I've ridden the shuttles before too. It's usually a pretty good wait and can be a long line. Hate to state the obvious, but with the expansion in seating at DWS, the demand for the shuttle is only going to grow. Combine that with the ever increasing tailgate restrictions, and the ridership could have easily jumped 3,000-5,000 people this week. It also appears that the post-game traffic was a bit snarled. The more people you park remotely who shuttle in, the better that situation will get.
It was more than just 5k more people and traffic problems. It was a huge 17up by whoever is in charge. I have been parking there for years without issue. I parked at the newpaper at 3:50 and did not get to my seat until the first quarter was half over.
In previous years they had multiple large buses and 2 stops. The newspaper and the courthouse. This year they had 2 small trolleys and at least 4 stops. this meant the trolleys filled up at the first stops and were full before they made it to the others.
After waiting at the newspaper for a while someone told us they were not picking up there, but they were at the Regions one block over. I waited at Regions, along with many others for over an 1.5 hours without a SINGLE trolley stopping. My wife and small kids eventually left and drove back home while I stayed to ride with my brother. With my small kids gone we decided to walk and that is when we found out they trolleys were filling up at the other stops
None of the gameday or hailstate ops twitter account told of the changes or of the extra wait. If you called the 1-800 gameday number all they would tell you is that buses were in route.
To make matters worse you had an empty full size buse passing by that said they could not pick us up because it route was to wal-mart. So it just drove around empty. Same thing after the game, you had a full size bus with driver just parked by the downtown pick up stop setting empty.
This could have and should have been avoided. They have been doing the shuttles for a few years now, this had nothing to do with buses out of service. This was just a contract change to go from several full size buses to 2 small trolleys and adding pickup stops, which considering the volume of users in previous years and the additional 5k in the stadium, was complete stupidity
