The Las Vegas Strip,  now rivalling Disneyland and Times Square as one of the most intensely used entertainment zones on the continent, has some choices to make.

It can keep the traffic moving now that it has leveled off  (down from 72,000 vehicles a day on the Strip before the 2008 Recession, to about 65,000 on the busiest stretch).

But the customers coming in the door, by an order of two to one, are more and more coming in by foot – and the Strip will need to find more room for them, while offering what they come to Las Vegas for.  To do that, they need to celebrate and enhance the pedestrian experience.  So far, not so good: wide roads, narrow sidewalks – and both are failing to move the traffic.  But while the Strip is designed to enhance the cruising experience by car, on foot it drags.

Even with most of the overhead pedestrian bridges, there’s no playfulness or extravagence .  Some have chain-link fencing and feel like cattle chutes.

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Revealingly, in a city that loves extravagant lighting, there are no displays on the passerelles – not even, in some cases, any pedestrian-scaled lighting at all.

How can a place with so much money do such a lousy job of the public realm?

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But eventually they will have to stop fighting the obstructions that can actually enhance the pedestrian experience and get on with widening the sidewalks.  Las Vegas will have to learn from New York – and not just how to serve those on foot but even those on bike.  Yes, Las Vegas might even consider a separated bike lane now that the kind of visitors Las Vegas wants are cosmopolitan, and will have increasingly tried out cycling and bike-sharing systems in other places and will want it as option for their vacation experience.  Can you imagine the politics of that?

Any new option means at least narrowing the existing 12-foot traffic lanes or possibly taking space from motordom for other modes – practically unimaginable in a southwestern American county at this time.

But if Las Vegas wants to remain globally competititve, it will mean offering visitors the option of driving less, not even having to rent a car, because they will have some practical choices.  Including, of course, transit.  If enough people could be moved by transit, taxi and foot, the number of vehicles could continue to drop to the point where the loss of four lanes on a ten-lane arterial could actually improve the flow.

But what would this look like?  Fortunately someone has already figured that out.

Part 7 here.

There is one over-riding imperative in transportation management on the Las Vegas Strip:  keep the traffic moving.

Las Vegas has bet that it can accommodate ever more vehicles and people – but this gambling town may be reaching its limit: they’ve maxxed out on traffic lanes for vehicles; now they’re trying to squeeze space on the sidewalks for pedestrians.

Last November, the jurisdiction responsible for the Strip, Clark County, received a study that measured what’s happening on their sidewalks:

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The study is rooted in research from the 1970s and 80s – and it shows.  Pedestrians are seen as another form of vehicle, and the analysis assumes the primary purpose of walking is speed.

 …speed is an important level-of-service criterion because it can be easily observed and measured, and because it is a descriptor of the service pedestrians perceive …

So they used a motordom measurement – Level of Service (LOS) – and gave grades to predestrian flow: A to F … green to red … free-flowing to collision.

And sure enough, the problem was determined to be the same ailment that afflicts traffic: unsatisfactory Levels of Service.

For example, here are the sidewalks on a holiday Saturday:

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Red is not good – and there’s a lot of it.  The Strip is becoming what Times Square was: so crowded that walking within the sidewalk space was getting impossible, and people started spilling out into the roadway, taking a lane from the cars.  Interfering with traffic!

But the Clark County analysis never mentioned the obvious: widen the sidewalks.  Taking space from the car – as New York did in Times Square – was clearly never on the table to be discussed .  The study, instead, took the same attitude to the sidewalk as transportation engineers have taken to the road:  Get rid of obstructions that might slow things down.

Most of the recommendations deal with extending and enforcing “No Obstruction” zones – and also with the need to “contain the pedestrians,” as they have in places up and down the Strip, using devices from Jersey barriers to artful fencing (left).

Ironically, some of the obstructions that hinder pedestrian flow are there to ensure that there are no obstructions hindering vehicle flow (right).

By the end of the report, one almost gets the sense that pedestrians are seen as a kind of pest, needing to be contained – especially when there’s a danger that a few might break free and make a run for it:

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Solution: build fencing along the medians to discourage any hope of sanctuary.  And of course: build more and wider pedestrian overpasses..

Ah, those pedestrian overpasses.  Las Vegas is already, I’d bet, the capital of passerelles in America.

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All have escalators, to ensure that no one might have to climb a set of stairs …

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… but many of which are “temporarily out of order”:

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Consequently, as they walk between acres of slot machines and gaming tables, from casino to buffet, along the Strip and over the passerelles, Las Vegas tourists may get more exercise than normal without even realizing it.  That may have something to do with why they enjoy the place.

But in the long run, the Las Vegas approach to transportation management isn’t improving either the visitor experience or the traffic flow.  So what should they do?

Part 6 here.

Las Vegas is Motordom Triumphant.  The city and county have practically from their birth, and certainly in their growth, assumed the dominance of the motor vehicle.

Here’s the first shot I took after arriving on the Strip:

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For most visitors, renting a car is practically compulsory.  But the region is not without transit.  Indeed, the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada has tried to provide a targeted transit service to appeal to visitors navigating the Strip – the cleverly named double-decker Deuce (right) and the express SDX – with sparkling buses and affordable extended fares.

But the design of and the space for the regular-service bus stops tell you everything you need to know about how transit is seen in this society: a service for the service workers, or for the poor, the disabled, the young and the old unable to drive.  (We did try the regular service on our first night to get Downtown, and were disappointed when the express simply didn’t show up.)

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Regardless of the quality or frequency of the bus, it’s just another vehicle caught in the traffic: transit has no separate lanes, no priority signals, or few pull-outs or stops with real-time information.

The view from the bus driver’s seat:

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There is a privately-funded monorail on the east side of the Strip, typically a half-kilometre or more from the boulevard, at the back of the casinos, if you can find a station.  We didn’t bother.

The monorail has had an unhappy operating experience, and, at one point in its bankruptcy, did more to discredit this kind of transit than encourage more of it.

There are also a couple of small private monorails connecting casinos owned by the same company.  No longer than a kilometre, they are at least integrated into the complexes and free to use.

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The absence of a dedicated right-of-way for serious high-capacity transit in the place where it is more critically needed – on the Strip itself – indicates that the problem is going to have to get significantly worse, with all other options eliminated, before the inevitable is considered:  a balanced transportation system, where the vehicle is just one choice in a menu of practical alternatives.

Part 5 here.

Las Vegas Boulevard – the ten-lane arterial that services one of the largest entertainment zones on earth – is not a nice place for a pedestrian.  And not just because the sidewalks are too narrow to accommodate the crowds generated by the huge hotel-and-casino complexes that are now close enough together, and in some cases seamlessly integrated, to encourage such surprising behaviour as getting North Americans to walk.

No, one of the other unpleasant realities is this:

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The volume of pedestrians on Las Vegas Boulevard feels like it has reached Times Square levels – but unlike in New York, there is continual conflict with vehicles crossing the sidewalk to access the stores and parking lots behind.  As a consequence of the parking-lot pattern of the previous era – and the sheer number of curb cuts – peds and cars play a continual game of chicken.

Here is one side of one the Strip’s busiest blocks – with a dozen curb cuts:

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And while you might expect in this frontier culture that the car would have or take the right-of-way, that’s not what happens.  The flow of people on feet is so relentless, there’s seldom a break for the vehicles, which then start to back up and obstruct the traffic flow behind them.

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It gets so bad that private security begins to function as traffic cops – and are often simply ignored:

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All this might be alleviated if there were, as in Vancouver, rear lanes from which the parking could be accessed.  But even in new developments, especially those that demand huge floorplates for their casinos, porte cocheres for the hotels and underground parking are still accessed from the boulevard:

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Unbelievably, these driveways are often entered from across the traffic flow, requiring left-hand turns across three or four lanes of oncoming traffic, without signals:

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It’s not just in the casinos that Las Vegas visitors are making big bets.

And it’s not that they don’t know they have a problem. 

Part 4 here.

Las Vegas for the tourist consists of three parts: the four-mile Strip, the Downtown and the suburbs.

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The majority of the tourist and conference action is on the Strip; Downtown had, like many American cities, fallen on hard times.  Still sort-of-cool, sort-of-depressing, it was the original townsite and gambling district of Las Vegas, prior to the Strip, and still attracts a crowd to the Fremont Street Experience – a quasi-enclosed pedestrian mall, worthy of an analysis all on its own.

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There’s more: an Arts District and Symphony Park with the new Smith Center (below), LV’s outreach to the fine arts, so scrupulously and expensively done in upscale Deco that, regardless of public favour, architects will hate it.  But there’s also a Frank Gehry-designed brain clinic and the vast Jon Jerde-designed World Market Center on the western fringe.

While most of the core is not yet comfortable to walk around, that may change as the area attracts the high-tech crowd, led by Zappo’s CEO, Tony Hsieh, who intends to move his operations from a suburban business park to the old city hall, just as the new Mob Museum occupies, appropriately, the old court house.  (Seriously, it’s really good.)

Anyway, back to the Strip.

Take a close look at the Las Vegas grid, laid out like the rest of the West in one-mile squares, and you can guess at the problem:

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Because of the airport, there are only four east-west arterial roads connecting a huge chunk of east Las Vegas with the north-south freeway – and they cross Las Vegas Boulevard to do it.  Which means a whole lot of through traffic is intersecting with a hundred thousand or so tourists, a lot of whom anticipate having their own wheels to get around.

So no wonder it looks like this:

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That’s not the Boulevard; that’s the ‘side street’ backed up to the freeway at 2 in the afternoon.

And that’s not the worst of it.  There’s another problem inherent in the design of the place that frustrates attempts to keep the traffic moving. 

Part 3 here.

The week: Reflections on Las Vegas.

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Las Vegas is s city of the imagination: we all have a sense of what it’s like.  We’ve been there, through the movies, ads, images, songs and words.

Sure it’s fake – of a very high order.  Yes, it pushes boundaries; excess is the point.  (“What happens in Vegas …” etc.) .  This is where the tourist comes to explore the outer limits of American popular culture, where the ups and downs are higher and lower than anywhere else.  And where Motordom prevails, and always has.

But they’ve got a little problem.

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Too many pedestrians.

In the last couple of decades, the Las Vegas Strip has seen an almost complete reconstruction of the classic desert resorts associated with the Rat Pack, Liberace, Elvis and the Mob. Ten of them – the Dunes, the Sands, the Stardust and more – have been imploded, to be replaced by a dozen or so massive hotel/casinos with three to four thousand rooms each.

What was once this:

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Is now this:

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But my guess is that Las Vegas thinks it’s only a bigger version of this:

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More urban, yes, but still a town to be experienced by car, preferably a stretch limo, where the traffic has to be kept moving 24/7.

So they’ve widened the Strip to ten lanes, removed any curbside parking, prevented any crosswalks at major intersections, constructed overhead walkways for pedestrians, and prohibited taxis from stopping when hailed.  And of course, no special treatment for transit, certainly nothing that would require a separate lane.

This is Motordom Triumphant.

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And it’s failing.

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Part 2 here.