Having spent enough time in and around AA over the last 7 years, I'm keenly aware of the shortcomings of movement in that town. Fortunately, I don't need to get on the highway to go back to our lodging for the weekend.
The absolute worst campus I've been on for dispersing football crowds is Iowa, and it's not close. Even a basketball game at a half-empty Carver-Hawkeye took forever to leave.
I typed my comment before I read yours about having relatives nearby.
I'm surprised that you had that much trouble in Iowa City. I've never been to a game in Carver-Hawkeye but we went to the tOSU/Iowa game at Kinnick in 2006. At the time (and it still might be) it was the most well attended athletic event in the history of the State of Iowa and traffic wasn't too bad getting out of there.
We found the worst in the B1G (not including the four new west-coast schools) to be:
- Penn State
- Michigan (these two are nearly tied)
- Nebraska
From my experience of going to all of those stadiums the two biggest factors seemed to be the two that I mentioned above:
- Population of the city relative to the Stadium, and
- Direction of travel of most attendees (are they all going one direction or dispersing?)
As to factor #1, Iowa City isn't too bad. Per wiki they have a population of ~75k in the City and 172k in the metro. For comparison Ann Arbor is 120k/372k and State College is 41k/158k. Dispersal in Iowa is better too, more like PA or OH and less like MI.
Iowa's most populous cities:
- 214k, Des Moines, W of Iowa City
- 138k, Cedar Rapids, N of Iowa City
- 102k, Davenport, E of Iowa City
- 86k, Sioux City, NW of Iowa City
- 75k, Iowa City
#1 isn't overly dominant and the rest are scattered relative to Iowa City so the traffic likely scatters as well, compare Michigan:
- 639k, Detroit,
- 199k, Grand Rapids,
- 139k, Warren,
- 134k, Sterling Heights,
- 124k, Ann Arbor
Not only is Detroit MUCH more dominant but Warren and Sterling Heights are Detroit suburbs so basically the entire crowd heads back to Detroit.
Penn State is BAD because the city of State College is basically Penn State and not much else. The one redeeming factor in PA is that the traffic scatters more like Iowa and Ohio rather than all going one direction like in MI. PA:
- 1.6M, Philly, E
- 303k, Pittsburgh, W
- 126k, Allentown, E
- 95k, Reading, E
- 95k, Erie, NW
For Ohio State, Columbus has a population of 906k so it is technically more populous than even Detroit (obviously not by metro area) so the City has the infrastructure to absorb the traffic and additionally the state's population is reasonably well spread out:
- 906k, Columbus
- 373k, Cleveland, NE
- 309k, Cincy, SW
- 271k, Toledo, NW
- 190k, Akron, NE
