Halifax Stadium Discussion

[Welkin]

Both Fenwick and Halifaxboyns make very good points and I agree with their view of a mass transit future. However, we are going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I think downtown locations are great for baseball stadiums (80+ home dates) and large arenas (100+ home dates for hockey games, concerts and trade shows) but football stadiums are a different animal. Football games happen on the weekends, not during the work week. Football weekends have become events and are much larger than just the game itself. Activities before games can begin hours and hours before kickoff. Many fans from outside Halifax would probably love to drive down in their RV's and make a weekend of it. I know one game I went to had over a hundred RV's camped at the far end of the parking lot and they turned it in to a tailgating festival that started on Saturday and went all the way to game day. You can't do that in a squeezed in downtown location. The NIMBY's will complain about the crowds and noise.

Access to mass transit is great and is very important for moving thousands of workers downtown everyday or reducing parking at high density residential areas. However, for the festival that football games have become, you need open spaces and easily accessible parking. Don't get me wrong, you still need to run buses to the game for those who don't want to deal with the hassles of crowds and parking, but it won't be more than 20% of your fans. Squeezed in downtown stadiums with limited parking no longer fit the environment that football games have become.

Regina is basically building a large downtown arena that happens to host football games. The 10-11 dates per year for football games are supposed to be but a small part of the 100+ events they expect to host each year so a downtown location is just. Personally I think they are building an expensive white elephant and should just build a $100M stadium down in the Grasslands Development, but that's another story.