WVU economics student discovers congestion ‘shock waves’ generated by NFL traffic
Bryan Khoo, a WVU PhD student in economics, used Uber data to calculate the cost of traffic congestion caused by National Football League home games. His research reveals commuters and businesses in cities with NFL teams are slapped with a staggering price tag for delayed work and wasted time and fuel. (WVU Photo/Matt Sunday)
Bryan Khoo readily admits that apart from a passion for badminton, he’s “not a huge sports person.” Nor does he have a driver’s license. But no one knows more than Khoo about the traffic jams caused by football game days.
A PhD student and researcher at the West Virginia University John Chambers College of Business and Economics, Khoo recently used a vast trove of Uber data for three cities that are home to NFL teams — Cincinnati, Seattle and Santa Clara, California — to put a number on just how bad NFL stadium traffic gets.
The answer astonished him. Khoo found that, on average, the costs of fuel and time wasted by drivers stuck fuming in gridlock due to game day congestion will equal or even exceed each stadium’s construction costs and tax breaks over its lifetime of about 27 years.
And because most stadiums in the U.S. are nearing the end of their lifetimes now, Khoo sees a major boom in stadium replacements over the next decade.
“It seems a little bit insane,” Khoo said. “Within just three years, congestion costs from home game traffic congestion generally amount to 5% of the stadium’s whole construction budget. Any policymaker who thinks they want to bring a stadium into their city and offer a team owner a $4 million dollar tax break to build it should realize having a pro football team is a financial drain. All the benefits a stadium provides, it zeroes out with negatives like increased congestion, air pollution, crime and travel times for emergency vehicles.
“That’s why people in France protested against hosting the Olympics. They know it sounds like good business, but overall, you’re losing money on the whole event.”
As Khoo wrapped his head around the extraordinary economic costs of congestion, he became more intrigued by the politics behind having a home team. But it was the data, he said, that drew him in from the start.
“What really got me was Uber’s microdata. It’s so fine-grained you can get traffic data by the hour, compared to other sources that provide only monthly or even yearly averages. Those pick up a lot of noise, making it impossible to distinguish between traffic patterns from a home game versus the work commute, or a political rally or a concert happening at the same time. But Uber’s data shows what a shock to the city an event like this is, and you could apply it to a lot more than sporting events. You could use the same data to figure out anything from the cost of political protest to the cost of a Taylor Swift show.”
Khoo also sees an opportunity to use different kinds of data to assess game day costs beyond congestion, like how new stadium construction affects home insurance or home prices in adjacent neighborhoods. His interests reach far and wide, and when he’s not analyzing football gridlock, he might be looking at how military base closures affect local patterns of business or how tax regulations affect migration between U.S. states.
That intellectual nomadism reflects a lifetime as a globe-trotting expat. What Khoo calls his “Imperial British tour” started when his family left his home country of Malaysia for Great Britain when he was 7 or 8, he said. That was followed by a move to India for Khoo’s teenage years, and at last America — Minnesota, to be exact, where Khoo attended Gustavus Adolphus College.
“While I was at Gustavus doing my undergrad, a professor introduced me to Chambers College Dean Josh Hall, and he was very kind. But by the time I was applying to grad schools for economics, I had forgotten about WVU,” Khoo admitted.
“Then one day, I opened up my letterbox and I see a postcard from Josh Hall saying, ‘Hey, your professor mentioned that you’re sending out applications. Don’t forget us.’ And I thought, ‘Wow!’ So I did apply, and it was WVU that offered me the best package.”
Now, Khoo said, wherever his tour of Britain’s former colonies takes him next, he will always remember West Virginia for its hills and its “Country Roads” spirit.
“I’ve never traveled anywhere with a stronger theme song than West Virginia and ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads.’ That’s the song to sing at football games, we are so united around it as a community, and in general I think the sense of community here has been really good for me. In Malaysia, if I say ‘hi’ to a stranger I might end up getting a weird stare back — but here, I’ll probably get a ‘howdy.’”
-WVU-
mm/8/12/24
MEDIA CONTACT: Micaela Morrissette
Research Writer
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304-709-6667; Micaela.Morrissette@mail.wvu.edu