, faculty, and staff about where they could park on game day with their valid UH parking permit without having to pay the game-day parking fee. These communications included multiple emails in the week leading up to game day that explained they could use the text-to-pay lots in addition to the gameday only lots, a new addition to the 2023 season.
Operations Staffing and Planning
The operations staffing and planning strategy involved implementing a game-specific traffic control plan that included meetings before and after games and instituting direct communications between PTS and the traffic control lead to provide PTS with dotted-line authority to traffic control officers. The strategy also called for a new event management system to manage the vendor process implemented for the 2024 season.
Game-day parking rates were reconfigured to create a clear and easy rate plan. All donor lots closest to the stadium were considered premium lots and assigned a higher rate. Lots farther away from the stadium were assigned a lower rate. Prepaid parking for these lots also was priced as much as $10 lower compared to the fee for reserving a space on game day.
As part of its specifications for lot designations, the strategy changed lot names from numbers or names to colors. For example, Lot 16D was renamed the Blue Lot. These designations were coordinated across all platforms — ticket website, signage, and parking purchasing website — to ensure continuity and reduce confusion among buyers.
Certain donor lots were designated as pre-paid only for single games and were then opened, if they had vacancies, to other vehicles in search of parking one hour before kickoff. Payment was taken on game day but only at perimeter lots, and cash payment was limited to the Pink Garage. Finally, text-to-pay was offered on lots throughout the campus for the first time.
Regarding RV parking, the consultant team reviewed five potential spots with UH before deeming the Green Lot as the best option. Typically empty during games despite its proximity to the stadium, the Green Lot can be easily controlled for game-day RV parking. The ease with which RVs can enter and exit the Green Lot maximized the number of RVs that can use the lot while not impeding traffic to other lots.
Technology
The new event management system implemented for game-day parking provides a more robust method to integrate with the ticketing system, VIP management, and real-time reporting, and includes an option to manage vendor parking in the Orange Garage and Black Lot, which is slated for the 2024 season.
A parking count and guidance system is scheduled to be installed by the 2025 season, if not before, to monitor occupancy in each of the surface lots.
Signage and Rideshare
A wayfinding system was installed that uses dynamic message signs for exterior roads, temporary static signs for interior roads, and feather-flag lot-designation signs at the entry to each lot. Clear, concise signs were established at text-to-pay lots, and more visible signage was installed at the two shuttle stops, both of which comply with the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The dedicated rideshare area located near the stadium was geofenced with virtual boundaries so riders could only be dropped off or picked up in the designated area. The rideshare area was strategically located to reduce traffic congestion but facilitate good pedestrian access. The plan also included a shuttle from the rideshare location to the stadium. Finally, significant wayfinding signage was installed to seamlessly guide vehicles to and from the stadium.
System Implementation
The UH event parking management system was rolled out in time for the 2023 football season. Highlights from its implementation include:
- 5,707 text-to-pay transactions occurred during the 2023 season.
- Text-to-pay average revenue per game was $29,025.
- Shuttle usage totaled 5,000 riders per game, up from 4,300 the previous year.
- Successful implementation of after-action meetings/briefings held after each home game in 2023 resulted in ongoing pivots to the parking management system based upon lessons learned after each game.
Because of their peripheral location, the text-to-pay lots enabled fans to get to their parking space more quickly, reducing roadway congestion and decreasing labor costs.
Future Parking Plans
Immediately following the 2023 UH football season, UH PTS and Walter P Moore huddled to discuss their takeaways from the parking management system. First, it was critical that all parties understood their relationships and how they contributed to success. Next, it was deemed essential to start traffic control before vehicles arrived at the stadium and stay vigilant with the traffic plans put in place for game days. Finally, PTS built upon the lessons learned during their after-action review following each game.
Although implementation of the UH parking management system in 2023 was deemed a success, additional initiatives are in place for the 2024 football season. These include increasing pre-sale communication for game-day parking, developing an interactive parking map, continual updating of websites, integrating parking software platforms, installing lot occupancy technology in the form of parking count and guidance systems, updating additional signage, and modifying the vendor tracking and management system.
JAIME SNYDER, CAPP, is a senior associate and senior parking consultant in Walter P Moore’s Structures Group. She can be reached at jsnyder@walterpmoore.com.
NEIL HART, MBA, CAPP, CASP, is assistant vice president of parking and transportation services at the University of Houston. He can be reached at nfhart@central.uh.edu.
