To Save Las Vegas, Pedestrianize the Strip
It’s time to go all in.
I have a confession to make: I kind of love Las Vegas.
On paper, I’m the prototypical Millennial killing the city. I don’t really enjoy gambling. I loathe slot machines. I don’t care all that much for most shows. I can’t stand strip clubs. (And I’m not just saying that because my wife edits my work.)
Nonetheless, I find that I have a great time every time I visit. To be clear, I’ve never been there purely for a vacation. I’ve never paid my own way to Las Vegas. But I usually take two or three trips there a year for conferences and work meetings, and I always look forward to them.
I love wandering around the maze-like casinos and people watching. I love the campy, vaguely self-aware flamboyance of it all. I love the neon signs and the Googie architecture. I love bar hopping with friends late into the night, and regretting that last Tiki cocktail over a breakfast buffet the next morning.
So it bums me out that there is now a constant drumbeat of stories about how Las Vegas is dying. As with all such stories, the case is slightly overstated.1 But the core point is real: tourism is down by something on the order of 10 percent. At a recent press conference, Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley basically begged tourists to come back.
Social media is overflowing with explanations. Is it because Canadians and Mexicans are annoyed with Trump? Is it because there are now better options in Asia? Is it the disappearance of the budget casino? Is it out-of-control resort fees? Is it the decline of gambling generally? Or is it the rise of online betting and local tribal casinos?
A common feature of these diagnoses is that they’re things local and state leaders don’t control. Among the things they do control, and have done, huge public works projects—like the various professional sports stadia—have stopped the bleeding, but at an enormous cost to taxpayers. The Sphere is great, but the novelty will wear off as other cities toss up their own “spheres.”
If Sin City is going to bounce back, it must learn the lessons of cities where tourism is booming: It’s time to pedestrianize the Las Vegas Strip.
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Las Vegas Boulevard is one of the most iconic streets in the world—an inherent draw on the scale of Champs-Élysées, Hollywood Boulevard, Shibuya Crossing, Times Square, or Bourbon Street. Lined with thousands of bombastic signs and storefronts, experiencing the strip should be one of the world’s great bucket list travel items.
Instead, it seems to be carefully designed to be as unpleasant as possible.
Like the typical American stroad, the Strip tries to do things at once: On the one hand, it’s a 12-lane road designed to move a lot of cars at high speeds. On the other hand, it’s a street lined with restaurants, bars, casinos, hotels, shops, and theaters, which millions of car-free tourists are theoretically meant to walk along.
True to form, it fails as both: These days, the Strip is a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam most hours of the day—a cacophony of honks and rattling tailpipes that is unpleasant both for walking and driving.
Sidewalks are variously either too narrow or far too wide, and are punctuated by cars whizzing down slip lanes. Sidewalks zigzag up and down, and have a tendency to abruptly stop altogether.2 At intersections, pedestrians are obliged to walk up and down bridges for the convenience of cars. And the dearth of street trees leaves visitors exposed to Las Vegas’ extreme heat.
The result is perhaps one of the biggest missed opportunities in all of American tourism. The Las Vegas Strip should be one of the greatest promenades in the world. Instead, it leaves you feeling like a sucker.
The solution is obvious: The Las Vegas Strip should be pedestrianized.
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On some level, the people who run Las Vegas know all of this kind of sucks.
Expecting tourists to pay to rent a car at the airport and then pay for parking is just silly.3 Instead, most visitors opt to either shell out hundreds of dollars on cabs and Ubers over the course of their stay, or remain confined to their little island along the Strip for most of their trip.4
The prevailing solution to this problem is even more ridiculous. In recent years, Clark County—home of Las Vegas— has approved plans for Elon Musk’s The Boring Company to build something on the order of 50 miles of underground tunnels.5 The plan is to add a subterranean level of traffic, with thousands of human-driven Teslas inching along underground.
On a recent visit, I rode the limited portions of the system that have actually been built, which currently serve the convention center. I’ll admit, there’s a sort of Disneyland-darkroom-ride-meets-tech-dystopia novelty in being driven through tunnels lit up like a teenage boy’s custom-built RGB computer. My driver had a good sense of humor about the absurdity of the whole thing.
In general, I default to a view of “just let people try things.” But we’ve tried it, and it kind of stinks.
As transportation infrastructure, the Las Vegas Loop entirely foolish. At full build-out, it will be one of the most inefficient transit systems ever built, moving few people at great cost. Worse yet, the tunnels are too narrow to eventually host any sort of real transit, like a subway. And the system will be entirely useless for the tens of thousands of people who work along the Strip.
The best thing that can be said about the tunnels is that they probably won’t be built.
The most frustrating thing about all of this is that Las Vegas has a transit system that works reasonably well: the Las Vegas Monorail. As originally envisioned, this privately-owned and -operated system—paid for through fare box recovery and casino contributions—was supposed to connect the airport to downtown via most casinos in between. Las Vegas’ linear pattern of growth makes it perfectly well-suited to this sort of transit.
Unlike the Las Vegas Loop, the Las Vegas Monorail is already automated, using Space Age-technology that has been available since at least the 1990s. Notwithstanding a unavoidable pandemic-era bankruptcy, it has been a big success: millions of people ride it each year. In a typical year, it does something that’s the equivalent of a jackpot in US transit planning: it pays for itself.
All of this is especially remarkable given the Las Vegas Monorail was designed to fail. A ride on the monorail might have been a glamorous, traffic-free ride down Las Vegas Boulevard, providing visitors with a chance to gawk at the Strip. Instead, it’s a ride along the backside of various casinos and parking garages. There is still no connection to downtown or the airport, most casinos, or any of the new sports stadiums.
Despite its success—and enormous potential—local leaders are already socializing the idea of decommissioning the Las Vegas Monorail and running human-driven Teslas down the tracks. To put it in poker terms, this would be the transit planning equivalent of a 7–2 offsuit deal.
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Ask anyone under the age of 50 what they should do in Las Vegas, and you will almost certainly be directed to Fremont Street—the original strip.6 I recognize that this is a spectacularly trite travel take on the order of, “You have to check out this local brewery.” But sometimes things are trite because they’re true: travel preferences are changing.
Sophisticated travelers, and the unsophisticated millions who follow them, value the authenticity, exploration, and discovery that usually happens on foot.7 And what is Fremont Street? A little pedestrian oasis in Las Vegas, blending the comfortable walking of a mall with a dynamism of a real city street.
The key to saving Las Vegas is to scale these sorts of experiences. In the near term, the easiest way to do this would be to kick the revitalization of downtown into overdrive.8 A consistently active urban fabric, full of stylish hotels, music venues, artists’ lofts, food stands, and apartments, extending from Fremont Street to the northern edge of the Las Vegas Strip is—in equal measure—potentially transformative and certainly viable.
But why not take the big swing? The city should open the section of Las Vegas Boulevard between Tropicana Avenue and Sahara Avenue exclusively to promenaders. The blacktop should be replaced with cool pavement. Sidewalks should be widened and liberally planted with desert-native shade trees, as should the island in the middle of the boulevard.
Through traffic on Flamingo Road, Sands Avenue, and Harmon Avenue should be rerouted, or eventually buried into an underpass, as with Desert Inn Road. Vehicle entrances along the Strip—as with the Aria, Bellagio, Caesar’s Palace, and The Wynn—should be rerouted to back and side entrances, which is already the general trend. The center lanes should be turned into center-running bus rapid transit and micromobility lanes.
Once pedestrianized, the more built-up portions—such as between Harmon Avenue and Sands Avenue—could be programmed with regular street markets, food truck corrals, and street performers.
Is this insane? Well, yes. It’s Las Vegas. What do you all want, sober suggestions? Go pay a consulting firm a few million dollars to tell you to run another ad campaign in the Midwest if that’s what you’re looking for. To my mind, this city was built on doing insane things—it built a 500-foot-wide glowing emoji ball, after all.
Or maybe it’s not insane. As city planning expert—and former car-free Las Vegas resident—Ray Delaney points out, the city already regularly shuts down portions of the Strip for major events. If the Las Vegas Monorail were extended to the airport and the future Brightline rail station, connecting Southern California to Las Vegas, a lot of the vehicle traffic dependent on the Strip could disappear.
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For all the reasons I detailed at the start of this piece, this is an existential moment for Las Vegas.
But it doesn’t have to be a disaster: just look to Reno. In recent years, the rise of Indian casinos in Northern California—and the persistent superiority of Las Vegas’ offerings—forced the city to reconsider its traditional reliance on gambling. And yet, through this period, Reno was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country.
It achieved this in part by relying on an old Nevada trick: regulatory arbitrage. Once built on liberal divorce law, Reno is now the heart of a high-tech manufacturing boom for basically the same reasons. The city is a 3.5 hour drive—or a 1.5 hour flight—away from the Bay Area, but without the high taxes, spiraling cost of living, or onerous regulations of Northern California.
Reno has embraced urban revitalization, permitting thousands of units each year. In a typical year over the past decade, the city permitted a quarter to half as many apartments as Clark County—home of the Las Vegas Strip—despite being a tenth as large.9
Las Vegas could easily follow the same trajectory, eating Southern California’s lunch as businesses and middle-class families stream out of the region. But to make this transition, it needs to double down on the qualities that make a city livable. Lacking the temperate climate or world-class ski slopes of Reno, Las Vegas needs to think big.
It’s time to go all in. It’s time to pedestrianize the Las Vegas Strip.
It now seems like the “take” cycle has advanced, with a growing number of pieces about how Las Vegas is not dead.
The Strip is also uniquely hostile to electric micromobility—think e-scooters, which are well-suited to this type of density corridor.
Indeed, the whole point of a Vegas trip is to remain inebriated and in a state where you shouldn’t be driving.
One theory I’ve heard for why it sucks to walk along the Strip is that casino owners (a) want you walking inside and (b) don’t want you leaving their campus. It’s possible. But I don’t think one needs a specialized theory for why walking sucks in any given American city.
The final plan calls for 65 miles of tunnels and 69 stations.
Indeed, before I visited, my mental image of Las Vegas was Fremont Street. I assume this is because scenes set in Las Vegas—The Hangover notwithstanding—often take place there, as it’s the only place in the city conducive to characters actually walking around.
And those travelers who don’t want these things should take a cruise. (I’m not being facetious, they’re great!)
A full treatment of how to do this is beyond the scope of this piece, and the city already seems to be doing a great job. Suffice it to say: encourage infill development and adaptive reuse, narrow vehicle lanes and widen (and beautify) sidewalks, plant street trees, install bus rapid transit and (shaded) protected bicycle lanes along the boulevards, etc.
I have a feeling that Nevada will also probably need revisit its laws governing condominium pre-sales and defect litigation. It’s often much easier for homeownership multifamily developments to pencil. Most of these units would presumably be second homes. While I understand that we’re all supposed to pretend like these are the worst things in the world, they basically amount to free money for local coffers—generating property taxes while consume few public services. This money that can then be spent on better services and infrastructure for the people who actually live in Las Vegas.
100% agree- the monorail already has a lot of potential. Connect it to the airport and Fremont Street and it becomes vital to the city. I suspect it’s the competing interests of casino owners that get in the way of unifying the city.
Yes.
My best Strip experience: Running the Las Vegas Half-Marathon (at night). The Strip was closed to cars, the neon lights were on, and it was spectacular.
My worst Strip experience: Walking back from a D&C show at the Sphere and nearly getting crushed because the sidewalks are barely ADA-compliant, much less wide enough for thousands of aging hippies on acid.