Blogging from Las Vegas
Malene Freudendal-Pedersen reports from Las Vegas. With its 600,000 citizens, casinos and massive energy usage, the city challenges the concept ‘sustainable urban development’.
Sustainable Transportation – not in Las Vegas
Today, I attended a conference session called ‘Making sustainable transportation work’. A critical subject, particularly in a city like Las Vegas. Unfortunately the session was not about sustainable mobility but about technologies which can subsidize fossil fuel engines. This is not sustainable transportation but environmentally friendly transportation. Furthermore, the discussion on how to produce these new propellants and the environmental consequences this might have was almost completely absent.
The outcome was not a visionary discussion. Instead the crux of the debate was how to continue our transportation patterns as we know them through technological developments. The fact that everything else seems impossible is understandable in a city like Las Vegas. A city, which is, to an extremely high degree, planned for and functions to serve cars.
Six lanes in each direction is more the rule than the exception - also downtown. Pedestrian crossings are relatively far from one another and it is prohibited to cross the street anywhere else. If you break this rule, big fines awaits – 100 $ per lane. So if one gets tired from waiting and chooses to risk his or her life crossing six lanes, it cannot only be dangerous. It can also become very expensive.
I know for a fact – because I bought a guide book – that there is public transportation in Las Vegas. I also know that you cannot buy a ticket in the bus because I found a bus stop where people kindly informed me about this.
What I don’t know is where to buy the bus ticket. In the end I think I will have to go online to figure it out (it was not written in the guidebook) since there is no help on the streets of Las Vegas. If you don’t drive your own car, you grab a taxi. Thus I succeeded in getting two helpful people to discuss on my behalf whether a 10 minute walk was possible or if I should take a taxi.
Tomorrow’s project will be to buy a bus ticket and see if I am able to find places in Las Vegas in which life is (just a little) about more than slot machines, loud music and junk food.
Comments
The odd thing about Las Vegas is that it has a rich pedestrian life--inside.
Each casino is set up as a giant shopping mall where it is possible to find hundreds of shops, dozens of restaurants, various activities, and the ubiquitous slot machines often designed to evoke the experience of walking through a liveable walkable (though air-conditioned) city.
As in many places, the public transportation system exists for the most part to transport the poorest members of the workforce--the armies of dishwashers and housekeeping staffs that work in the downtown hotels and casinos.
It's interesting to look also at Los Angeles which has a vastly more diversified economy, but a similar sprawl, and a quite remarkable bus system that moves huge numbers of passengers daily--again primarily poor people who can't afford a car in that most car-centric of cites.
It's interesting to look also at Los Angeles which has a vastly more diversified economy, but a similar sprawl, and a quite remarkable bus system that moves huge numbers of passengers daily--again primarily poor people who can't afford a car in that most car-centric of cites.
Unfortunately public transportation is not self-sustainable in the most cities of the world (maybe China could make the exception) and it works only with the help of the authorities; Since Las Vegas is a tourist destination the city's authorities should be more careful with the public transportation.
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