Game Day Champs: How the City of Tampa Successfully Managed E-Scooter Operations During the Super Bowl
One of the most exciting moments for any city is being selected to host a major event like the Super Bowl. Along with eager anticipation, though, also comes the immense responsibility of ensuring the safety and satisfaction of attendees and others in the event vicinity.
For this year’s Super Bowl, the City of Tampa needed to plan for the usual transportation challenges that arise from hosting tens of thousands of additional people—but also consider how to best regulate new shared micromobility operations during a major event.
“Using Populus to monitor our e-scooter program during the Super bowl was a massive help in ensuring that our city hosted a successful major event.”
— Calvin Thornton, City of Tampa
With safety top of mind, the City DOT opted to bar e-scooters from the designated special event area around Raymond James Stadium. Using Populus’s Mobility Manager Platform, the City designed and communicated temporary policies for e-scooter operations during Super Bowl LV, creating an “exclusion area,” as seen below, within which no shared motorized scooter operations would be permitted.
The platform also enabled the City to monitor e-scooter operations to ensure compliance with the temporary policy. The “Live Map” below depicts a snapshot of e-scooter operations during the Super Bowl:
Each dot above represents a vehicle, and each color represents a different operator.
For the City and its residents, game day was a historic success on the football field and behind the scenes. Per the temporary policy, no e-scooter operations took place within the exclusion area, aside from a few rides that were pre-approved. And outside of the exclusion area, operators Spin, Bird, Lime, and HOPR collectively facilitated nearly 10,000 trips, the second highest since Tampa’s e-scooter pilot program launched in May 2019.
“Wow! Super Bowl Sunday was a great day!...Thanks to [Populus], the micromobility services achieved its second highest ridership of 9,914 trips on February 6, 2021. That includes three scooter operators and one bicycle operator.”
— Calvin Thornton, City of Tampa
The City of Tampa partnered with Populus in 2019 to help manage the newly launched pilot program. Today, Populus supports more than 80 cities, empowering them to securely access the data needed to create policies that drive program success. Schedule a demo today of our comprehensive shared mobility solution.