As Auburn University prepares for the 2019 football season, we are proud to announce the launch of Tigers Unlimited, a new electric shuttle service in partnership with Auburn that will transport fans to and from Jordan-Hare Stadium for home football games and other major sporting events. This marks Slidr's first university partnership and a significant expansion of our operating model from hospitality into higher education.
Jordan-Hare Stadium seats 87,451 fans. On game days, the population of Auburn, Alabama, effectively triples. The logistical challenge of moving tens of thousands of people into and out of a concentrated area within a few hours is one of the most complex transportation problems in the country, and it happens seven weekends per year.
The Game Day Problem
Anyone who has attended an SEC football game understands the transportation challenge. The typical game-day experience involves some combination of these pain points: circling for parking 90 minutes before kickoff, paying $40 or more for a spot in a makeshift lot half a mile from the stadium, walking along congested roads shared with vehicle traffic, and then spending 45 to 90 minutes after the game trying to exit the same parking situation.
For older fans, fans with mobility limitations, families with young children, and visiting fans unfamiliar with the campus layout, these challenges are not just inconvenient. They are barriers to attendance. Auburn's athletic department recognized that improving the game-day transportation experience was essential to maintaining the atmosphere and accessibility that make Jordan-Hare one of the great venues in college football.
The existing transportation infrastructure, primarily surface parking lots and limited university bus service, was not designed to handle the peak demand spikes that game days create. Adding more parking is expensive and consumes valuable campus land. Expanding bus service requires capital investment in vehicles that sit idle for most of the year. A flexible, scalable, demand-responsive shuttle service offered a fundamentally different approach.
How Tigers Unlimited Works
Tigers Unlimited operates a fleet of electric shuttles on designated routes connecting remote parking areas, hotels, and key campus locations with Jordan-Hare Stadium. The service begins three hours before kickoff and runs continuously until two hours after the final whistle.
Key features of the operation include:
- Remote parking connection: Fans can park in designated remote lots and ride the shuttle directly to the stadium area, eliminating the need to compete for close-in parking.
- Hotel pickup service: Fans staying at Auburn-area hotels can request shuttle pickup, removing the need to drive to the stadium at all.
- Continuous loop service: Shuttles run on continuous loops during peak hours, with headways as short as 5 minutes on high-demand routes.
- Real-time tracking: Fans can see shuttle locations and estimated arrival times through a mobile app, eliminating the uncertainty of when the next vehicle will arrive.
- Accessible vehicles: The fleet includes ADA-accessible vehicles to ensure the service is available to all fans.
The operation is fully managed by Slidr. We provide the vehicles, the drivers, the technology platform, and the operations management. Auburn provides the routes, the brand integration, and access to the campus infrastructure needed to operate efficiently.
Scaling for Peak Demand
Game-day transportation is an extreme example of peak demand management. The service needs to move thousands of people in a compressed time window, then scale down to zero for the rest of the week. Traditional transit models, built around consistent daily service with predictable demand, are poorly suited for this pattern.
Our approach uses a variable fleet model. For the highest-demand games, like rivalry matchups and homecoming, we deploy the maximum fleet. For lower-demand mid-week events or non-conference games, we scale down. This flexibility is only possible because of the turnkey model: we are not asking Auburn to purchase a fixed fleet of vehicles that must be justified year-round.
The electric vehicle platform is particularly well-suited for this operating pattern. Vehicles that sit idle between game days do not consume fuel, do not require engine maintenance to stay operational, and do not degrade the way gasoline vehicles do when they sit unused for extended periods. Battery health is actually better preserved by the intermittent-use pattern than by daily continuous operation.
The University Transit Opportunity
Auburn is the first of what we expect to be many university partnerships. The game-day shuttle model is directly applicable to every major college athletic program in the country. There are 130 FBS football programs, and virtually all of them face the same transportation challenges on game days.
But game days are just the starting point. Universities face transportation challenges year-round: moving students across sprawling campuses, connecting satellite parking with academic buildings, providing safe late-night transit, serving special events from commencement to alumni weekends. The same infrastructure and operational model we deploy for game days can be adapted for these daily use cases.
We are particularly interested in the parking displacement opportunity. Universities across the country are spending $25,000 to $40,000 per space to build structured parking. A shuttle program that connects remote surface parking with campus destinations can defer or eliminate the need for new parking construction, freeing capital for academic facilities while actually improving the transportation experience.
The Fan Experience
Ultimately, Tigers Unlimited is about making game day better. We want every Auburn fan to arrive at Jordan-Hare relaxed, excited, and ready for kickoff, not stressed from circling for parking or exhausted from a long walk in the Alabama heat.
The electric shuttle experience itself contributes to the atmosphere. Our open-air vehicles, branded in Auburn's orange and navy, become part of the game-day spectacle. Fans riding together share the pre-game energy. The ride becomes a social moment rather than a logistical chore.
We have seen this effect in our hospitality operations. Guests who ride together in our shuttles strike up conversations, share restaurant recommendations, and form connections they would not have made in individual cars. We expect the same dynamic on game days: fans bonding over the shared experience of riding to the stadium together.
Looking Ahead
The 2019 season will be our proving ground. We will be collecting data on ridership, wait times, route efficiency, and fan satisfaction throughout the season. That data will inform how we scale the operation for future seasons and how we adapt the model for other universities.
To the Auburn community, War Eagle. We are honored to be part of your game-day tradition, and we are committed to delivering a transportation experience worthy of one of the greatest college football environments in the country.
For athletic directors and university transportation officials at other institutions who are interested in learning more about how the Tigers Unlimited model works, we welcome the conversation. Game day transportation is a solvable problem, and we have the operating model to prove it.
