The 49ers, city of Santa Clara and Valley Transportation “staged their first and only mock stadium event” yesterday at Levi’s Stadium to “test out the game-day plans they’ve been honing for years,” according to Mike Rosenberg of the SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS. Traffic, parking and “general questions about how everyone is going to get around on game days continue to be the top concern of fans.” The event was “designed to make sure authorities will be as ready as possible for the unprecedented crush of people descending on suburban Santa Clara.” 49ers VP/Stadium Operations & Security Jim Mercurio yesterday said, “There hasn’t been anything today that was an ‘uh-oh, we forgot this.’ What we learned was the plans that we had should work.” Although, there were “no fans” at the event, the simulation was “no joke.” The 49ers “timed everything to make sure they knew exactly how long it would take fans to get through security gates.” Workers “barged into the chain-link fences to make sure drunken fans couldn’t knock them over.” There were “some issues” yesterday, but most of them were “relatively minor.” Stadium officials figured out they could “squeeze more metal detectors onto the streets, that more barricades were needed and that some of the rope-lines simply looked ugly” (SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS, 6/30).
