Parking Behavior at Planned Events and Its Impact on Road Safety: Policy Insights from Taylor Swift Concerts and a Football Game in Florida

Planned special events (PSEs) like sports games and large concerts create significant mobility and safety challenges around the venue, particularly resulting from parking planning and management. These events often create a mismatch between parking supply and demand, resulting in instances of informal or unplanned parking. This study examines location event type (local versus broad fanbase), parking behavior, proximity, and temporal factors affecting driving instability during two PSEs at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium: a three-day Taylor Swift concert series and a National Football League (NFL) game between the Buccaneers and Packers. Using high-frequency connected vehicle data, the study analyzed how parking patterns and search behavior influence driving behavior by modeling microscopic changes to driving instability. The modeling results suggest that parking search duration emerged as the dominant factor, with a 10% increase associated with a 3.5%–3.7% rise in volatility across speed, acceleration, and jerk measures. Broad fanbase events (concerts) showed 9%–10% higher baseline volatility than local fanbase (NFL game) events, with an additional 8%–10% increase in the effect of search duration. Residential parking and key time windows before event scheduled start times were also associated with greater volatility. Overall, the results highlight the need for targeted policies toward event-oriented real time parking and traffic management, the use of dynamic pricing strategies with incentives for early arrival, and a strategic increase in enforcement to improve both operational efficiency and roadway safety during PSEs.