At Beyoncé/Jay-Z concert, high heels, golf carts, buses keep fans moving in traffic

A man dances at the edge of a gravel, dirt and grass parking lot in front of a warehouse on Shop Road, waving his arms above his head and shaking his hips. He’s waving people into $15 parking for Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s On the Run II tour, which stopped at Columbia’s Williams-Brice Stadium Tuesday night. Across the street from the dancing man is Jake Mosley.

Mosley cuts your more typical parking lot attendant demeanor and dress. He wears a reflective yellow vest and waves an orange flag to signal people toward the lot he’s overseeing. In the four years he’s done this parking service gig full-time, he’s seen a lot of concert and sports event traffic. Today in Columbia isn’t that bad, he says, at least along Shop Road. Though traffic is somewhat backed up by 5:30, it’s still moving, if slower. People aren’t enraged yet with the flow of the roads.

“People don’t get angry with me so I don’t really get angry at all,” Mosley says.

But when the roads start to get clustered and people are stopped for too long without moving, that’s when Mosley’s seen people lose their heads. And in the gravel lot across from him, where the dancing man directs cars, Mosley sees all the potential for infuriated drivers. How the attendants on the other side of the street are parking people, one vehicle behind another, will cause problems later, Mosley predicts.

“They’re parking cars back-to-back,” he says. “It might be 30 minutes before you can get out. I don’t like that.”

Tension ratchets up in the roads around Williams-Brice Stadium as people and cars intertwine for what will probably be the most popular concert event in years for Columbia. While the show will provide some relief to this tension, ominous signs abound that the four- to five-hour time frame in which people have arrived and parked in the area will lead to a mass exodus stalemate at the end of the night. Other battles aside from those between vehicles and their movement on the roadways also shape up during the show.

Officer Clifford Fisher, head of Richland County Sheriff’s Department mounted unit, patrols through Key Road on his horse — a near black, towering animal named Naked. No traffic issues have come up so far, he says.

“It’ll probably be alright until it’s over,” Fisher says.

The most prominent movement dilemma in these early pre-concert hours isn’t with vehicles at all, but with women and how they navigate walking hundreds if not thousands of feet in stiletto and other forms of heels.

Kiki Watson and Bee Harris drove down from Charlotte. When Watson tried to go to a Beyoncé concert in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2016, she spent four hours in traffic before giving up and heading back home. Having found a parking spot in Columbia around 5 p.m., traffic was nothing like her last experience. After they take pictures for social media in a parking lot, their main issue is how to make it the almost one-mile walk in Harris’ single strap stilettos. It’s a problem she has a solution for. She’s brought a pair of flip-flops that she carries in her purse.

The heels, Harris says, “They’re just for pictures.”

They’re preparing for the bigger problem after the show — the traffic that they believe will back up then. While getting into Columbia and parking was easy enough, “Leaving will be a different story,” Harris says.

Tiffany James and Kylee Bleadson also made it into town from Darlington without fighting much traffic. But they did have something of a struggle with the shoes they wore. Both are in six-inch heels.

“It wasn’t that hard,” James says of their walk from the State Fairgrounds to the stadium, but she admits she would have rather done the jaunt in flat shoes.

“You have to look cute,” Bleadson says. “It hurts to look good.”

By 7 p.m., traffic on Assembly Street is starting to hurt. It’s grown from a steady flow of vehicles to bumper-to-bumper lanes stretching all the way from Williams-Brice Stadium to the old Capital City Stadium. The Highway Patrol has shifted two of the outgoing lanes to make five lanes coming. Those lanes might be packed but traffic is moving.

The COMET, Richland County’s public bus system, offered shuttles from the Vista to the State Fairgrounds. Getting people home from work on the buses’ normal routes, one of the system’s busiest times, coincided with shuttling people to the concert, which caused a shortage of buses for those looking to get to Bey and Jay. The COMET tweeted that by 8 p.m. they had all their riders dropped off.

Some of those people getting off at at the fairgrounds were moved around the growing maze of vehicles by the brigade of golf cart drivers — private entrepreneurs doing a side hustle in which they transport people from their cars to the stadium in a way that’s quicker than walking and with the ability to weave in between vehicles and go off-road as needed.

They interlace vehicles and leave the stalled traffic in the dust from the cart’s off road trekking as they call out, “Need a ride?” to folks.

AJ Jackson is one of those golf cart drivers. He’s got an extra long cart with three bench seats, painted black with “Gamecocks” emblazoned on the side. He got the cart three years ago and now he says he’s the neighborhood golf cart guy.

“All the kids want to ride with me,” he says.

Tonight, a lot of women have wanted to ride with him.

“The Beyhive did show up,” Jackson says. “All the ladies, that’s all I transported. … I tried to show them some hospitality. Some good ole AJ ‘the Golf Cart Guy’ hospitality.”

While the cart drivers show hospitality for a nominal fee, they’re also part of an ongoing traffic feud for customers.

“Golf carts doing better than Uber,” says Gee Robertson, a cart driver waiting for passengers on Key Road at the side of the stadium during the concert. “Ubers don’t like us.”

The cart drivers battle with Uber and Lyft drivers for customers — a well known competition to Thomas Jackson.

Jackson idles his black cart that sits on rims with a group of about 15 other cart drivers. He blasts Hip Hop and R&B from its speakers — just one of the tactics he uses to pull in some customers. He’ll even cater to their musical tastes to make their ride a bit better than an Uber driver.

“If they ask for something, I put it on,” he says.

When a Highway Patrol trooper starts asking the fleet of cart drivers parked on Key Road to move, a minor dispute is brought up about the Uber drivers parking in the same place and whether they’ll have to move. It’s all resolved civilly but tension mounts as more people start to make an early exit from the concert, hoping to avoid traffic.

The experience of Deputy Fisher, the mounted officer, proved he was right. When the concert ends, the exodus of people — people who had all day to get to the concert and find parking — try to get into their vehicles and go as soon as possible.

Key Road becomes a clogged artery of people, vehicles and golf carts. While George Rogers Boulevard and Assembly Street is packed, the roads are an orchestrated evacuation. Shop Road becomes a cluster of bad road behavior — people driving in the wrong lanes, others cutting each other off, and driving on the shoulders to only get one car ahead.

Shop Road at around 11 p.m. looks like a long stopped train of cars. It takes almost two hours to get from Northway Road down Shop Road to Assembly Street, where the stalemate breaks. The line of traffic on Shop Road headed toward I-77 is even longer.

The COMET got caught up in this outpouring of people, taking until 1 a.m. to shuttle everyone back to the Vista where they’d parked. Even with the delay, a video posted by the COMET shows people on the bus exuberant about their experience and saying they had a great time at the show, with one man so enthused that he took off his shirt earlier, he says.

“Now we’re on the Comet train,” he says. “I mean bus, whatever.”

Sumner Bender saw the traffic coming. This was her third time seeing Beyoncé.

“To get here was very smooth,” she says. “Leaving is always the issue.”

But when people are ending their night, “No one cares about traffic,” in her assessment.

People can say they just saw Beyoncé and Jay-Z and that’s some relief when moving an inch every ten minutes.