Columnist Hal Rothman: Feeling congested

Hal Rothman

Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005 | 8:14 a.m.

Hal Rothman, a professor of history at UNLV, is a columnist for the Las Vegas Sun.

Editor's note: Today's column is the fourth in an eight-part series on the consequences of growth in the Las Vegas Valley.

There is no more grueling aspect of life in the Las Vegas Valley than trying to get around.

We sit in traffic, offering each other the postmodern salute -- you know which finger I'm talking about -- and marvel at the stupidity and inconsideration of those who surround us.

We sit and we sit, burning genuinely expensive fossil fuels, polluting the air and getting grumpier by the second.

Nothing is more demoralizing than the traffic jam. They've become commonplace here, a constant in daily life that we've surrendered to, forcing us to think of movement around the valley in uncomfortable ways.

Once, we said, nothing was more than 15 minutes away. Now we calculate in 45-minute segments. Traffic grinds us down.

Surprisingly, we've actually done pretty well in our response. Traffic has gotten worse, but it hasn't gotten worse as fast as it could have.

Two major steps have been catalysts in slowing our bleeding.

Question 10, a measure for Clark County to tax itself to pay for transportation infrastructure, passed in November 1990. The initiative, spearheaded by Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, allowed the county to build the Las Vegas Beltway faster and farther than federal dollars alone would have allowed. No individual action showed greater commitment to the future of the valley than this measure.

The second catalyst, the effort to create east-west connections to facilitate crosstown traffic, has also made a significant difference. Since 1990 -- when planners referred to the Strip, the railroad tracks and Interstate 15 as "the Great Wall of Las Vegas" -- we have seen the construction of the Desert Inn arterial, flyovers from the interstate that have noticeably improved traffic flow, and the consistent opening of new roads and routes.

Nonetheless, we still see orange cones everywhere, still have too many one-open-lane slowdowns, and still sit longer every year.

Part of the problem is our strategy. No American city has ever built its way out of traffic, and we will not be the first. Roads draw cars like honey draws flies. Every new road that opens provides a brief respite, but soon enough everyone discovers it, and its pace slows to a crawl like everywhere else.

We're seeing at long last the beginning of creative solutions to our traffic dilemma. One is the growing interest in a comprehensive mass transit system.

We have an award-winning bus system, but it mostly brings low-wage workers to the suburbs, not suburban workers to their jobs.

The monorail provides a vision, but its impact on the city is minimal. It moves visitors. The great flaw of tourist towns is that they serve visitors ahead of residents, but in this case the monorail may have something to teach us.

Middle-class Americans don't ride buses much -- they have the stigma of poverty, like trains in South America. But Americans do ride commuter trains, and the future of a commuter system, such as the one proposed by the RTC, is bright.

Although every Western city has been built for the car, rising gas prices and the inefficiency of our favorite mode of transportation, the SUV, project a future in which people will at least explore other modes of daily travel.

The old industrial railway from Henderson into the core of the valley offers a perfect beta test of whether mass transit will work here. If a commuter train can get people to work and back in no more time than a vehicle takes, then there's a chance of people buying in.

Another trend that bodes well is the change in how and where we work.

The resort corridor -- along with nearby hospitals, the university and other employers -- creates the greatest concentration of workers and, consequently, of traffic in the valley.

If mass transit can serve this core employment district, it might be able to pay for itself.

Even more promising, much job growth in the valley is outside that central district. Each year a smaller percentage of the valley's workers are employed in that core.

More people work elsewhere and many don't commute; they live within a few miles of their workplace. Many of these people are self-employed, physicians and others, and have chosen this for convenience.

Many more, especially newcomers, have moved close to where they work. This pattern alleviates traffic congestion. These people simply don't participate in the morning rush hour.

While all the signs are hopeful, we still sit on the roads. We've been proactive, albeit in a conventional way.

This is a critical moment in transportation history in this valley. If we do nothing, traffic will certainly get worse.

The kind of innovation we saw 15 years ago is necessary again, and it exists today in the form of proposals for a comprehensive mass transit system.

It may be that the best we can do is to slow the rate of increase of cars on the road. Mass transit has the best chance of achieving that small goal.

In Thursday's Sun: A look at the future of water use and why a dramatically different way of allocating water from the Colorado River is needed.