SURREY — The City of Surrey is looking to the sky for its future transit. Literally.
Mayor Linda Hepner wants private helicopter companies to set up shop in the city.
“Surrey is currently in discussions with a consortium of private helicopter companies to create a network of helipads across our city,” she told a business crowd of a few hundred during the luncheon at the Sheraton Vancouver Guildford Hotel on Thursday (May 19).
“It really shouldn’t come as any surprise,” the mayor remarked.
“We’re attracting 2,000 new companies a year including regional headquarters as well as national and multinational companies looking to set up shop.... Combine all that with Surrey’s growth as our province’s second metropolitan core and you can see we’ve created a demand for helicopter service between Surrey and other centres such as Vancouver, Victoria or Kelowna.”
SEE OUR VIEW: Let them ride Hepnercopters
Hepner said many executives are moving to Surrey, but commutes to Vancouver and Victoria are just too long.
“We’ve had some inquiries on, ‘Wouldn’t it be easy if we could just go from Surrey to North Vancouver in a heart beat?’” she said.
The mayor said she’d use the service for commutes to Victoria’s Parliament Buildings.
Both north and south Surrey sites are being explored, according to Hepner.
“We’re in site selection mode right now. I know that it takes a while so I would say by this time next year…. I would hope that we’ve got that pretty solidified and under construction,” she said.