By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
It’s easy these days finding parking along the famed Las Vegas Strip with COVID-19 reducing the size of event crowds, but in three months on July 10 things will be very different on the south end of the Strip.
Allegiant Stadium is hosting a Garth Brooks concert with 65,000 music fans, while T-Mobile Arena only a mile or two away is expecting more than 20,000 UFC fans to pack its venue to watch MMA fighters Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier battle in the cage at UFC 264. Gov. Steve Sisolak is aiming to open capacity to 100 percent on June 1 and both Allegiant Stadium and UFC are promoting their July 10 events.
“Incredible, Vegas is BACK!!!,” UFC President Dana White texted LVSportsBiz.com Friday.
And the traffic will be back, too. It’s going to be a shock to the system — an infrastructure system that has yet to be tested for events at the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium because no fans attended Raiders home games in 2020.
The biggest crowd so far at Allegiant Stadium was 2,000 college football fans for a few UNLV football games last fall, while parking at T-Mobile Arena is literally free and easy because attendance at Vegas Golden Knights games is currently capped at 3,950 fans.
The Garth Brooks event has been on the Allegiant Stadium event docket for a while.
And just today, White tweeted out that his fight show organization’s UFC 264 event is sold out, with more than 20,000 people expected to fill T-Mobile Arena.
The Raiders presented parking plans back in August 2018 that involved shuttles serving four satellite parking lots for Raiders home games.
But Raiders owner Mark Davis said no fans would be allowed to attend home games in the inaugural football season in Las Vegas during the pandemic because if all the fans could not attend, then none would.
On Halloween Oct. 31, 2020, the UNLV football team actually staged the first event at Allegiant Stadium that included fans inside the building, which was a $2 billion stadium project. Southern Nevada contributed $750 million to help build the 65,000-seat, domed stadium.
The UNLV football game had only 2,000 fans, or three percent of capacity. Parking and traffic were hardly problems when 2,000 people are showing up at a 65,000-seat venue.
September 10, 2020
(Josh Hawkins/UNLV Photo Services)
Justin Gannon, a realtor who follows the local sports scene closely, said the events’ organizers will need to educate the public when 85,000 people are attending two major events at two venues on the same day.
“Right now the only parking plan released is for Raiders home games, but no one for sure knows where to park regarding satellite lots and Strip parking. UNLV’s parking plan did not include satellite lots with buses. So I guess the question is, will they always have satellite lots or are they just assuming everyone will park on the Strip and figure it out,” Gannon told LVSportsBiz.com Friday.
“UFC is mostly tourists. Garth has a ton of locals. If you have locals just show up to the Strip on a Saturday night and try to find parking it’s likely to be slammed and almost impossible to park. Now add 65k people. And if they park on the Strip, there’s only one bridge to walk to the stadium. I just see a lot of confusion,” he said.
Here’s the Allegiant Stadium off-site parking options that the Raiders presented to the Las Vegas Stadium Authority Board a few years ago.
Are these parking spaces ready to go for July 10 and the Garth Brooks concert at the stadium?
Jeremy Aguero of Las Vegas-based Applied Analysis, the public stadium board’s consultant, said,” My understanding is that they do” have a parking plan at the stadium.
LVSportsBiz.com sent emails Friday to Raiders President Marc Badain, and PR staffers for Clark County, the RTC public transportation agency and MGM Resorts International about the parking and traffic issues for the July 10 events. We didn’t get any comments, but if we do, LVSPortsBiz.com will share those with you.
PSA