Sunday, March 5, 2006 | 7:17 a.m.
We've had it easy. Getting people to Las Vegas has never been the challenge that it will become.
Our popularity is a strange kind of double-edged sword, one that requires a special vigilance from the people who run our transportation systems. The success of our advertising and the special cachet of Las Vegas in post-industrial America mean that more people want to come here every year. Getting them here with ease is very likely to become the next big issue, the threat to our continued success.
Now that everyone wants to visit Las Vegas, something will have to give. We have long taken for granted that anyone who wants to come here can fly or drive in with relative ease. The incredible growth in visitation has made that a dangerous conceit, one that could cost us our lead over considerably lesser attractions.
One of the two most successful entities at handling increasing demand in the Las Vegas Valley is McCarran International Airport. Clark County Director of Aviation Randall Walker once said that he did not want the airport to become a bottleneck that stymied growth and, by and large, he has succeeded. Despite occasional backlogs at security and check-in and increasingly frequent long waits in the baggage claim, the airport works well most of the time.
The proof is in the phenomenal growth in passengers. In 2005 more than 44 million people came through McCarran, up from 36.3 million people who used the airport in 2003. The airport's capacity has long been projected to be about 50 million people per annum. If we increase at the same numeric rate during the next two years as we have in the last two, we will exceed that number.
There are certainly ways to expand the airport's capacity, and I have every expectation that airport officials will find them. But increasingly, it looks as if the projections for the opening of the new airport at Ivanpah may very well be too late. The year 2017 is the most common time frame bandied about. What happens in the meantime remains to be seen.
It won't be the outrageously high gas prices that cuts down the number of drivers who come to Las Vegas every weekend. Interstate 15 has been a nightmare for a long time, but we rarely suffer from it locally. Every Friday, long lines of traffic stream toward us from Southern California. Every Sunday, longer lines return to greater Los Angeles. Las Vegans are typically headed the opposite direction, mostly with wry smiles on our faces.
Some call the 275 mile-stretch "the world's largest parking lot." We hear apocryphal stories of 10-hour trips and the heartrending tales of needless fatalities abound. Every one of us marvels that people actually endure this, but we rarely ask why they do.
Even anticipating such an ordeal would take the luster off a Las Vegas weekend for me or at least make me turn into the first Indian casino I passed on my way in on a Friday.
Las Vegas and Nevada have long had an investment in California's stretch of I-15. In the late 1990s, the Nevada Department of Transportation gave California a $10 million contribution to the road-widening project between Victorville and Barstow, and the Nevada and California congressional delegations cooperated to allow $24 million of Nevada's annual $190 million in federal road money to be spent in California as Las Vegans sat miserably in traffic.
But it has not been enough. All that money and the traffic is no better. If the airport gums up as well, we could have problems.
People on vacation don't want to spend it in the airport or on I-15, especially if they only have the weekend. Imagine yourself six hours in traffic on the way to Las Vegas and passing a sign on the side of the road that said "if you just want to gamble, you're through with your trip" or some other version of the signs that dot American highways that say "if you lived here, you'd be home by now."
If you were sick enough of the traffic and the trip, an Indian casino somewhere in the Mojave Desert might just do the trick. We should all heed the prospect.
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