Las Vegas 2: A dilemma of its own design, cont'd

Las Vegas for the tourist consists of three parts: the four-mile Strip, the Downtown and the suburbs.

.

The majority of the tourist and conference action is on the Strip; Downtown had, like many American cities, fallen on hard times.  Still sort-of-cool, sort-of-depressing, it was the original townsite and gambling district of Las Vegas, prior to the Strip, and still attracts a crowd to the Fremont Street Experience – a quasi-enclosed pedestrian mall, worthy of an analysis all on its own.

.

There’s more: an Arts District and Symphony Park with the new Smith Center (below), LV’s outreach to the fine arts, so scrupulously and expensively done in upscale Deco that, regardless of public favour, architects will hate it.  But there’s also a Frank Gehry-designed brain clinic and the vast Jon Jerde-designed World Market Center on the western fringe.

While most of the core is not yet comfortable to walk around, that may change as the area attracts the high-tech crowd, led by Zappo’s CEO, Tony Hsieh, who intends to move his operations from a suburban business park to the old city hall, just as the new Mob Museum occupies, appropriately, the old court house.  (Seriously, it’s really good.)

Anyway, back to the Strip.

Take a close look at the Las Vegas grid, laid out like the rest of the West in one-mile squares, and you can guess at the problem:

.

Because of the airport, there are only four east-west arterial roads connecting a huge chunk of east Las Vegas with the north-south freeway – and they cross Las Vegas Boulevard to do it.  Which means a whole lot of through traffic is intersecting with a hundred thousand or so tourists, a lot of whom anticipate having their own wheels to get around.

So no wonder it looks like this:

.

That’s not the Boulevard; that’s the ‘side street’ backed up to the freeway at 2 in the afternoon.

And that’s not the worst of it.  There’s another problem inherent in the design of the place that frustrates attempts to keep the traffic moving. 

Part 3 here.