Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

Sun Editorial:

County showing lack of vision in considering expressway plan

In their zeal to build an elevated expressway, some Clark County elected leaders are poised to send Las Vegas back to a time when you might have overheard something like this in an average American household:

Hop in the car, kids, and let’s go for a ride. Mom and I are going to chainsmoke cigarettes with the windows rolled up while you use the backseat like a trampoline and play with those fun toys with the sharp metal edges.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, elevated expressways were all the rage among highway designers. But like secondhand smoke, dangerous toys and cars that lacked basic safety equipment, they’re now considered monstrosities. Time has proven that the roadways spawn crime, induce poverty and create miles-long eyesores that disfigure city environments, prompting cities across the globe to demolish them.

Not that you would know any of those drawbacks from an engineering report the county recently received on its proposed roadways connecting McCarran International Airport with the Las Vegas Strip.

The report was so favorable, it may as well have had rainbows and unicorns on the cover. Expressways are inexpensive! They can move a heck of a lot of traffic! Yay! What’s not to like?

Here’s what:

• If it works as designed, it will dump even more cars into areas that are already swamped. If you’ve ever stood in the taxi line or ride-share line at McCarran during a busy time or visited the Strip on virtually any weekend, you know that the last thing either place needs is more cars. Think of the road as a pipe with a funnel at each end. Regardless of how big you build the pipe, it won’t help the flow unless you enlarge the holes in the funnels. And that’s impossible, at least on the Strip.

• Elevated expressways have created urban decay and racial segregation in cities worldwide. They’ve done it in two ways: By creating paths for white flight to suburbs, and by fracturing urban neighborhoods. Understandably, people don’t want to own homes or businesses in the concrete, perpetually shadowed no man’s land under the roadways, so residents and commerce move out, homes lose value, crime increases and poverty shoots up.

• The county leaders who are pushing for the expressways seem to be focused on the fact they’re cheap compared to other solutions, like light-rail. But cheap isn’t always better. For instance, it would be cheaper to channel raw sewage through open ditches than to route it through networks of underground pipes. But nobody’s suggesting we do that, and with good reason.

• Expressways aren’t even the cheapest solution. Traffic flow could be improved by overhauling intersections between McCarran and the Strip — such as adding left-hand turn lanes that would be channeled underneath current roadways (think of the Desert Inn Road underpass below Las Vegas Boulevard).

• Light-rail is the answer. It eases the problem that elevated expressways only make worse — the bottle-ups at each end. The more McCarran passengers are riding in rail cars, the fewer passenger cars are needed and the less congestion there will be at the outlets. Light-rail would be much more expensive, no doubt. But in a city that is marketing its visitor experience, it would be a good investment. What would you rather do: Sit in traffic — whether at street level or 22 feet above — or zip from the airport to your hotel and back? Plus, light rail moves people up and down the Strip, as opposed to simply dumping them out into a congested area.

• Maintenance and replacement costs are high. When a section of an elevated expressway fails, you can’t just fire up the paving machine and lay down a new surface. Fixing one can requires weeks and even months of construction and millions of dollars. Just ask Atlanta, which is hoping that the portion of Interstate 85 that collapsed during a fire in late March will be fixed by June 15.

Those are just a handful of the reasons expressways have been relegated to the traffic engineering hall of shame.

It’s frankly stunning and embarrassing that county commissioners are considering turning to this outdated idea to solve a modern traffic problem. It’s like addressing an insect infestation by bringing back DDT.

The lack of vision here is disappointing. The community deserves better.

Clark County commissioners need to keep expressways right where they are — on the scrap heap of history — and out of Las Vegas.

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