Your Raiders Stadium Parking Opinion? It’s Based On Where You’re From

By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com

 

Is there anything more subjective than hearing sports fans talk about traffic and parking around major league sports stadiums and arena?

 

Depending on where you attended big league games in this country and where you grew up, we heard both legitimate groans about a Raiders’ stadium parking plan that falls flat and crybaby whining over a parking plan that is not perfect but still OK when you consider many fans will take an Uber/Lyft or walk from the Strip to the palatial venue that opens in late July 2020.

 

The Raiders this week released their parking plan, which relies on four satellite parking lots and shuttles to ferry fans from these remote lots a few miles away to the $1.8 billion stadium project on 62.6 acres on the west side of I-15 bounded by Russell Road and Polaris and Hacienda avenues. The Raiders parking plan, to be discussed by the county commission Sept. 5, includes 12,000-14,650 parking spaces, including 2,375-2,725 on site.

 

If you’re from New York, you take the No. 7 train to watch the Mets. If you’re from Washington, D.C., you take Metro to watch the Capitals or Wizards. And it’s the L train to Wrigley Field to catch a Cubs game.

 

But this is Las Vegas, home of the Strip and the suburbs, where locals drive everywhere and sports fans were spoiled by taking their cars to the big asphalt sea surrounding Thomas & Mack Center for UNLV basketball games for years.

 

This is no longer your father’s Las Vegas and the first year of the Vegas Golden Knights playing in an arena on the Strip showed that fans will figure out the best way to park and get to a big league game, while tourists will either walk, catch a taxi or use an Uber/Lyft app.

 

Now the stakes are raised. T-Mobile Arena packed in 18,000 people for mostly evening games. Now, it’s 65,000 people arriving for a Raiders game — though most of those games will be at 1 p.m. on a Sunday.

 

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Clark County planners wanted some 16,000 spaces for the 65,000-seat Raiders stadium.

 

But the fact is more sports fans are becoming more savvy in reaching big league sports venues these days.

 

And people even in car-centric Las Vegas are learning to devise ways to reach places without having to park in front of the building.

 

It’s hard to get Raiders officials to discuss stadium issues for the record. So, LVSportsBiz.com reached out to Raiders surrogate Tommy White, the Laborers 872 Local union leader and a member of the Las Vegas stadium authority board to offer his side.

 

The Raiders stadium plan is not set in concrete.

 

It’s a fluid proposal that could even include the Bali Hai golf course land one day. The golf site is off Las Vegas Boulevard just south of Russell Road and within walking distance of the stadium. For now, it’s not in the stadium parking plan.

 

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