The pedestrian bridge system celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, it’s true. They were initially built due to the high volume of pedestrian and vehicular traffic on the Strip, to increase pedestrian safety. For instance, as recently as August 30, an Australian woman was hit by a car while trying to cross Flamingo Road on foot. Since 1995, the Tropicana Avenue bridges have been joined by ones at Harmon Avenue, Flamingo Road, Spring Mountain Road, and inside CityCenter. Most were constructed when one of the conditions of the development agreement was that the casino company put up the funds for a pedestrian bridge.
Therefore, the lack of new development on the north Strip would explain the absence of overpasses there. If Alon gets off the ground or Resorts World Las Vegas begins construction, we can probably look for that situation to change. "I think there’s plans for more [bridges]," says Clark County Public Information Officer Dan Kulin, "but I don’t think there’s a timeline yet. You would have to have a need plus, in many cases, a funding source." That probably means we won’t see north Strip bridges until construction on at least one of those major resorts, and/or the Convention Center expansion, gets underway.
In the case of the four replacement bridges being put up at Tropicana Avenue and the Strip, the $26 million budget is coming from hotel-room taxes and Las Vegas Convention Center leases on trade shows, so none of the burden is falling on local taxpayers. As far back as 2012, the county found numerous points of "unacceptable" congestion on the Strip, mostly on sidewalks (especially in front of Bellagio – 2,633 pedestrians in 15 minutes) but also on the bridges between the Excalibur/New York-New York bridge, the Bellagio/Caesars Palace bridge, and the Harmon Boulevard bridge south of The Cosmopolitan. Foot traffic on the Tropicana Avenue bridges is estimated at 130,000 people a day.
In response to this heavy usage – and because of frequent breakdowns of the escalators, exposed to the elements – Clark County embarked on a complete overhaul of these four bridges in "a sleek, contemporary look" more in keeping with other Strip overpasses. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Richard Velotta, the county "will replace 16 escalators, four at each corner, with state-of-the-art equipment, while installing low-energy glass and air-conditioning units to the elevators. Aesthetic improvements call for placing new tempered-glass wind screens and polished aluminum panel cladding along all four bridges." They will be 165 feet long, 16 feet wide and have a 17-foot clearance.
So far, the project is literally still on the drawing board thanks to the former owners of the Tropicana hotel-casino, who dithered over how to integrate the bridges into a retail complex that they wound up not building. Therefore, although the impetus for the new Tropicana bridges was to accommodate foot traffic to the AEG/MGM arena, they won’t be ready in time for the arena’s opening next year.
