Plans are under way to install traffic barriers on the Las Vegas Strip to protect its teeming sidewalk crowds from the types of motor vehicle attacks that have terrorized cities in France and Great Britain.
The Clark County Commission is soliciting bids to install 700 such barriers, permanent steel posts known as “bollards,” between Tropicana Avenue and Spring Mountain Road. The barriers will be spaced at equal distances and connected underground to form a network capable of withstanding the impact of a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling at 50 miles per hour.
The total cost of the project is estimated at $5 million, including 500 bollards for other locations to be determined, with some of the money coming from the county’s tax on hotel rooms.
Nevada Resort Association President Virginia Valentine expressed support from the Strip casinos for the barriers. “Visitor safety is the highest priority for us,” she told the commissioners. “This is a great investment in tourism safety.”
Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak termed the project “a matter of life or death”
Las Vegas has not seen a terrorist attack, but there have been two fatal incidents involving motor vehicles driving onto Strip sidewalks. In 2005, a Californian driving a stolen car jumped a curb near Bally’s, killing two and injuring 11. In December 2015, an Oregon woman plowed into a sidewalk near Paris Las Vegas and Planet Hollywood, killing one and injuring at least 34 others.
In Manhattan recently a 26-year-old veteran with a history of drunken driving rode over three blocks of sidewalk. One died, and 22 were injured.
The worst terrorist attack involving a motor vehicle to date occurred last July, in Nice, France, when a semi-truck sped through a fireworks celebration, killing 80 people and injuring hundreds.
In London earlier this month, eight were killed and 40 injured when a van drove onto the sidewalk along London Bridge. The attackers then went on a stabbing rampage in a nearby market.
