Las Vegas Doubles Down on the Bicycle

For visitors, the signature feature of Las Vegas is the Strip: an unwalkable, unshaded, traffic-jammed boulevard of monster casino-hotels flanked with a circus of digital screens, garish signage, and over-the-top theme architecture. It’s a place where urbanism has gone to die, an environment designed more for cars with gambling habits than for humans with conventional needs.

But the Strip is outside the city limits, and the story of downtown Las Vegas is quite different. Perhaps best known as a place where budget travelers sleep off their hangovers, the neighborhood’s flat, gridded street network, relatively short blocks, and mid-century storefronts “make it a natural pedestrian and biking town,” according to the transportation research group TransitCenter. And now it will start to look the part: At the end of September, the city opened a bike-share program, with 20 rental stations opening up around the Fremont Street corridor and further south near Las Vegas Boulevard, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.