It was December 26, and I was 40 miles from finishing a trip from hell.
I had just driven 520 miles from Albuquerque after waiting for a Ford service guy to come unlock my new truck after I had locked my keys inside it. So a half-day after I woke up and nine hours after I left the Duke City, I was cruising along U.S. 93 at 80 miles an hour, thinking about what great time I was making as I passed the Arizona entrance to Lake Mead National Recreation Area.
Of course, in an extended slumber that was only staved off by taking unsafe quantities of No-Doz, I'd forgotten that it was the day after Christmas, and I was about to tackle the worst choke point in the West—Hoover Dam on a holiday. Just after 3 p.m., I passed mile marker 5, and traffic slowed to a crawl, a ribbon of brake lights adding red to the already hue-rich Arizona side of Black Canyon.
It took two and a half hours to cross Hoover Dam, a delay caused just as much by tourists jumping out in front of traffic at random (where else in the world can they get away with that?) as by the extreme volume of traffic heading back to Las Vegas.
But that was understandable, bad timing on my part. If I'd have only waited three more years, the dam bypass bridge would have opened, ending this problem.
It was when I got to Boulder City that I got really irritated. Another stretch of brake lights spanned up the hill into town. I turned right and took Lakeshore Drive to Lake Mead Parkway instead of staying in line to see what awaited me in the Dam town.
Unlike Hoover Dam, Boulder City does not have a bypass under construction. Blocked first by obstructionist businessmen trying to keep their lifeblood through their quaint, historic town, the Boulder City bypass is now held up by bighorn sheep, the state animal and proud resident of the mountains between Boulder City and the dam that built it.
Environmental groups are concerned that building a freeway around Boulder City, connecting the dam bypass to I-515 in Henderson, would disrupt bighorn sheep habitat. Building extensive underpasses for Nevada's state animal isn't enough. The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have opposed the Boulder City project, and its Hoover Dam counterpart, since their inceptions, projecting images of fire and Armageddon if these projects get built.
The problem with the logic is this—it's not like we're disturbing virgin terrain. Bighorn sheep are already faced with crossing (an unprotected) U.S. 93 in the area. Diverting the traffic off the unprotected, narrow, two-lane existing road makes for easier crossings of the existing highway while adding new, safer areas for wildlife to cut under the more heavily trafficked new routes.
The logic that gave us the stall at Boulder City also has us sitting in traffic on U.S. 95, while the Nevada Department of Transportation planners work around the Sierra Club's lawsuit that contends that a wider U.S. 95 in Northwest Las Vegas means more pollution inhaled by people in the surrounding area.
The Sierra Club argues that wider highways mean more growth, and more growth means more cars in the area. But they're making two critical assumptions that I think are wrong—one, that if traffic on U.S 95 remains bottlenecked, people will stop buying houses on the northwestern fringes, slowing growth, and two, that there's an endless bank of land between Centennial Hills and Indian Springs that can be developed for all those people pouring down a newly widened 95.
That second assumption is dead wrong. The area toward Indian Springs is buffered by the Paiute reservation, a national wildlife refuge, a national forest, a prison and the Nellis bombing range. The only person crazy enough to attempt to plan growth out there was Oscar Goodman, whose idea to annex part of the refuge into the City of Las Vegas was shot down before developers could even think up street names.
The logical assumption is this—if there's a finite amount of land to develop, a finite amount of people can move into that area. So, if they have a wider freeway, more cars will get through in less time, actually making less pollution than the current six-lane logjam.
Sure, a lot of our regional bottlenecks are caused by poor planning and hyper-growth. But some are caused by a simple lack of logic on the part of concerned individuals. Moving traffic off of existing roads and onto more environmentally friendly roads creates less chance for roadkill. And providing motorists with less-congested roads means less pollution for all to breathe.
The next time you're stuck in traffic moving two hours a mile, ask yourself whether your time is worth someone else's cause du jour.