Music Festival Site Map Planning Guide

The temptation is to drop stages first because they're the loudest decision. Resist it. The base layer is the ground truth that every other element negotiates with: site boundaries, existing roads and access tracks, hard standing, slope and drainage, tree canopy, underground services, and the public/back-of-house split.

Walk the site with the landowner before the map opens in any software. Mark every gate, every culvert, every overhead line. A 33 kV span you didn't know about is a cancelled crane lift on day three.

Safety zones get drawn before anything fun. They are the constraints every other layer respects. Plan and label these explicitly:

• Emergency vehicle access — minimum 4 m clear width, 4.5 m vertical, with passing bays every 100 m. Kept clear at all times, including during peak crowd flow.
• Crowd evacuation routes — measured against expected peak density and the licensing capacity, not the gate count. Signed and lit, with a redundant route if the primary is compromised.
• Medical and welfare locations — main medical near vehicle access, satellite medics inside crowd zones, welfare somewhere quieter with shade and water.
• Fire breaks and exclusion zones — around generators, fuel bowsers, pyro, LPG, and battery storage. Walk these with your safety officer and your insurer's risk assessor.
• Crowd flow pinch points — front-of-stage barriers, bar queues, toilet blocks, food village entries. Model density, not just throughput.

Logistics lanes are the difference between a clean bump-in and a 200-truck traffic jam at gate. They need to be on the map from day one of planning, and they need time windows attached.

• Bump-in route — usually heavy-vehicle only, one-way, with a marshalling area off-site so trucks aren't queueing on public road.
• Production loops — internal circulation for forklifts, telehandlers, buggies, and runners. Separated from crowd zones as soon as doors open.
• Artist routes — discrete access from the artist compound to each stage's back-of-house. Time-shared with logistics where space is tight.
• Waste and water — pump-out routes for portable toilets and grey water tanks, refuse runs to the compactor. Daily, not occasional.
• Bump-out reverse plan — bump-out is bump-in run backwards under fatigue. The lane plan that worked in is the lane plan you trust on Monday morning.

Infrastructure placement is where the map earns its keep. Every distro, every cable run, every fibre tail, every potable tap, every grey water tank needs a coordinate and an owner.

• Power — generator locations sized to load schedules, with fuel access lanes and noise/exhaust direction marked. Cable runs ramped or buried wherever they cross public ground.
• Comms — fibre or microwave between FOH, production office, ticketing, and medical. Radio repeater locations chosen against terrain, not convenience.
• Water — potable taps every 100 m through public areas, with redundancy. Crew-only water in BOH separated from public supply.
• Lighting — site lighting for safety routes overnight, not just show lighting for stages. Mark the dark spots before patrons find them.
• Connectivity — POS, ticket scanners, access control, CCTV. Map the network like you map the power.

A site map isn't a deliverable for the production office — it's a working document for dozens of teams. The ones who must have a current version on the morning of show day, ideally on a tablet, ideally with their own layer turned on:

• Stage and area managers
• Security and crowd management leadership
• Medical and welfare leads
• Bar, F&B, and traders coordination
• Logistics and traffic management
• Local authority liaisons, police, fire, ambulance
• Artist liaison and tour managers on arrival

If any of those people are working from a PDF emailed three days ago, the map has already failed them.

Site maps decay fast once load-in starts. A generator gets relocated 30 m to clear a low branch. A second medic post is added at the dance stage. Production swaps two bar locations after a queue model fails. If those changes don't make it back to the map within the hour, the map stops being trusted, and people stop opening it.

The fix is operational, not technological — but the technology has to make it cheap. Pins must be editable from the field, on a phone, by the area lead who owns that zone. Updates must be visible to everyone else inside a minute. History must be retained so you can replay what changed and when, because the after-action review depends on it.

• One-version-of-truth on paper. By day two it's three versions of truth, all wrong.
• No layer separation. Putting safety zones, infrastructure, and stage rigging on a single layer means nobody can read the layer they need.
• Coordinates without owners. Every pin needs a named owner and a status. "Generator 4" is not enough — "Generator 4 / Power lead / commissioned" is.
• Skipping the bump-out map. It's the same site, but tired crew and reversed lanes turn it into a different site. Plan it.
• Map drift across teams. Security's map says one fence line, production's map says another. Whichever one is wrong, the radios will find out first.

The expensive part of running a festival map isn't drawing it — it's keeping everyone on the same version, and answering the same question (is the second medic post commissioned yet?) forty times an hour.

Cadence Ops treats the site map as live operational data. Every pin — stage, bar, generator, medic, gate, camera, water point — has a status, an owner, and a history. The Cadence assistant can read that data directly: ask it "what's the status of the south gate fence build?" or "which infrastructure pins are still uncommissioned on the dance stage?" and you get a current answer, not a stale PDF.

For production teams used to chasing area leads on radio for a status update, that shift — from "ask a human, wait" to "ask the map, get an answer" — is the single biggest reason to move site mapping off static diagrams.