Unless you want to be stuck in it, you might be better off staying home.

On a regular day at LSU, Tiger Stadium is empty and traffic flows freely in the surrounding areas. After a football game, however, it is a different story.

With tens of thousands of people leaving campus all at once, some residents of nearby apartments are confined to their homes by road blockages and the contraflow traffic system local police enforce after football games.

“I think one of the biggest disadvantages is that people who are local residents who are affected by it can feel like they are trapped in a situation where they can only move in certain periods of time in the day,” Lt. Brandon Johnson of the Baton Rouge Police Department said.

The contraflow system forces all traffic to move away from campus. This means that residents who live right off campus may have to drive through the entire route of traffic just to finish less than a mile from where they started.

“One of the cops just told us to just park and sit and wait for an hour. We’d already been driving around for an hour and they told us to wait for another hour,” resident of the Venue at Northgate Jadyn Devillier said.

“We ended up not getting home until… the game probably ended at 10:30. We didn’t get home until 1:30.”

Despite the inconvenience to residents, law enforcement says the contraflow plan is in the public’s best interest when it comes to safety. Although it may not be the most timely, contraflow does help to prevent accidents.

“The amount of pedestrians that are on roadways in the streets surrounding the stadium is a huge safety issue if we just allow normal traffic,” Interim Chief of LSU Police Marshal Walters said. “So you have to control it to prevent those conflicts.”

As much fun as college football games can be, waiting hours in traffic to get home is an unfortunate price to pay.