Picture a stereotypical big city. Consider all the things that make it so: tall residential and office buildings with street-facing restaurants and retail; huge public gathering spaces in the city core, where festivals (and protests) can take place; beloved institutions, like sports teams, local nightlife districts and museums; and lots and lots of people, riding to and from these things on commuter rail.
The Las Vegas metropolitan area, which boasts some big-city numbers—approximately 2.5 million people now live in the Valley, which puts us on par with metros like Cincinnati and Salt Lake City—has some of these puzzle pieces, but not all of them. We’re putting up taller residential buildings. We have major sports franchises—two and counting. The City of Las Vegas is currently considering design proposals for a civic gathering plaza adjacent to City Hall (see them at bit.ly/3FY6fN7).
And things are happening on the transit front, too. The Boring Company, the Elon Musk-founded company that built a pair of underground tunnels connecting the two far-flung ends of the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center, recently entered into a special use permit and franchise agreement with Clark County to expand the LVCC tunnels into a 29-mile network of tunnels, serviced by Musk’s autonomous electric vehicles.
Traffic heads southbound on I-15 near Sunset Road.
The Vegas Loop is a staggeringly ambitious proposal, one that would link more than 50 venues, from Allegiant Stadium to the Fremont Street Experience. (An airport connector falls under a separate proposal.) Musk’s company says it’ll cover the development costs for the tunnels, while individual properties would foot the bill for their own stations.
The LVCC connector, now in operation, runs from the south end of the convention floor to the newly built western end—a 25-minute walk, knocked down to two minutes. It’s exciting to imagine what that speed and convenience might feel like spread out to the entire resort corridor, say, leaving a Knights game at the Fortress and immediately going to the Cosmopolitan for a celebratory round of drinks … or better still, going to a venue with a less-congested cab and rideshare stand. And just imagine what the Strip could look like if much of its tourist traffic moves underground, forgoing gridlocked rental cars for underground zip.
It’ll be a while before we experience that, assuming it happens at all. (Musk could simply pull stakes for Mars tomorrow; I imagine its corporate tax rate is favorable.) But the Boring Company proposal only solves a resort corridor problem—a problem that’s already partially addressed by a monorail and several resort-to-resort shuttles. It’ll be a boon to conventioneers who intend only to travel between their hotel and the LVCC, and tourists who aren’t interested in leaving the Strip or Fremont Street.
Meanwhile, the Valley is growing at a rate that no amount of road-widening can accommodate. A June 2021 report by UNLV’s Center for Business and Economic Research predicts that the population of Clark County could swell to 3 million people in the next decade or so. The telltale signs of an overbuilt, underprepared metro are already becoming evident: daily traffic snarls on the recently-widened I-15, surface streets jammed beyond their limits.
We can vent our spleens about growth on Twitter all day long. “It’s the [expletive] Californians,” “Carpool lanes are tyranny,” that kind of thing. But it won’t stop Las Vegas’ growth. We can only hope to manage it, and that means a rapid transit network that goes far beyond tunnels connecting resorts to each other.
Most Las Vegans I know have no use for transit. (One proudly told me, “I’ve never taken a bus, and I never will.”) But in other cities where it’s become a part of daily life, rapid transit is not viewed as something that caters to the poor and car-less. It’s a multi-modal thing—bicycles, scooters, buses, light rail, taxicabs, car share, ride-share—intended to get you to your job or school in less time than it takes to get into your car, slog through traffic and find parking. It’s also a fortification against fluctuating gas prices; I lived in Seattle for a decade, using buses and trains to get around, and checked the numbers at the pump maybe a dozen times.
Arguably, Las Vegas hasn’t needed transit solutions like these until recently, when the sprawl of single-family residences finally scraped up against the red rocks. Judging by Friday rush hour, we need them yesterday. And while the Vegas Loop network could be a net good, we can’t allow ourselves to slack on planning for light rail, or in making sure that the RTC has the funding it needs to accommodate the 500,000 more bodies that are even now eyeing our low-compared-to-California cost of living and bitchin’ new football stadium. Picture our big city as it should be—complete.
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