There is one over-riding imperative in transportation management on the Las Vegas Strip: keep the traffic moving.
Las Vegas has bet that it can accommodate ever more vehicles and people – but this gambling town may be reaching its limit: they’ve maxxed out on traffic lanes for vehicles; now they’re trying to squeeze space on the sidewalks for pedestrians.
Last November, the jurisdiction responsible for the Strip, Clark County, received a study that measured what’s happening on their sidewalks:
.
.
The study is rooted in research from the 1970s and 80s – and it shows. Pedestrians are seen as another form of vehicle, and the analysis assumes the primary purpose of walking is speed.
…speed is an important level-of-service criterion because it can be easily observed and measured, and because it is a descriptor of the service pedestrians perceive …
So they used a motordom measurement – Level of Service (LOS) – and gave grades to predestrian flow: A to F … green to red … free-flowing to collision.
And sure enough, the problem was determined to be the same ailment that afflicts traffic: unsatisfactory Levels of Service.
For example, here are the sidewalks on a holiday Saturday:
.
Red is not good – and there’s a lot of it. The Strip is becoming what Times Square was: so crowded that walking within the sidewalk space was getting impossible, and people started spilling out into the roadway, taking a lane from the cars. Interfering with traffic!
But the Clark County analysis never mentioned the obvious: widen the sidewalks. Taking space from the car – as New York did in Times Square – was clearly never on the table to be discussed 
. The study, instead, took the same attitude to the sidewalk as transportation engineers have taken to the road: Get rid of obstructions that might slow things down.
Most of the recommendations deal with extending and enforcing “No Obstruction” zones – and also with the need to “contain the pedestrians,” as they have in places up and down the Strip, using devices from Jersey barriers to artful fencing (left).
Ironically, some of the obstructions that hinder pedestrian flow are there to ensure that there are no obstructions hindering vehicle flow (right).
By the end of the report, one almost gets the sense that pedestrians are seen as a kind of pest, needing to be contained – especially when there’s a danger that a few might break free and make a run for it:
.
Solution: build fencing along the medians to discourage any hope of sanctuary. And of course: build more and wider pedestrian overpasses..
Ah, those pedestrian overpasses. Las Vegas is already, I’d bet, the capital of passerelles in America.
.
.
All have escalators, to ensure that no one might have to climb a set of stairs …
.
… but many of which are “temporarily out of order”:
.
Consequently, as they walk between acres of slot machines and gaming tables, from casino to buffet, along the Strip and over the passerelles, Las Vegas tourists may get more exercise than normal without even realizing it. That may have something to do with why they enjoy the place.
But in the long run, the Las Vegas approach to transportation management isn’t improving either the visitor experience or the traffic flow. So what should they do?
Reblogged this on NR Architects & Associates.