The NFL draft is coming to Pittsburgh on April 23, 2026 and bringing an estimated 500,000-700,000 visitors with it for the weekend. The impact of such a massive influx of people will put the city’s transportation systems to the test.
Carnegie Mellon University’s Sean Qian , civil and environmental engineering professor in the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and College of Engineering , leads the Mobility Data Analytics Center and studies large-scale multimodal transportation infrastructure and traffic patterns. In the following Q&A, Qian explained what happens when a city absorbs hundreds of thousands of visitors - and what Pittsburgh can expect.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
What kinds of issues does a midsize city like Pittsburgh need to address when a huge influx of people come to town?
One is road closures, which I’ve been doing research on. Regardless of the nature of the road closure - it could be work zone construction, a marathon, football game -- you still have the same amount of people on the roads. For the NFL draft, there could be many more people on the roads. This is going to be a big issue, because Downtown Pittsburgh is constrained by the limited capacity of bridges and tunnels. There are many, many different factors that contribute to congestion but a big factor is limited capacity of roads, curb spaces and parking. So that’s going to have a tremendous impact on the roadways and on the city in general. There are also side effects from this congestion. How do you route emergency vehicles through the city so that they can get where they need to go quickly? That’s a big issue, too.
We also need to think about the flow of traffic. In certain directions -- like from the airport to Downtown -- traffic is going to increase drastically. I know some of the city traffic signals use technology to measure and adapt to the real time traffic flow, but most of the signal lights are run based on some sort of time-of-day plan. That means most traffic lights are programmed in such a way to accommodate the usual traffic flow patterns. But if things become drastically different, there’s likely to be congestion attributed to the flow change. These are very big challenges for the city.
Visitors will be traveling Downtown from the airport. What are some solutions that can address potentially big traffic backups?
I always encourage people to shift their peak travel time and check out the traffic conditions before they leave. Those are the typical travel demand management strategies. But in this case, it’s more important to encourage people to take different kinds of transportation, like buses or micromobility - that could mean bikeshares or walking. My research on this shows that it’s helpful to encourage people to use all sorts of modes of transportation rather than just driving. If you do seriously want to drive, you should carpool as much as you can.
What about using rideshare apps, like Uber or Lyft?
I would encourage people not to use ridesharing apps, because all these vehicles have to drive around to find the next trip and add cars to the road. Their price may surge and become unaffordable during peak times.
How could your research help cities prepare for events like this?
I have not personally done any survey or behavioral analysis specifically tied to the NFL draft. But at the Mobility Data Analytics Center, we developed a tool that is based on CMU research that specifically addresses those ripple effects. We can feed the tool where people are coming from, where people go and how many people are making these trips. For example, we can model what traffic would look like if we encourage 30% of people taking buses from their origin destination instead of driving on the Parkway. That simulates human behavior in both the transit network as well as the roadway network and we can see what the roadway conditions might be under those what-if scenarios. It can inform decision-making about what travel strategies officials adopt and encourage the public to use. Maybe you can provide some discounted passes for people to take Pittsburgh buses during the NFL draft. There are many different strategies that, based on the modeling outcomes, you can use to mitigate these impacts.
I would imagine during the NFL draft, some folks will certainly change their commuting routes, because they see the Parkway being extremely crowded. They might have to take some arterial streets instead and create some sort of a ripple effect. Timing is a factor, too. The later you depart, and because road congestion is so bad, you certainly will make different route choices or departure time choices.
Will traffic and mapping apps be reliable during the NFL draft in Pittsburgh?
This happens quite a lot with extreme weather events in other parts of the country, like hurricane evacuations in Florida. Any map app can only measure what’s going on right now. There’s currently no way for them to predict how people will be making certain choices in the next 30 minutes. Usually that’s fine, because most of the time, people will make the same travel choices - for example, people generally commute to work at the same time every day and probably take the same route. That system is what we call recurrent equilibrium, in more academic terms.
However, if there’s an extreme event, then people may start to freak out. That’s when these apps start to fail to predict what the next 30 minutes might look like, because they simply have no idea how people are making choices.
Do you have any recommendations for how Pittsburgh residents can avoid traffic issues during the NFL draft?
Reduce the number of trips that you’re making using private cars. If you want to go somewhere, I would definitely suggest switching over to public transit, biking or walking instead of using Uber or your own vehicle. Also, be on the lookout for public information from official sources about road closures and other incidents on the roads.
