Super Bowl City

As New Orleans hosted its 11th NFL Super Bowl game, the city fortified its transportation infrastructure to welcome a hundred thousand football fans — and savor its moment in the world’s spotlight.

By Rick Hathaway | Director, New Orleans Department of Public Works

When Super Bowl LIX kicked off February 9, 2025, it was a major milestone for New Orleans in several ways. It marked the 11th time the city has served as host of a Super Bowl, tying a record held by our friends to the east in Miami. Those who attended enjoyed the event in the extensively renovated Caesars Superdome, which will be celebrating its 50th anniversary. Also, the event shined a light on recent investments in the city’s transportation network, which delivered a smoother, more efficient experience for these attendees and many thousands of other fans, friends and families.

New Orleans has earned a reputation as the nation’s premier “host city,” with hundreds of public events that in 2023 attracted more than 40 million visitors, who spent more than $18 billion in the city. To support all those visitors and to maintain the city’s charm for our residents, planning and implementing transportation improvements is essential. Our event-driven construction projects were on tight deadlines, but they remake infrastructure in ways that will serve residents for decades to come.

Tackling Poydras

Executing much-needed improvements to the city’s main business artery — the mile-long Poydras Street — was a critical priority for our Super Bowl preparations. Poydras Street extends west from the Mississippi River, past office towers, hotels, restaurants and residential buildings fronting the Superdome. It is key to economic vitality for the entire metro region and is a regional employment hub for southeast Louisiana as a whole.

Poydras has been a thoroughfare for more than two centuries, but only in the late 1970s was it updated and widened to integrate the newly built Superdome into the cityscape. Since that time, no significant upgrades had been endeavored on Poydras until this year. Our team worked with contractors to accelerate work on this street because it is the gateway to the game and the backbone of mobility in that part of the city. Importantly, the Poydras improvements were among the NFL’s must-haves as they collaborated with the New Orleans Super Bowl Host Committee, which is led by the New Orleans Saints and
the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation. The Committee and the League were keen on creating an outstanding experience for visitors, with safety and efficiency at the forefront.

Working on Poydras involved the same traffic management challenges facing any major downtown construction project. In our worksite situation, we have a Superdome that constantly holds events of various sizes,
so we cannot seal Poydras off completely without disrupting mobility and event access. The largest events in a typical year are New Orleans Saints football games, which required us to clean up roadways and remove barricades to make way for heavy traffic before and after the game, then shift back into construction mode.

We also, somewhat uniquely, must deal with the threat of damaging winds and flooding from hurricanes and other major storms. As soon as a significant storm enters the Gulf of Mexico, the federal Homeland Security office here in City Hall sets up the Emergency Operations Center, and convenes twice-daily meetings with city department heads and representatives from the armed forces and other federal agencies. If the threat level rises, our team executes a plan to secure construction sites before the storm is expected to hit us.

For example, with Hurricane Francine in September 2024, our teams filled open excavation areas with rock to preserve usable escape routes for vehicles. We also removed wooden barriers and other objects that high winds can turn into deadly projectiles.

Our contractors are accustomed to such circumstances, and are very responsive and experienced at securing the work sites. Their contracts allow for short-term disruptions like this in the project schedules and, in many cases, work on affected roads can resume in just a few days.

In late January, construction activities halted as the city faced the most significant snowfall in 130 years. The city redirected fourconstruction companies completing infrastructure work to plow snow on major streets across the city, including downtown, the French Quarter and extending down to the airport to allow NFL staff to access the city. Within three days of the snowstorm, the city was open for business, ready to welcome Super Bowl attendees.

Expanding Footprints, Rising Expectations

The footprint of the 2025 Super Bowl was much larger than that of the 2013 event, which was largely restricted to the Superdome vicinity. This time around, there were companion events, all of which highlighted infrastructure repair needs. If we saw that certain streets were going to be used extensively for getting people to and from events, we added these streets to our project list.

Many vehicle parking facilities were available within a half-mile of the Superdome, from numerous ground-level lots to large parking garages. To meet the needs of thousands of walkers, we strategically repaired sidewalks and crossings to improve safety. We engaged small business/DBE contractors to handle sidewalk repairs downtown and in the French Quarter.

We know that not everyone can, or wants to, walk, so we had shuttle buses circling throughout the area. Also, for the first time, we created a rideshare hub at a public park in front of City Hall, about a block away from the Superdome. There was music and food at this rideshare hub for tourists’ convenience.

Our team also responded to mobility requirements related to high-profile visitors and exclusive events. For example, we ran shuttles from the Superdome over to the LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, which hosted invitation-only events in their parking lots.

North of the Superdome, we worked on improvements to a street in the Gentilly area, which connects our historic Lakefront Airport to the Interstate 10 highway. We understand the importance of making a great impression on these high-profile guests so they’ll return again and again, bring world-class entertainment to the city, host private events and contribute to our local economy.

A terrorist attack on Bourbon Street on January 1 necessitated a change to our security approach around the Superdome and in the French Quarter. As concerns heightened, the Department of Public Works obtained and staged concrete barriers and closed roadways as part of the increased security measures following the attack. Close collaboration between departments was leveraged to ensure a safe and secure environment for residents and visitors.

Super-Gras Fusion

Preparing for major events in a city that hosts them continuously is both an honor and a challenge. For cities getting ready for their largest-ever public events, I humbly offer food for thought:

We are confident that we have our infrastructure ready to provide an excellent experience to our many visitors from around the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Clinton “Rick” Hathaway is the Director of the Department of Public Works for the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. Appointed in December 2023, he oversees five divisions that are responsible for maintaining about 1,547 miles of streets and 149 bridges in the city. Born in the city, with roots in the Lower Ninth Ward, Rick leverages his professional background in civil engineering and construction management to improve the city’s public infrastructure.

Prior to assuming this role, Rick served as a transportation section manager and construction program manager for a national engineering consulting firm. He also worked for the city from 1982 to 1994 in what was then called the Department of Streets.

He graduated from the University of New Orleans in 1982 with a degree in Civil Engineering.