Beltway project speeding along

Sunday, April 16, 2000 | 10:50 a.m.

Cars and trucks will soon be able to make the 25-mile drive between the Las Vegas Valley's two largest master-planned communities without taking surface streets.

From Gibson Road, three miles east of Green Valley Parkway, to West Tropicana Avenue, at least two lanes of the Las Vegas Beltway should be open by the end of this month. That opening will mark a milestone in the development of what will ultimately be a $1.5 billion, 53-mile highway circling most of the Las Vegas Valley.

According to Gus Cederburg, Clark County Public Works construction chief, the next segment from West Tropicana to West Sahara Avenue is expected to be finished by the end of September. After that, the road between West Sahara to West Charleston Boulevard will open by January 2001.

The segment from West Charleston to Summerlin Parkway should open about a month later, opening the last link between the two fastest-growing communities in the Las Vegas Valley -- Summerlin and Green Valley.

The road linking Summerlin and Green Valley won't be all highway. Parts of the Beltway will be just two lanes; others stretches will be six lanes -- three in each direction.

From Gibson Road to Decatur Boulevard will be six-lane freeway. From Decatur to West Tropicana will be frontage roads. West Tropicana past the Summerlin Parkway will be a four-lane divided road.

The segments opening this month between Gibson and West Tropicana will bring the length of the Beltway to over 20 miles. That segment of the roadway was scheduled to open later this year, but crews worked triple shifts to finish the work earlier, said Bobby Shelton, Clark County Public Works spokesman.

The Beltway segment between Summerlin Parkway and Cheyenne Avenue should be completed by early 2001.

The eventual design calls for five lanes in each direction throughout the full 53-mile semicircle. Cederburg said Public Works doesn't know when the final, full 10-lane roadway will be complete -- it will likely be decades, with segments going in as traffic volume and available funding dictate.

Shelton said work should begin this summer on the segment from Interstate 15 to North Durango and be completed by late 2001. The segment from Cheyenne Avenue to North Durango should be finished in 2003.

The development of the Beltway over the last decade hasn't been without controversy, and hasn't come cheap.

The road is unusual for a major highway construction project because it doesn't use state or federal funds. Voters approved a county tax in 1990 that adds a 1 percent tax to motor vehicle registration and a $550-per-new-house development fee to fund the Beltway. Developers also pay 50 cents per square foot for commercial property.

The vote "was a deliberate decision to support the Beltway locally," said Leslie R. Henley, the county's Public Works construction division manager.

Environmentalists have charged that federal and state highway construction funds were lost because the county didn't want to complete federal environmental impact reviews.

That was part of the picture, but not for fear of the results of the study, Henley said. The federal process can take years to complete. The county, instead, did a thorough environmental assessment, which accelerated the project by years, he said.

With the county environmental assessment, the county was able to buy rights-of-way in areas that now are developed. Not only did it save time, but because those rights-of-way would now be much more expensive, it saved the region millions of dollars, Henley said.

Because the county moved quickly to buy rights-of-way -- mostly at nominal cost from the federal Bureau of Land Management -- fewer than 50 homes and businesses were displaced by the Beltway's 350-foot-wide swath, Henley said.

The Beltway isn't just a response to development, but it also spurs development, observers agree.

"It's pretty logical, when you're tying together two of the fastest-growing master-planned communities in the county. It's just a matter of time before that whole area fills in with commercial development," said Tom Stilley, senior vice president for office properties at Colliers International, a commercial real-estate company with offices in the Las Vegas Valley.

For Jane Feldman, conservation committee co-chairwoman of the Sierra Club's Southern Nevada group, the Beltway and development on what used to be the edges of the urban area have a significant downside.

Locally and nationally, the Sierra Club has targeted urban sprawl as a priority. The group wants to bring worksites closer together with homes, invest in downtown areas, encourage higher-density residential development and reduce the amount of time people spend driving.

The Beltway is the virtual antithesis of that environmental program.

"We could be building a city where we don't have to jump on the Beltway," she said. "There's more ways of skinning a cat ... We're stuck into that chute. We can only think that one way."

Feldman points to several recent studies indicating that when a community builds new and bigger highways, traffic volume on the roads increases until traffic congestion is as bad or worse than before the road-building efforts.

"We're building ourselves into this problem," Feldman said. "I'm not going to celebrate the opening of the Beltway."

Shashi Nambisan, director of the UNLV Transportation Research Center, called it a "chicken-and-egg" issue. Does the Beltway bring development, or did the development necessitate the Beltway?

Nambisan and others said it probably is a mix of both factors. Regardless of which came first, the rapid development in the Las Vegas Valley demands highways for people to move around, he said.

"We have so much growth -- even it you didn't build the roadway, you would have a significant increase in trips," Nambisan said. "If you look at the growth pattern, you have a tremendous amount of growth in the northwest and the southeast."

However, Nambisan said development near interchanges on the Beltway will likely proceed quickly. He compared it to the rapid retail development around Bay Area Rapid Transit stops in the East Bay area of San Francisco.

That development is an integral part of a new highway, Nambisan said. As people find the roadway helps them get quickly to work, shopping, recreational and cultural activities, they will start to use it more and more frequently.

"Most people want to minimize their travel times," he said.

Nambisan said the Las Vegas Valley adds an extra 3,000 to 4,000 households with cars each month, and many of those folks are moving into the southeast and northwest areas. Many of those new residents will use the Beltway to move around, at least until traffic congestion makes surface streets more attractive as a travel option.

Nambisan said that will happen when traffic volume reaches 70 to 80 percent of capacity.

County Public Works employees believe that won't happen for at least several decades, thanks in part to the flexible design of the Beltway construction.

Launce Rake covers growth issues for the Sun. He can be reached at (702) 259-4127 or by e-mail at lrake@lasvegassun.com.