Moving walkway, not light-rail, could solve traffic problems

By David Friedman, Las Vegas

Thursday, Sept. 8, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Your light-rail editorial (“Light rail key to ensuring visitors enjoy Las Vegas — and come back,” Las Vegas Sun, Aug. 25) shows a overly optimistic view of streetcars and the Strip. Street-level light rail on the Strip could not work in either a paired-center-line or a separated-far-right-lane configuration in such a congested environment. It would make the problem very expensively worse.

In San Francisco, street cars are constantly hung up behind traffic. New York ripped its light rail out when this letter writer was a child. A far better solution would be a high-speed moving walkway (6 feet per second) at the height of existing crosswalks along the center line of the Strip. Famous German engineering firm ThyssenKrupp makes the ACCEL for such a purpose; 7,300 people an hour can move past any point without stopping traffic or interfering with traffic and pedestrian flow. That would be equivalent to 73 100-passenger rail cars an hour, loading and unloading, stopping at red lights, hung up on blocking cars and pedestrians.

Good luck with that. This plan has been submitted to the Las Vegas Tourism Infrastructure Committee.