Remedy To Fix Metro Las Vegas’ Dangerous Roads: Think E’s Of Enforcement, Education, Engineering Better Designed Roads (Or Road Crashes, Deaths Will Continue)
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — It’s 2026 and this year represents my 20-year anniversary of quitting the Tampa Tribune to work on bicycle and road safety issues after I decided I needed to act on all the bicyclist and road user deaths in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area.
I devoted six and a half years of my life from early 2006 to late 2012 to working more than full-time on decreasing crashes on roads before I moved to Las Vegas from Tampa to work for the local newspaper here in Southern Nevada.
And lo and behold, I am pulled into another metropolitan area struggling to cope with road violence, crashes, lame road design and deaths in our public right-of-ways. Four students killed by motorists in one year. This is horrific. This is deeply disturbing. But here’s the brutal truth: the deaths are the predictable outcome and logical result of several contributing reasons behind the reckless drivers and dangerous roads of metro Las Vegas.
I learned a lot about road crashes from 2006-2012. There are a bunch of contributing factors that cause crashes. Clark County, city of Las Vegas, state of Nevada and LVMPD, here are the non-negotiables if you want to reduce crashes:
Lower speed limits: Let’s start with the obvious. Speed kills. Speed maim walkers and people on bicycles. On Blue Diamond Road at Fort Apache heading west the speed limit goes from 55 to 65. Are you insane? There are subdivisions and businesses there and you have a 65 mph speed limit.
Design roads for bicyclists and walkers, not just motorized vehicles: Good grief, where do we begin in the Las Vegas metro area? Let’s look at Blue Diamond Road heading east past the Rainbow intersection where the road mushrooms into four lanes wide to the Jones and Decatur intersections. It’s like the four-wide drag racing strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. LVMPD is telling you speed is a major factor in crashes so what do public works and road designers do? Build roads to maximize speed, prioritizing that over pedestrian and bicyclist safety. You will need to retrofit roads to make then safe for all users. Let’s take a look:
Mandatory road and driver education: Clark County and the Clark County School District must enter an inter-local agreement to require all students to have mandatory driver, road safety, bicycling and walking education.
Enforcement: Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill said during a TV news interview that his department has failed and should receive an F for the deaths and crashes on Las Vegas area roads. He is correct. LVMPD and Clark County have failed. Metro has talked about a crackdown on road violators. No more blitzes. Crackdowns and blitzes have to become everyday routine enforcement with double the number of road police. The red light running. The no stopping at red lights when making right turns. The sheer daily recklessness of driver behavior. It all has to end and it’s up to Metro and other police agencies to enforce our road laws. Of the four students killed on the way to or leaving school, one was a girl who was biking when she had to bike around one of the hundreds of cars parked by people in bike lanes. This girl biked around a parked car in a bike lane and was struck by a school bus operator. Go out and ticket every single person who has parked in a bike lane at a school. The sidewalks in the county and the city have major problems — if there are sidewalks in the first place. Like these I encountered:
Punishment: Steve Wolfson, the Clark County district attorney, has been howling about this for years. Prison terms and penalties have to be beefed up. At a recent state traffic summit event, Wolfson was on stage with three state lawmakers who have not done anything to pass legislation beefing up prison terms and penalties for drivers who kill people. Wolfson said he had to tell the mother of a student killed by an impaired driver that realistically the driver who killed her son will likely get six years in prison at the most. Wolfson recalled how upset the mother was to that fact.
Metro Las Vegas needs a leader and a team that wants to end this road violence with the same passion, fire and forceful will exhibited here in Las Vegas that people show for building stadiums and attracting sports events.
The bad news is that all these crashes and deaths will continue here in Clark County if you don’t take action now. Vegas is all about suspending reality and having a good time. Well folks, there’s no magic or hocus pocus that will make these road tragedies disappear in Las Vegas. You have a choice: Change your ways about education, enforcement and engineering or the deaths and crashes will continue on your roads.
