San Francisco was a flurry of black and orange the last week of October, but less of that had to do with Halloween than someone unfamiliar with the Bay Area might expect. After rallying to win the National League Championship Series, the San Francisco Giants made it to the 108th World Series, where they squared off against the Detroit Tigers. Giants fans came out of the woodwork and the moderately quiet neighborhood of South Beach became a frenzy of activity on game days.
As the season came to a close, South Beach’s pedestrian activity experienced a steady increase; September saw 13.79% more pedestrians than August, but October really knocked it out of the park with an increase of 41.36% over the previous month. The spikes in the graph below are directly correlated to The Giants’ home games.
In the month of October, home game days saw an average increase of more than 400% over the previous non-game days. The pedestrian count increase that we saw on game days was heavily concentrated at the beginning of the games: movement throughout the rest of the day would be comparable to an average day’s activity in South Beach with a spike an hour or two before the game began, followed by a decrease in pedestrian activity during the game, with a slight increase as attendees slowly make their ways from AT&T Park.
As shown in the image above, pedestrians per block per hour exceeded a whopping one thousand people per block per hour in the hours leading up to a home game. Interestingly, vehicular traffic followed a slightly different pattern.
On an ordinary weekday, South Beach experiences the bulk of its vehicular activity during business hours, as drivers head to work or pass through the neighborhood on their ways to other spots in the city. The biggest difference in vehicle traffic on games days was the climb in activity immediately following home games, when commuters were headed out of the city; typically the number of vehicles driving through South Beach will continue to dwindle after 6pm until commuters head into the neighborhood for work in the morning. Similar to pedestrian activity, vehicular traffic decreased during home games, as fans filled AT&T Park and other local venues to watch the games.
This is the first World Series for which Motionloft has monitored pedestrian and vehicle activity. Because Motionloft data is collected in real time, we were able to watch the neighborhood come to life with excitement for the San Francisco Giants as it happened, but we have collected this data for comparison in future years… maybe even next year! Thank you, San Francisco, for a great baseball season and for working with us to disrupt and innovate pedestrian and vehicle data.
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