Boston has known it for years: One effective way to push tourists to the places you want them to go is to create trails and send them off on self-guided sightseeing tours. Urban trails can be based on anything—cultural sites, historical markers, arts districts, whatever—once people have a map, a visible path and some must-see sites, they tend to stick with it.
It can also work with locals—and Vegas planners are onto the idea. There are plans to create several new urban trails in town, aimed not only at tourists, but at residents: Redeveloping Downtown means getting Las Vegans to come get out of their cars and create some kind of community. Since Neonopolis and other attempts haven't yet done the job, City of Las Vegas urban designer Flinn Fagg says they've mapped out four trails that might. One trail would lead through the Arts District; another would trek through the Cultural Corridor north of Downtown; another would link Fremont Street to Frank Wright Park; and the fourth would connect these to the planned monorail stops.
Ideally, the trails would be marked by wider sidewalks made of something other than plain cement—in Boston, they're marked in some places with brick lines and in other places with paint.
"The whole system would be connected and increase pedestrian mobility," Fagg said. "Downtown is going to be home to more residents in the future, and this will serve them and tourists."
Meanwhile the county is busy planning eight to 11 miles of paved trail by the Flamingo Wash, to include public art, pedestrian bridges and benches—the kind of thing, again, meant to encourage pleasant out-and-abouts and some sense of community pride. In fact, planner Jeff Harris said that the creation of the trail was in part a response to biannual telephone surveys the county solicits, asking residents what types of recreational accommodations they'd like. "They say they want trails—they say it's a quality of life issue," Harris said.
The county recently reviewed applications from nine "context-sensitive design consultants"—otherwise known as artists—and hired three of them to begin work on a master plan and "visual language" for the Flamingo Wash trail. One artist is from Tucson, another from Phoenix, and the third from Seattle; contracts are expected to be funded by Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act funds—BLM land-sales cash—at about $25,000 per artist.
The Flamingo Wash Trail project is expected to cost $2.5 million, and construction is expected to start in late spring or early summer. "This is the first thing like this here," Joan Lolmaugh, county cultural affairs manager, said. The city's urban trails are probably more than a year in the distance, pending securing grant money to develop them.
So all of this begs the questions: Will people use these trails? Will they enhance the community? Or simply eat up money and draw further attention to our apparent unwillingness to participate in a pedestrian-based community off the Strip?
Plenty of cities have used the urban trails concept—San Francisco has something called the Gold Rush Trail, although that city has rarely seemed to suffer from a lack of pedestrian-oriented community. Atlanta has a few Civil War trails, and Kansas City has something mysteriously called a Family Fun Trail.
In Boston, there's the Freedom Trail, which includes 16 nationally historic sites such as Paul Revere's house, the site of the Boston Massacre and the Granary Burial Ground, in which Sam Adams and Benjamin Franklin are buried. Boston also offers a Black Heritage Trail, an Irish Heritage Trail and a Literary Trail. The latter includes stops at Harvard, the gargantuan Boston Public Library and Walden Pond.
And while Las Vegas does have a significant dearth of Walden Ponds, Ivy League schools and buried Founding Father-era legends, there are plenty, and dare we say, plenty of interesting, things to check out here.
Planners are counting on the appeal of sites like those in the Cultural Corridor: The Children's Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Old Mormon Fort and the Boneyard (neon sign museum) all stand within a mile of each other. Not good enough? The burgeoning arts district, complete with burgeoning galleries. Not good enough? What if they add benches and interesting public art? Fancy walkways?
A recent stop at the not-so-urban trails at the Wetlands Park offers some mild degree of optimism that people do take in the off-Strip attractions, use the benches and walk easy trails if given a formal-enough set-up.
On the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, a half-dozen street-shoes-wearing people were crowded into the Parks and Recreation information trailer at the eastern end of Tropicana, talking about bird-watching and picking up leaflets about natural history. Another half-dozen were out on the cement pathways that lead through a marsh and allow visitors to get in a bit of not-so-casino, not-so-strip-mall strolling.
"Did you see any interesting critters out there?" one asked another as they crossed paths.
"We sat and watched ducks. And, oh—we did see a great big bird, maybe a hawk?"
"Isn't this great?"
"We love it. We come here all the time."
Hmmm.