Giants games to attract giant traffic: Langley Township prepares
Posted May 5, 2016 12:23 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
LANGLEY (NEWS 1130) — The Township of Langley is looking at parking and traffic options as the Vancouver Giants gets set to make the Langley Events Centre its home next season.
Council is tossing around ideas like a parkade, paid parking and an updated intersection on 200th Street to accommodate upwards of 5,000 fans.
“We’ve had large crowds before, and we’ve handled them before, this would just be handling that large crowd more often,” says councilor Blair Whitmarsh.
“At the same time as a hockey game, we could have a basketball game or volleyball game in the gym, so there could be as many as 6,000 to 7,000 people coming to the facility at the same time.”
He says the township doesn’t have any concrete plans in place but it recognizes people are concerned about traffic jams and parking.
“We do have a challenge because a lot of the vehicles that come are single occupancy, so people aren’t carpooling. One of the things that charge parking does is it encourages people to consider carpooling.”
“If we were to build a parkade, we might have it such that the parkade is paid and the rest is free, those kinds of things.”
Whitmarsh says the parking situation at the Langley Events Centre is a bit better than what some people faced at the Pacific Coliseum, the now former home to the Giants.
“It’s really more country-kind of roads, so it’s really quite different. I found it quite difficult to park at the Pacific Coliseum. I’ve gone to some of their games and I’ve gone to other events there when the BC boys’ basketball championships are there and I’d be parking a mile away in a residential area to try to and get there.”
TransLink has recently increased service in parts of the township but it is unclear if more buses will be making the trek to the Events Centre this fall.
