Why? In a word: crowds.
Upwards of 300,000 people jammed the Strip on Dec. 31, 2007, to party, get rowdy, and ring in the new year. How many people is that? It’s like plucking every man, woman, and child from the streets, for example, of Reno, or Toledo, Ohio, or post-Katrina New Orleans and dropping them onto a four-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard between Sahara Avenue and Russell Road. It would take more than 700 Boeing 747s, 7,500 Greyhound buses, 75,000 4-passenger cars (or 150,000 tandem bicycles) to deliver them all.
And that’s just outside, on the street. Meanwhile, hotel guests, invited guests, and other partiers and patrons pack the casinos from stem to stern and by about 10 pm, the whole tourist corridor reaches critical mass.
At that point, the casinos lock their doors and you have to show a hotel key -- or in some cases, a players club card -- to door-manning security guards to get into a joint, till the wee hours when enough people have left through the back doors for the casinos to start allowing people in the front again.
It can be very tough on 300,000 bladders, especially if copious quantities of beer are involved. But that just goes with the territory on New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas, when the equivalent of the population of Hue, Vietnam, Blacktown, Australia, or Münster, Germany, invades the place.
This year, other than thousands of bladder-bursting and shivering people stuck outside, it was a relatively peaceful gathering. Only 58 people were arrested on various charges, mostly misdemeanors, along the Strip corridor. Citywide, a total of 79 people were arrested, compared to 145 last year; there were no traffic fatalities, though 36 accidents occurred between 6 pm and 1 am on New Year’s Eve.
