Street safety proposal riles builders group

By Sam Skolnik

Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Las Vegas may be a town full of dead ends, but the City Council is trying to make sure you’ll always be able to turn around.

On Wednesday, the council introduced an ordinance that would mandate all future residential streets that don’t intersect with another road be circular cul-de-sacs.

Under a 2000 ordinance, private streets longer than 150 feet are designed to end in an intersection, with a crash gate that only emergency vehicles can get through, or with a circular cul-de-sac.

For roads less than 150 feet in length, the street, or “private drive,” could also end in a “stub” dead end, where the road just stops.

The trouble is, large trucks, including garbage haulers, moving trucks and sometimes fire engines, have had a difficult or impossible time turning around on streets without a circular cul-de-sac or an intersection.

They’ve had to back out of those streets, sometimes over long stretches — endangering hard-to-spot pedestrians, including children.

Officials with waste hauler Republic Services said they’ve had several close calls over the years.

“The issue is 30 percent of our accidents happen when our trucks are backing up,” said Bob Coyle, president of Republic Services of Southern Nevada. “For us, it’s strictly a safety issue.”

The problem has become worse, Coyle said, with developers increasingly designing higher-density residential neighborhoods.

Coyle said he asked Councilman Steve Ross to address the issue.

Ross, who sponsored the proposed ordinance, said he had been discussing the issue with others, including Las Vegas Fire & Rescue officials, for several years.

The ordinance likely will be voted on when the council meets early next month.

On the surface, the ordinance could appear to be a sop to homebuilders (and sellers), as homes on cul-de-sacs typically sell for 20 percent more than those that aren’t.

But the main resistance to the measure has come from the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association.

Four months ago, the group’s executive director, Irene Porter, argued in a letter to a public works official that the ordinance would ultimately be costly to builders and homeowners because of decreased density and eliminated lots.

Porter also argued the measure would run contrary to the city’s urban design plans, which encourage population concentrations.

“Particularly now,” Porter wrote, “we are in a time when we must find methods to encourage construction of new homes which our service-oriented workforce can afford.”

Association spokeswoman Monica Caruso said staffers thought discussions with Ross were ongoing, and they were “very surprised” to hear the ordinance was on the council’s agenda.

In an interview, Ross said he didn’t think homebuilders would be hurt by the ordinance, and that public safety issues trumped those concerns.

Robert Bell, deputy chief and fire marshal for Las Vegas Fire & Rescue, said his department supports the ordinance.

Fire trucks need streets to end in an intersection or with a crash gate — or they need to be able to turn around in a circular cul-de-sac that must be at least 81 feet in diameter, not counting sidewalks. Although larger residential streets have one of these features, smaller streets often don’t.

Over the past several decades, the growing use of cul-de-sacs — a French term that literally translates to “bottom of a sack” — has been criticized by academics and urban planners, some of whom have persuaded their midsized cities to ban them.

Planners have said cul-de-sacs result in a certain blandness and sameness, an aesthetic urban homogeneity. They’ve also said overuse of cul-de-sacs inhibits a sense of community and connectedness, and makes residents more dependent on their cars.

Bart Anderson, the Public Works Department’s engineering project manager, said Las Vegas’ planners — including Tom Perrigo, deputy director of the city’s Planning and Development Department — had shared some of those beliefs.

But Anderson said he hopes the ordinance would “promote connectivity” by encouraging developers and homebuilders to connect new streets to one another instead of creating more circular cul-de-sacs.

Perrigo could not be reached for comment.