When the biggest annual football game comes to town

By Wayne Ting, General Manager of Uber Bay Area

It’s been 31 years since the Bay Area last hosted the Big Game, the country’s largest sports event, and boy are we glad it’s back.

For most of us, game day Sunday will be a day to kick back, watch the game, and eat a large quantity of snacks. (A really large quantity: As a nation, we eat more on that Sunday than on any other day except Thanksgiving.) But when the game comes to your city, things gets much more interesting.

For one thing, there’s the scale: Instead of lasting one day, the festivities last for over a week and the preparations take months. This Saturday San Francisco will kickoff the opening of Super Bowl City with fireworks. The week before the big game, more than a million visitors are expected in the Bay Area for the special events and free concerts.

At Uber we’re focused on helping people get from A to B — reliably, safely and affordably — even when things are crazy busy. To ensure the wheels keep turning we’ll be using a dedicated parking lot at Levi’s Stadium to get people in and out of the game, as well as launching a few special products.

And after all, what better way to celebrate in our home city than with a bit of innovation?

Big events like Halloween and New Year’s Eve have an equally big impact on demand in San Francisco. As the graph below shows, in 2015 we see more than double the demand during events like these as compared to a typical weekend.

But to ensure we understood the implications of an event of this size in the Bay Area, we spoke to the Uber team that would know best — last year’s game host, Phoenix. As the chart below shows, demand for Uber on the Friday and Saturday night of the big game was just as high as New Year’s Eve, without the “countdown dip” (in blue) that cities experience just before midnight.

Using this data, we estimated what demand for the Bay Area could look like. As you can see, we’re expecting lots of trips before the game, a steep drop overnight, slower demand the day of the game and then another spike comes at the end as people start to make their way home. As with all busy times, our system will ensure that enough drivers are available for these spikes using dynamic pricing to rebalance supply and demand in real-time.

It’s Game Time

So how does this all translate into reality?

For the week before the Super Bowl

  • Caltrain + uberPOOL. From Saturday 1/30 through game day Sunday 2/7, a new service we’re dubbing “POOLtrain” will be available at Caltrain stations all the way from San Francisco Station to Blossom Hill Station in San Jose.

This means that Bay Area residents and fans from all over the world will be able to share their rides — and split the cost — by using an expanded version of uberPOOL when they start at a Caltrain station. More butts in fewer seats should help relieve some of the upcoming traffic gridlock by reducing duplication. Here’s what Caltrain had to say:

“Uber already provides an important connection for Caltrain riders to and from our stations. Bay Area congestion is at record levels and we know that next week’s Super Bowl events are going to place an even greater strain on the region’s transportation network. Uber’s ‘POOLTrain’ service will provide travelers with a new, more affordable, convenient option that will help incentivize transit use during Super Bowl week.” — Seamus Murphy, Chief Communications Officer, Caltrain

Combining Uber with Caltrain is already a popular choice for commuters — as we noted last year, Bay Area residents actively use Uber and public transit options to complete the first and last miles of their daily commutes. As the map below shows, nearly 80,000 Uber trips started or ended within 100 meters of a Caltrain station in last July alone (an increase of over 150% since the previous summer). And Caltrain’s San Francisco Station was the single most popular destination in all of San Francisco in 2015.

  • SFMTA coordination. Our team in San Francisco is working with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority to keep all rideshare drivers informed of upcoming traffic conditions and road closures.

Parts of downtown San Francisco will be closed to vehicles during daytime hours for week-long events like Super Bowl City. To support this, we’re making sure drivers on the Uber platform are kept aware of daily conditions through advance notice and a real-time alert system.

On game day Sunday

  • Dedicated Uber lot at Levi’s Stadium. For the first time ever, a ridesharing company has been granted access to a designated lot at Levi’s Stadium for pickups and dropoffs.

Riders will be able to push a button and get a ride — right at championship stadium. Before the game, they’re able to be dropped off from an Uber within walking distance of Levi’s Stadium. And when the game is over, folks can head to our Rider Lounge where they can relax while they request a ride. It’s that simple.

We are excited to do our part in making this the smoothest Big Game experience yet. This will be the first time that many of Bay Area residents and fans from all over the world will experience Uber and UberPOOL, and discover first-hand how Uber can make cities — and this iconic game — more accessible for everyone.