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2024 AREMA Conference:
On Sept 14th through 16th, four members of the WiHST Group attended the AREMA conference in Louisville, Kentucky (President Kyle East, Vice President [and ’21 JRC Intern] Noah Sobczak, sophomore Josh Schooley, and Mike Schlicting). AREMA sponsors student chapters at universities throughout the nation and has been a sponsor of the WiHST group since 2013.
Being the first time in five years that the group has attended this conference, it was interesting to see a slight change when it comes to high-speed rail. Before 2019, AREMA did not discuss high-speed rail at all. Back then the WiHST group felt out of place as the whole conference was focused on freight rail. However, there has been a change. A student chapter at the University of Las Vegas has been started and was very active in working with Brightline, and several members of Brightline West were present at the conference.
Additionally, a high-speed rail committee has been formed and Brightline even gave a technical session on their civil engineering plans now that they have begun excavation in Nevada. So while the conference remained heavily focused on freight, the railroad industry is taking high-speed rail more seriously.
Las Vegas, the Great Transportation Experiment
Las Vegas is the true modern city. In 1950 the city had a population of less than 25,000. By 1990 Las Vegas had a population of 260,000. By 2022 the population had tripled to 657,000 (Source: US Census Bureau) making it one of America’s fastest growing cities. More importantly, in 2023 Las Vegas had over 40 million visitors to the city (Source: Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau). As a result, Las Vegas is an interesting case in transportation. It is a new city free of legacy transportation systems, such as New York, allowing it to be innovative, but Las Vegas desperately needs a way to move those 40 million visitors and 700,000+ residents.
While Las Vegas started as a railroad stop, the automobile is what really built Las Vegas and specifically the Strip. After all, it was US Highway 91 leading from downtown Las Vegas to Los Angeles that the first “suburban” casinos sprang up along The Strip. Since then, Las Vegas has relied primarily on vans and shuttle busses but has experimented with many different forms of transportation from trams, busses, monorails, so-called “hyperloops”, and eventually high-speed trains. On top of it, it is a mix of privately owned and publicly owned transportation making the city a test bed for ways to move people around.
The Las Vegas Maglev
Then of course there was the Las Vegas to Los Angeles Maglev. Yeah, one of the first magnetically levitating train routes in the US was to be in Las Vegas. Back in the 1990s, city and state officials saw that the airport had reached capacity, and Interstate 15 was becoming overcrowded. As a result, the city and state seriously considered magnetic levitating technology.
The train was going to be an all-new infrastructure between Las Vegas and Anaheim, CA which is south of Los Angeles. Speeds were to be 310 mph (500 km per hour), and in 2005 $45 million was allocated to start the planning on the first 40-mile segment ($74.5 million in 2024 dollars). The maglev had the strong support of Senator Henry Reid (for whom Las Vegas Airport is named). However, over time the project failed to gain momentum and was quietly discontinued in 2012. Had the maglev been built, it would have been the same Siemens consortium technology that was used for the Shanghai Maglev.
It was during this same time that Xpress West was also considering the Las Vegas to Los Angeles high-speed rail route. While the maglev project died, Xpress West continued on and in 2018 was then acquired by Fortress Investments, creating Brightline West.
However, there are many lessons to be learned about transportation in Las Vegas. No financial figures are available for the privately held trams and monorails operated by the casino resort hotels, such as the Mandalay Bay to Excalibur monorail. The Las Vegas monorail that operates from the Las Vegas Convention Center to the MGM Grand was a private company but ended up going bankrupt twice, eventually being taken over by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau. The Youtube City Planner, CityNerd, cites the reason for the failure of this transport system is that it was put far behind the casinos and only serves the east side resorts. The result was the Las Vegas monorail is a transport system that is pricey and very inconvenient to use especially from the casinos on the west side of Las Vegas Boulevard.
Las Vegas Hyperloop
Then there is Elon Musk’s Las Vegas Loop, which is likely to be remembered in history as the biggest blunder in Las Vegas transportation. Called a “hyperloop”, the “Las Vegas Loop” is nothing more than a tunnel that individual Tesla’s drive through. The “loop” is just a 2.2 mile tunnel across the Las Vegas Convention Center property with 5 stations and cost $53 million to build. Cars are driven by human drivers, and only carry one to four passengers, at speeds no faster than 30 mph. While there are plans to make the vehicles autonomous, today the Las Vegas loop is slow and highly labor-intensive. Initial estimates were that the system could handle 4,400 passengers per hour. However, news sources report that the maximum capacity was closer to 1,200.
The Boring Company (which built the Las Vegas Loop) has revealed plans to expand the system to 68 miles eventually to the Brightline West station on the south side of The Strip. However, the Boring Company has run into many setbacks, both in the design of the system, rights to dig under Las Vegas, as well as complaints from the Occupational Safety and Health Also, it is important to remember that the Las Vegas is still a low capacity and slow form of transportation that is highly labor-intensive. Not a good combination making the Las Vegas Loop hard to scale and make profitable.
The future
Las Vegas in a lot of ways is America’s test tube. It was here in the 1930s that gambling was made legal, which led rise to casinos and the city becoming one of the most popular tourist cities in North America. However, the city is also an experimentation in different types of transportation as it did not have the legacy rail systems of older cities. As a result, it has been able to try new forms of transportation. This all leads to the fact that Brightline West will change Las Vegas dramatically. After all, imagine what would happen when Californians prefer the high-speed train over driving through the congestion of Interstate 15. For example, would the casinos be able to close and redevelop their parking garages? Or if the Las Vegas Monorail is extended to the Brightline station, would that transportation option turn and become profitable? Or could there be a whole new type of transportation infrastructure that would replace Las Vegas Boulevard itself with either trams or elevated trains? Perhaps even expansion of high-speed rail to downtown Las Vegas in tunnels built for the defunct Las Vegas Loop. It is going to be very interesting to watch how Brightline changes Las Vegas. Hopefully, we have to wait only 4 years.
The Faster Badger is produced by students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to help break through the misconceptions of high-speed rail and high-speed transportation. This blog is for educational purposes only and all opinions presented are of the students.
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