Southern Nevada Transportation: 2015 Edition

This week, the southern Nevada RTC released their transportation projects list, one of which was a subway underneath the Las Vegas Strip. I’ll touch on a few of the options they’ve mentioned.

Taxi stands: Taxi staging areas at casinos and the two airport terminals will need to be expanded as we build more casinos and more convention space. Also, with Uber coming to the state, how people bypass the standard taxi line and take an Uber instead needs to be figured out. You cant have Ubers in the taxi line, and most hotel porte-cochères don’t have lots of space for pickup and drop off needed to accommodate a massive amount of Uber vehicles, nor do they have waiting space for people in Uber cars to park and wait for their passengers to walk out of the casino and to the car (I’ve been yelled at before by hotel security waiting to pick up people in a drop-off area). You can’t walk out to Las Vegas Blvd and hail an Uber, that will be a disaster for traffic, nevermind that it’s illegal to hail a cab on the strip – you have to go to a casino taxi stand. So where do the Uber cars go? The parking garages at the casinos? The passenger pickup lanes at the airport? I can’t think of a good answer to this.

Pedestrian Overpasses: More of these are needed along the stip in the areas away from the major intersections. This one is a big “duh”, the most difficult is the massive amount of right-of-way needed on the sidewalks to land these immense structures and allow for elevators to be ADA compliant.

Las Vegas Monorail: The RTC suggests linking the recently expanded Mandalay Bay Convention Center with the monorail, and adding a stop at the Sands Convention & Expo Center. First and foremost, the monorail should go to the airport (notwithstanding the subway idea below). Thats job one, and if the taxi industry was defeated by Uber, then surely the Las Vegas Monorail group can stand up to the taxi lobby this time. Next, good luck trying to get Shelly to buy into the idea of putting a monorail stop near the Sands Expo – he rejected it the first time and I’m sure he hasn’t changed his mind. Until there is a new CEO of Venetian/Sands, there won’t be a monorail stop there. I love the idea of the monorail being upgraded to 1) support more passengers at peak times, 2) connect to the airport, and 3) connect all three major convention spaces in town. I just don’t think it will happen for reasons that aren’t related to funding and business plans.

Las Vegas Strip Subway: I like this idea. There are two major geotechnical issues with building a strip subway – the water table below the strip is shallow, so there will have to be a lot of effort into making sure that the tunnels don’t leak, and don’t fill up with water during construction. Geotechnical work will be the single largest factor in the pre-construction phase of this project. However, a few casinos have built underground structures (the Palazzo parking garage, for example) so its not unreasonable to think this can be done. The second is caliche, which is a concrete-like substance found in the soil in the Las Vegas area. Its expensive to go through, and I don’t know how deep it runs – it could be a foot or six feet thick. If you build the subway at a sufficient depth (below the water, sewer, gas and power lines underground) then you can get under the caliche and be ok, only needing to penetrate it at access points and passenger stops. Phase one should go up and down the strip from the old Saraha (now SLS) to the Mandalay Bay, which could do a better job connecting all three major convention spaces because the Rivera will become an extension of the LVCC, and a people mover system on LVCC property could move people from the strip to the main hall located a half mile away. Phase 2 would link it to the airport east from Mandalay Bay underneath the two north/south runways at McCarran Airport to terminals 1 and 3. Phase 3 extends north to the Arts District and Downtown Las Vegas.

I’ve taken light rail from SeaTac Airport to Downtown Seattle and I loved it. It was way better and cheaper than dealing with a taxi. Then I took the monorail from Downtown Seattle to the Space Needle. That was neat. I only had to rent a car to go north to the Boeing factory in Everett.

Express Exit Ramps and HOV/HOT Lanes: NO, BAD RTC! NO! The HOV lanes that are in place now don’t get used much (they already have pretty limited hours of operation for HOV use only), and building more ramps between highways or side streets isn’t going to get people in Vegas to carpool. This isn’t a business town where everyone works 8-5, this is a service industry town where everyone works different hours, can be let off their shift early if it’s dead or be asked to stay late if it’s busy. People just can’t carpool here without substantial risk. What they can do however, is setup a park-and-ride system that allows strip casino workers from all over town to park in their neighborhood in a parking lot, and then take a bus for the area they work in (downtown/north strip, mid-strip, south strip/airport) and be taken to work on mass transit, and be returned to their car when their shift is over (the busses would run 24/7).

US 95 (I-11) Interchange at Maryland Parkway: This is great idea, the downtown Las Vegas area needs more access from the highway, the one-and-a-half exists from the US 95 and one from I-15 isn’t enough to handle the large spikes in traffic from AAA baseball games and nights at the Smith Center, plus all the normal traffic from the very large outlet mall downtown.