![\"Heritage](\"https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/edmontonjournal/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/hawrelak-park-1929.ej_304578837.jpg\" "\\"Heritage")
This year’s Heritage Festival had a successful return to its home at Hawrelak Park in terms of attendance, registering an estimated 100,000 visitors on Monday alone. But with a big move comes growing pains.
Some visitors faced issues reaching the festival over the weekend. With parking at capacity at the Edmonton Valley Zoo and Laurier Park, ideal park and walk and bike areas, police advised festivalgoers to rely on the ETS park and ride shuttle system. Many residents used city buses to attend the festival, but a few gave the shuttle system mixed reviews. Ward papastew Coun. Michael Janz said that he took the shuttles down to Hawrelak, and thought they ran relatively smoothly.
“I took the shuttle from Health Sciences, and I was actually quite impressed how fast and frequent the shuttles were running and how smooth it was with the boarding on and off,” said Janz. His only complaint was that single-occupancy vehicles kept merging into the shuttle-only lane.
“There were a number of cars around us with single occupancy blocking the way of the buses. So if anything, I think there needs to be some sort of consideration given to bus priority to help speed up the buses,” said Janz.
“Eighty people on a bus shouldn’t be stuck behind six cars with one person each.”
Josh Thompson attended this year’s Heritage Festival and said while the festival is definitely back where it belongs in Hawrelak, the park does create new problems.
“The park creates some bottlenecks with transportation,” he said. “They weren’t explicit enough about trying to encourage more people to find ways other than trying to drive and park, and I think it caused a lot of challenges for everyone trying to drive and park, because it was just a mess over Groat Road.”
Thompson thought bikes should have been promoted more as a way to get to the event and added having more options for bike parking would help. He pointed to the CFL’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers as an example of this.
“Winnipeg, of all places, for their Blue Bomber games, it’s like a massive kind of like bike parkade kind of thing that they’ve really built into their culture, and people just know, ‘Oh it’s way easier if we can get 5,000 people to bike to this thing versus trying to move 5,000 vehicles in and out.’ ”
In terms of cars, 266 parking tickets were handed out during the festival, including 43 tows, according to the City of Edmonton. However, these numbers are for tickets handed out by parking enforcement officers, not including park rangers, peace officers, or EPS.
Regardless of hiccups, it seems festivalgoers still had an enjoyable time at this year’s event. Janz said even though he had his complaints, Heritage Festival still held up.
“Even for all my complaints about traffic, transportation, and parking, still it was very seamless,” he said.
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