This paper studies a lane reservation problem for large sport events in big cities. Such events require organizers to deliver certain people and materials from athlete villages to geographically dispersed venues within a given travel duration. A lane reservation strategy is usually adopted in this circumstance to ensure that time-critical transportation tasks can be completed despite heavy urban traffic congestion. However, it causes negative impact on normal traffic. The problem aims to optimally select and reserve some lanes in a transportation network for the exclusive use of the tasks such that the total traffic impact is minimized. To solve the problem, we first develop an improved integer linear program. Then, its properties are analyzed and used to reduce the search space for its optimal solutions. Finally, we develop a fast and effective quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm for large-size problems. Computational results on instances with up to 500 nodes in the network and 50 tasks show that the proposed algorithm is efficient in yielding high-quality solutions within a relatively short time.