Stadiums – well, you can’t really get more paradoxical. Rooted in their glorious ancient tradition, these buildings are very much the present. They are highly visible icons, yet invisible lurking masses when empty. The large elements that make up their totality – tiers, ramps, roofs, and concourses – put them at odds with the concept of a multi-use venue that must stand the test of time.
Whether it is a stadium, an arena, or even a concert hall, the goal of any architect or facility manager is for the people in attendance to have an unforgettable time. Sports fans wax poetic about tradition and nostalgia, concert audiences obsess about acoustics. Whatever the event and whoever the spectator, the one thing these facilities have in common is that everyone wants to leave at the end at exactly the same time. This means the implications for logistics, safety, and people flow are enormous.
“This is really the blind side of large facility design,” says Steve Edgett, president of Edgett Williams Consulting Group, who has been working with elevator design in buildings for forty years. “It doesn’t matter if it’s stairs or elevators; it’s about the accumulation of people.”
In stadiums and arenas, people enter at their leisure, but assuredly, at the final whistle or ovation…
“All these people are exiting the upper deck, coming down the ramping while the stairs, the escalators and the elevators are all at full capacity. The transportation systems need to reflect that we have an additive number that we need to account for,” says Edgett.
John Burt, NYC Metro district sales manager at KONE, agrees.
“A stadium requires transportation systems that get people up to the various levels, keeping in mind that incoming traffic occurs over a two-hour period prior to game time or to the start of the show. People like to get something to eat or drink before heading for their seats. Leaving the stadium, however, presents a totally different traffic pattern – where we see peak demand. The vertical transportation system must be capable of emptying the entire stadium safely in a reasonably short period of time.”
Design in time as well as space
Stadiums, after all, are immense structures that, once in the environment, may be there for hundreds of years. According to Edgett, people often don’t want to look far ahead and are more interested in “urban sculptures” instead of the human experience over time. But there are other examples:
“More and more, architects and developers are putting a great deal of thought into how people are using and experiencing their facilities. It’s about the qualitative aspects.”
To take just one solution, Edgett cites the potential of advanced destination-based control systems in elevators to meet the needs of modern real estate, especially in large event facilities. Both Burt and Edgett hold out hope for the future. An aging demographic, for one, has spurred a new societal phenomenon that Edgett believes will drive more human-centered building design processes.
Innovation in stadium design and planning tools that promote long-term value creation for more stakeholders seems inevitable. With more mobile, fluid populations and concerns with safety and security, the sustainability of any investments in people’s comfort and enjoyment seems guaranteed.
Elevators rise to the occasion
The challenge of moving masses of people in stadiums or arenas is compounded by the fact that escalators might not be the optimum choice in the future.
“Traditionally, escalators have been seen as the best means of moving masses of people,” explains Burt. “An escalator with 1000 millimeter-wide steps moving at 0.5 meters per second will move 275–300 people in five minutes.”
“Escalators also consume a great deal of area. The necessary 30 degree angle of incline requires a footprint of about 1.5 meters by 15.25 meters for an escalator with a 6 meter rise. That’s a great deal of valuable real estate, especially when multiplied by the number of up and down traveling escalators required to serve the multiple levels of a stadium.”
Despite this apparent logic, experts like Burt and Edgett often find it a hard sell to architects and planners who choose escalators by default.
“Escalators are superb at moving people in retail environments where you want to involve them in their surroundings,” acknowledges Edgett. “But whether we like it or not, escalators present a far greater hazard than do elevators, so this should be considered in situations involving large scale exiting. One or more elevators must be installed for disabled and aged people, and it often makes far more sense to supplement them with a sufficient quantity elevator system, where escalators are not used at all.”
Allocating elevators for both shared as well as dedicated service use is not only necessary for disabled accessibility and easing congestion, it can also offer a revenue and branding boost in the fickle world of sports as a business. Forbes magazine, for instance, has calculated that despite costing more than a billion dollars, the new Yankee Stadium in New York City ranks in the top ten in the US in terms of revenue per seat, due especially to income from in-demand luxury boxes and high ticket prices. In addition, the stadium’s elevators, which were manufactured by KONE, incorporate large flat screen displays with targeted messaging.
Edgett also points out that elevators can provide premium service to the valuable fans in the VIP areas by using discrete entry points and elevator car interiors with sophisticated ambience. These are used particularly well in Yankee Stadium for customers going to the building’s high-end steakhouse and luxury box suites.
Furthermore, Burt reminds us that freight elevators are the backbone of the stadium’s “back office”, keeping the administration, technical, media, and concession functions all humming along. The large passenger elevators at Yankee Stadium were designed to connect with a below-grade service tunnel, providing easy access for concession re-supply and reducing the amount of storage space needed at the more valuable upper levels.
Fuzzy data
People flow and vertical transportation planning in stadiums is therefore a multidisciplinary business, where space cognition and circulation needs to be addressed through design, signage and lighting, fed by robust data on pedestrian traffic.
Like Edgett, Burt has had his fingers in the elevator business for decades. “Before we had computer programs to tell us how many elevators could handle the vertical traffic flow in a prospective building, I would work out all such numbers long hand.”
In a case like Yankee Stadium, as both an old venue and a decidedly urban one, excellent data was available to the planners on entry and exit flow. To further help designers nowadays, there is data on the psychological effects of queuing and perceived waiting time.
There are also sociological concerns, mass behavior patterns such as herding instincts that become significant in crowding and evacuations. Experts in this area point out the “non-adaptive crowd behaviors”, which entail destructive actions in emergency situations. These are problematic to predict and nearly impossible to study in practice. Even in business-as-usual crowd behavior, research is scant and not necessarily disseminated to practicing planners and consultants.
Modeling people flow
Software for modeling crowd behavior and traffic patterns is, however, becoming increasingly sophisticated.
”There are now several firms who do simulations, where you can visually watch people based on data generated on the population of the facility,” says Edgett. “You can see where the hotspots develop, where crossing traffic creates conditions where people are running into each other. These simulations are becoming more common, but they are still not well understood.”
“In the West we are too focused on the immediate financial impact and not the longer-term impacts. The Chinese, for instance, seem to understand this the best: facilitating the movement of people makes society work better.”
KONE in famous sport venues
• Yankee Stadium, New York City, USA
• Ravens Stadium, Baltimore, USA
• Gillette Stadium, Boston, USA
• EverBank Field Stadium, Jacksonville, USA
• Lucas Oil Stadium, Indianapolis, USA
• United Center, Chicago, USA
• Bird’s Nest Stadium, Beijing, China
• Yas Marina F1 Circuit, Abu Dhabi, UAE
• Meydan Racecourse, Dubai, UAE
• National Stadium, Warsaw, Poland
• Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
• Mbombela Stadium, Nelspruit, South Africa
• Soccer City Stadium, Johannesburg, South Africa
• Ellis Park Stadium, Johannesburg, South Africa