The 2026 NFL draft was held in Pittsburgh, which was the first time in the city since 1946. This year’s draft also broke attendance records with north of 800,000 people attending the final day. The Thursday and Friday of the draft witnessed more than 600,000 people on Pittsburgh’s North Shore, effectively more than doubling the city’s population. Strains on scarce infrastructure came with the large attendance. It is my contention that the city’s officials failed to account for economic principles with respect to allocation of infrastructure leading up to the Draft.
I was in attendance the first night. My friends and I boarded a Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) bus in the neighboring city of Monroeville without issue. Since the city announced ahead of time that bus fares would be free, I suspect this is what most people did. Hundreds of thousands of people traveling into the city spread across a whole day posed few logistical issues. The problem arose when all of these people tried to leave.
The vast majority of those in attendance left after the Pittsburgh Steelers made their pick. The fans descended upon the closest bus stop en masse. The crowd moved onto the street, backing up traffic.
There was also a lack of coordination on the part of the buses. A number of the bus drivers stopped up the street from the bus stops and allowed people to board. As a result, the buses arrived already full, creating unrest within the crowd.
Did it have to be this way? Having a clear procedure for picking up would have gone a long way, but higher prices would have helped.
The PRT could have raised bus fares in anticipation of high demand. They should have anticipated high frustrated demand and increased their prices accordingly. If the PRT would have increased their prices, people would have been more inclined to turn to high-priced garages and casino parking lots, which were priced high due to an anticipated high traffic. In light of the zero price for the PRT, these garages and casinos decreased their prices over the course of the Draft. If the PRT had high prices from the beginning, fewer people would have taken the buses and rather drove in and parked in the various garages and lots across the city.
If the demand for buses is about perfectly inelastic, then people would not have been deterred from taking the buses at what would be considered a “reasonable” price; however, there must be some price above the normal prices that would deter less-willing riders and sort them into other forms of transportation or out of the event entirely.
Of course, visitors substituting into car transportation would have produced more traffic; however, this traffic could have been less extreme given that it would have been dispersed throughout the city rather than concentrated in the North Shore. Additionally, this would have lessened the burden on the PRT and prevented a large mob from forming at the bus stops.
Decreasing the size of the mob would have been a clear gain from siphoning more visitors into car transportation. What occurred the first night of the draft was a prisoner’s dilemma. If it is doubtful that you (a potential passenger) will be able to get on the bus, then it would benefit you to move ahead of everyone else (onto the street). Someone else observing you would recognize this and also move ahead to equal the playing field. After you both move onto the street, you are no better off than if you both were to stay on the sidewalk, but now the both of you are on the street and blocking traffic, leading to a worse situation than if both of you were to just stay off the street. Higher prices would have diminished the population of potential passengers, increased the probability of being able to get on the bus, and therefore decrease the relative payoff of moving ahead of the crowd and onto the street.
To sum up what happened: Pittsburgh provided free transportation, which caused a great amount of frustrated demand. This led to mobs crowding the buses, increased traffic around the bus stops, and underused alternatives to public transportation, such as parking in garages or lots. Many wondered whether they would be able to get on a bus at all and perhaps resorted to Ubers and Lyfts priced at surge rates. After I got on the bus, a SWAT team arrived and succeeded in establishing some order.
The above issues would have been averted by the higher prices. A private transportation system would have likely raised the prices, as evidenced by the private parking garages and lots raising their prices in response to the high demand. The PRT exhibited the failure of the public sector in anticipating future conditions.
It is possible that a transportation system owned by private businesses would provide free transportation to the North Shore just as a mall or a store provides free parking for their potential customers. The fact that the company Sheetz partially sponsored the free busing shows that this might be possible, but given that paid alternatives, such as lots and garages, increased their prices in advance shows that a private system would face pretty high costs to providing free transportation.
Another objection to the proposal above is that the free buses lessened the risk of drunk driving accidents after the draft. I do not think that this objection has much weight. Nevermind the fact that the buses are taking visitors from Pittsburgh and just dropping them off somewhere else where they get in their cars and drive off. The draft lasted all day and gave plenty of time between the bulk of drinking and the travel out of the city at the end of the day.
I have not addressed here the merits and detriments of hosting events like the Draft. Opportunity costs of the resources devoted to hosting the games, high security costs, and ephemeral benefits are among the studied results of hosting the Olympics. Likewise, there are already reports that the 2026 Draft will not pay for itself, and some restaurants are announcing that they did not receive as many customers as expected.
We will likely learn more about the costs of the NFL Draft in subsequent months and years as economists research the myriad of consequences, but one thing that we can be certain of is that the private sector responds to such events in a dramatically different way than the public sector. The public sector does not know how to respond to changing economic conditions as well as the private sector does, and it much prefers to err on the side of actions that will immediately gratify the electorate rather than considering long-term consequences.
Mises states, “Bureaucratic management is management of affairs which cannot be checked by economic calculation.” The public sector can, at best, mimic the free enterprise system. The only way that we can realize the private sector outcomes is to actually privatize the public sector. Mises states elsewhere, “A government enterprise can never be ‘commercialized’ no matter how many external features of private enterprise are superimposed on it.” There is no substitute for the private sector. The ideal libertarian outcome would be a totally privatized system with private roads, busing, parking, etc. Until this is established, it is unclear whether the problems of congestion will be solved by marginal privatization or simply shifted to another public utility.
The private sector will judge if transportation should be free under a fully privatized system. It will determine bus fares and parking prices. It will determine if it is worth shutting down a large portion of the city for the draft. If the cost outweighs the benefit, then the draft will go elsewhere.
This article has only examined a particular problem with a socialized busing system that resulted from a single event that transpired over a few days. The costs of a socialized busing system are more numerous than failing to set prices that do not equilibrate the market.
Colin McNickle of the Allegheny Institute advocates for privatizing the PRT in a 2025 piece. He draws heavily from a Brookings study by Clifford Winston. The study as a whole is worth reading, but some of the detriments of a public transportation system are “excessive labor costs, bloated bureaucracies and construction-cost overruns.” Privatization leads to “fewer operating restrictions, greater economic incentives and stronger competitive pressures,” which would “reduce waste and make service more responsive to travelers’ preferences.”
Will future hosts of the Draft consider these lessons? Unclear. We will check back in after the 2027 NFL draft in Washington, DC.
