Name: Good Crowd Control Can Boost Safety and Profits. These Tactics Can Help.
Uploaded: 2024-07-05T11:32:00Z
Duration: 6 min 49 s
Description: From the shape of the line you wait in to the size of the concession stand menu, nearly every square foot of major event venues are designed to prioritize safety and boost revenue.

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From the shape of the line you wait in to the size of the concession stand menu, nearly every square foot of major event venues are designed to prioritize safety and boost revenue. Photo: Getty Images

https://m.wsj.net/video/20240705/f12d26d7-8617-4ef8-80ad-27daa158a057/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

From the shape of the line you wait in to the size of the concession stand menu, nearly every square foot of major event venues are designed to prioritize safety and boost revenue.

Good Crowd Control Can Boost Safety and Profits. These Tactics Can Help.

Narrator: Say you have tickets to a music festival like this. The way you get inside may look different depending on the venue, whether you're funneled through multiple lanes, or a single lane Disney queue, nearly every square foot of a major events layout has been engineered by people like this.

If no one knows what we do, we do a good job.

Narrator: The shape of the line you wait in, to the pathways you follow to leave, all contribute to the same goal for any major venue, keep people safe, happy, and make money.

Even if you have the most careful planning, things can still go wrong.

Narrator: In the worst case, losing control of a crowd could cost people's lives. So we asked an expert how to move tens of thousands of people through a major event to maximize profit and avoid disaster. Now, every venue is different, but there are a few key stages to moving any crowd, arrivals, halftime, and departures.

So we're looking at people from their front door, right to their seat

Narrator: A planner's first goal is to slow the flow of people into an event by flattening what they call the arrivals curve. Sports events typically look something like this. People generally arrive earlier at more family friendly events and much later at American football games because people tailgate.

The ideal scenario would be for everybody to arrive uniformly, but it never will. So the flatter we can get that curve the better.

Narrator: One way to flatten that curve is to encourage people to arrive early by setting up fan zones or other activities on site before the event. That means less crowding at the entrance and more opportunity for the venue to make money. Once people do make their way to the gates, planners face their next big challenge, screening and getting everyone inside.

At the base level, we're looking at keeping everyone safe and moving and not getting crushed or not getting hurt.

Narrator: The secret to any smooth entry system, keep people happy.

Brett: Keeping people moving, keeps people relatively happy and avoids that frustration.

Narrator: But if you're stuck in line without any indication of when you'll be out.

Brett: That's when you get that crowd behavior of almost like a hive mind, where that frustration will almost permeate and build.

Narrator: That feeling of progress can actually be engineered through the shape of the line, or as the Brits call it, the queue.

There's lots of different ways you can organize a queue, and here's just some examples of the way you can do it.

Narrator: You might see this disorganized queue when there are smaller, tighter spaces to squeeze into.

Brett: It takes up a little space, but the disadvantages are that there's no equality of service, so those more aggressive people will push towards the front.

Narrator: If there's more space, you may see multiple lane cues.

Brett: It takes up a little bit more room, but it does mean that there's equality in terms of the front of the queue. The disadvantage to this queue, again, is indecision at the start. Which queue do I join, which means moving quicker, and you also got the potential for people to try and hop into different queues.

Narrator: And then there's the S-shaped single queue, also known as the Disney queue.

The single lane queue gives equality, because everybody joins the start and everybody finishes at the same point. One of the disadvantages here is that in a halftime scenario for the first person to get served, it's a long walk, so you are losing time off the first server.

Narrator: One way to solve for that is with the hybrid, it takes up more space, but gives you the best of single and multiple lanes.

Brett: So you're giving everybody the same queuing system as they join and the equality of that queue, but then you're joining short queues so that each server has got somebody waiting as soon as they're ready.

Narrator: Once you make it inside, planner's next big challenge is maximizing efficiency and sales of food and drinks. Brett has the concession stand design down to a science.

We want to have big signs and big obvious ways of getting to that stand. We want people to be attracted over, but in a straight line, not circulate. Although you want offer people choice, you don't want too many choices as it just creates hesitation in decision making. So the more simple the menu or the simple the drink options, the better. And that helps not just the people making decisions approaching the stand, but it also helps the servers and that way you're maximizing the turnover.

Narrator: Say a venue is able to take the amount of time people wait at the counter from 60 seconds down to 30, they could effectively double their sales. That's why some stadiums have opted for bottoms up beer taps like this. They allow servers to serve more items in less time because they can do other tasks while the cups fill up.

Anything there that can shave 5, 10, 15 seconds off a transaction will increase that total revenue in that short space of time.

Narrator: The next wave of crowd movement is expected to come at the end of the event. That's when planners need to find a way to get tens of thousands of people home.

So ideally what you want with the crowd is for it to disperse into the local area and go into different directions.

Narrator: At Hyde Park, for example.

The direct station obviously is Marble Art Station over here. So we have got crossings over from these islands. We can slow people down as they leave, and also people who exited from the side of the park over here and this then gave them other options. They could walk up Park Lane to the station, or they could start to filter into the west end to go for a drink or whatever. What you're trying to avoid is everybody leaving the venue and just steaming straight to the station and standing outside in a huge queue.

Narrator: One way to slow the flow of a crowd is to break people up into different groups. Take Wembley Stadium. At the end of the night, the crowd is released in waves to manage the flow into the train station.

If you allow too many people in at the station here, then the crowds on the platform will become unsafe. And then you can obviously have people falling onto the lines or just purely not being able to get on trains.

Narrator: But not every venue is designed to move tens of thousands of people at once. For the 2012 London Olympics, Brett designed a system to move crowds of up to 15,000 people to and from a venue down a narrow sidewalk across a road and through a narrow station entrance. The venue was emptied in about 45 minutes,

And so what we came up with was a way of holding people in a series of pens.

Narrator: The crowd would come out of the venue, wait in this area here, and then they'd be guided into pens, which were the same width of the sidewalk across the street. When the traffic lights turned red, the pens opened. People walked across the street and down to the station.

And what this meant was that this footway was never overcrowded. People didn't step into the road, and that as this slowly filtered down, it fed through the narrow part of the station, and so you didn't get the crowding at the entry point or on the platforms.

Narrator: While Brett's work may not be in the spotlight, it's planning like this that can often make the difference between a night to remember for the fun of it or an event gone wrong.

The hardest part is predicting what people will do and it can't always get it right, but it's what makes it interesting.