The season’s first home football game is only days away after a long summer of waiting, and the UCF Police department has begun to get the word out about a few operation changes for the 2015 tailgate season – this year making alterations to the post-game traffic pattern, the drone policy on campus and the reservation system for memory mall.
“What happens here at the UCF Police Department is every season we take a look at what worked well, what didn’t work well, what improvements we can make,” UCF Chief of Police Richard Beary said. “Every year we try to tweak our operational plans so that we can provide the best service we can on game days,” Beary explained.
In an effort to alleviate the perennial complaints of attendees stuck in gridlock after any home game, the traffic flow will be directed to specifically facilitate a mass exodus off of campus by shutting down certain inbound lanes.
“What we’re doing for the first time here is what we call counter-flow. What we’re going to do is on the outbound side after the game we’re going to use all the traffic lanes to push the traffic out,” Beary said.
New videos and charts posted by the university that break down the new procedure so that anyone can see what they are getting into before they actually show up. According to UCFPD, wherever you park will dictate which route you will be directed to. The traffic flow patterns can be found on the UCF Athletics website.
Drones will be banned from campus on game days, but it is not entirely the UCFPD who made the decision.
“We’re a no fly area under FAA rules,” Beary clarified.
There are potential problems with security as well with the drones, which have the potential to crash – causing damage to both persons and property. It is a situation that fortunately hasn’t been caused any major events as of yet, but will be avoided in the future.
Beary also made it clear that there is a chance the sight of an unidentified aircraft could cause panic in a large crowd, which is an easy way for people to get hurt.
His last major point for the upcoming season was the alteration to the Memory Mall reservation system. The system will be used this year to keep the mall a student dominated zone.
“We think that area should be for our students mostly, unfortunately there were some groups that came in there that had nothing to do with our students – they were only there to have big parties and create problems and we hope they don’t come back,” Beary said.
