Super Bowl transit issues draw NFL’s attention

There was always the mooing guy. This is not just a New Jersey thing, I’m sure. Although it seems worth noting that the only place I have experienced The Mooing Guy phenomenon — and experienced it again and again — was in the bottleneck waiting to walk through the pedestrian bridge that spans Route 120 and connects the parking lot of MetLife Stadium to the parking lot of the Izod Center, which had a number of different names back when the Nets still played there.

This was, fundamentally, just a case of trying to fit 10 pounds of humanity into a 5-pound bag, and so in that sense had the same origins as the transit nightmare endured by people trying to travel from New York City to MetLife Stadium — which is in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and separated from the delightful brand-interaction fan experience of Super Bowl Boulevard in Manhattan by eight miles and one fairly large river — and back again. The unavoidable congestion created by this too-many-people/too-little-space issue was exactly as annoying as you’d expect: thousands of people funneled down and then down again until they could fit up a comparatively narrow flight of stairs and onto the walkway, which was packed and poorly graffiti-ed and piss-smelling and otherwise awful. It made sense that someone would liken the scenario to that of cows at a slaughterhouse, and so decide to make with the mooing. It was never funny, not the dozens of times that I heard it, but it was never exactly inaccurate.

The NFL will look into the mass transit nightmare that left thousands of fans stranded in New Jersey for hours after the conclusion of the Super Bowl, according to ESPN.

The league admitted it underestimated the number of fans that would be commuting via train, a miscalculation that resulted in chaotic crowds and long delays, the worst of which centered around the Secaucus Junction.

The main vessel of public transportation from New York City to MetLife Stadium, where the Broncos and Seahawks will kick off at 6:30, is NJTransit. NJTransit runs from the famously decrepit subterranean people container known as Penn Station to Secaucus Junction, a stop no one uses but to pass through, change trains, or as a waypoint to the Meadowlands Sports Complex. It gets packed on game days, but today-- even over five hours before game time-- it is seriously full to the brim. The reason, it appears, is that TSA is screening people before they leave the station, so you end up with this:

The backup, of course, goes all the way back to Manhattan (a line for a ticket at Penn isn’t unusual, but this is heavy):