Redesigning the University of Houston's Football Game-Day Parking

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.

As part of the new parking strategy, text-to-pay was offered on lots throughout the campus for the first time.

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.

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.

After joining the Big 12 Conference, the University of Houston decided to revamp its football game-day parking design and strategy to accommodate anticipated crowds of up to 40,000 people. Photos courtesy of Walter P Moore

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.