From our recent (🎧) podcast interview with Andrew Bennett, director of the Clark County Office of Traffic Safety:
Is there an end to that roadwork that's always happening in Las Vegas?
I don't know if there will ever be an end, because there's always the opportunity to improve the infrastructure — right-sizing our roads and making sure that they are accessible to everyone. We are in a climate where we have 24/7, 365 road construction, unlike in some states that don't do road construction during the winter months. And so there is a unique frustration here that it is consistently ongoing.
Our hope is that, by coordinating our communication, working with our regional partners, and working with the utilities, we can get to a point where it is better planned, so you don't have parallel roads under construction, which is where some of the frustration is. But I think the orange cones are here to stay.
How much of that road construction is improvement versus repair?
Currently I'm tracking 86 projects. (And that's not including a lot of the utility projects.) When we talk about that 86, one third is going to be development-related, going further to the west or to the north or to the south. I would say another third is going to be specifically safety-related infrastructure: detached sidewalks, adding signals, roundabouts, etc. And then the other third is going to be repair, whether that's just resurfacing a damaged or a cracked road, or filling in a pothole. So it is pretty evenly spread out between those thirds.
Do we have more repairs here because of the heat?
I believe we have more maintenance than necessarily repairs. You might've noticed our crosswalk paint doesn't last as long. And that's just due to the sun baking it. And so those continued maintenance projects definitely increase with the heat and the sun.
(Edited for length and clarity.)
