On a good night—like right now, when it’s not still 100 degrees after sunset—I walk a 3-mile loop around Downtown Las Vegas. On foot.
I’d like to tell you why I walk, before you’re inclined to tell me why I shouldn’t. There are valid health reasons to “get my steps in.” I’m Gen X, and there aren’t all that many of us, so it’s incumbent on me to stay in reasonably good shape to preserve my collectability.
But the main reason I take walks is that, after some 20 years of living in walkable neighborhoods from here to Seattle, I’ve come to enjoy it. The walk takes about 50 minutes, during which I enjoy the week’s new music drops. (This time last year, I street-tested Parquet Courts’ “Walking at a Downtown Pace.” I remember that walk. It was a good walk.) I take photos; I look at decaying 50-year-old homes and imagine how I’d restore them. In short, walking provides calm and focus … even on these, the most terrifying streets ever encountered by pedestrians.
According to recently released Metro figures, pedestrian deaths in Southern Nevada are up 33% over last year. So far in 2022, 36 pedestrians have been struck and killed by drivers—a number high enough to be depressing, yet low enough to make you wonder if these deaths could be somehow prevented. A state traffic safety education website, zerofatalitiesnv.com, even provides a few life-saving remedies on a page tellingly titled “Watch Out for Each Other.” Among other things, the page instructs pedestrians to walk facing oncoming traffic, and drivers to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks.
None of this stuff should be controversial. Yet even in conversation with friends—to say nothing of the sweaty trolls mumbling to themselves in the comments section—I repeatedly hear that pedestrians have no business being on the Valley’s streets, none at all. Their arguments generally follow two consistent lines: It’s too hot to walk in Vegas, and drivers make it too dangerous to walk in Vegas. The first doesn’t track with the city’s newfound embrace of rooftop patios and sprawling pedestrian “neighborhoods” like Downtown Summerlin and the District, and the second argument—well, it’s kinda rich, coming as it does from the people doing the driving.
Put another way: Years ago, when I wrote a similar pedestrian safety story for another publication, an older reader proudly informed me that he’d struck pedestrians on multiple occasions and had never been cited for it. He was angry with me for saying that drivers should try not to hit people with their cars. The next time you get a “walk” signal I advise you to wait a moment, given the possibility he still has his license.
Like many western metros of its size, Las Vegas was built by vehicles, for vehicles. Its roads are wide, with “blocks” that can run a quarter-mile long. It was built without a dense, walkable civic core (save for the tourist corridors of the Strip and Downtown, and even that’s debatable). It has never had a light rail or streetcar system—nor, seemingly, any understanding of why it’s desirable to have one. And its sidewalks, pardon my simplicity, are largely decorative.
When I first moved to Las Vegas in 1990, many streets didn’t have sidewalks at all—“sawtooth roads,” locals called them—and the sidewalks that existed were scarcely wide enough for two people to pass one another without someone needing to step off the curb.
In other words, many of the Valley’s walkability enhancements—notably the wider sidewalks that the City of Las Vegas is now installing Downtown, and the bollards added to the Strip several years back to prevent drivers from rolling up onto the sidewalks—are recent additions, very much works in progress.
Just because space is being carved out for Vegas pedestrians doesn’t mean that a city raised without sidewalks will suddenly gain respect for them. Or that the large numbers of Southern Californians relocating here, nearly all of whom were born speeding up, will see our wide streets as anything but freeways in miniature. We’ve not seen our last pedestrian deaths, or even the beginning of the end.
If you read this far thinking I’d have a solution, I’m sorry to say that’s not the case. I have a somewhat unique perspective, in that I walk through my neighborhood by choice, and drive through it because I have to. I’ve got a swivel on my neck when I get behind the wheel, because Downtown is jaywalker central. (That’ll happen when the closest controlled intersection is many minutes and hundreads of feet out of your way.) And I won’t cross a street unless I’ve made eye contact with the drivers stopped at the light, because I once rolled up onto the hood of an inattentive right-turn driver, and I didn’t care for it.
But the problem is bigger than getting everyone to put down their phones and pay attention to the 5,000-pound metal wedge careening toward them at speed, or the hospitality worker crossing midblock to catch a bus (though we absolutely need to do that). Our sidewalks need to be widened. Streets need to be redesigned to slow traffic flow. Dedicated bike and bus lanes need to be marked off, and light rail needs to be literally fast-tracked.
These things are beginning to happen in our Downtown, as they’re happening in our neighboring metros, because a Valley with 2 million cars on the road is not sustainable. Soon, our traffic snarls could be so severe, walking to a bus stop won’t seem like such a crazy idea.
On that note, I suggest try a walk around the block now that the summer weather has cooled. Put on your earbuds, some good shoes and simply go. Walk to the corner, then to the next corner and maybe even up the street to a restaurant, bar or movie theater you’d normally drive to. Look at the houses, the signs and the sky. You might be surprised how easily you slip into a Downtown pace.
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