Improving Vegas bike access? Wonderment of wonderments…
Interbike and Bikes Belong, which is a national coalition of industry retailers and suppliers, are ponying up $50,000 over the coming two years to improve bicycling conditions in Las Vegas, host of the annual Interbike trade show.
Bike lanes, trip counters and other enhancements are on the way. That amount of money won’t go far, of course, but it’s a great first step.
Covering Comdex and CES as a tech journalist during the 1990s, my typical modus was to rent a bike from Escape the City Streets and use it to get around between the Strip and the Las Vegas Convention Center (as well as, later, the Sands). While I was about the only attendee among hundreds of thousands to do so, as evinced in the blank stares I got from security when I asked where I could lock my bike up, I have to say Vegas is perfectly “bike-ready.” It’s not that big a place, and bikes can get around town during high-volume events a lot faster than cars.
Strange as it may sound, I cannot recall bad driver encounters in Vegas either. But that may well be because I took back routes that cars did not know about or want to bother with. That and the fact that I was typically moving a lot faster than the cars!
In any case, bike features in Vegas will help boost the town’s friendliness toward cycling, as well as Interbike’s putting its mouth where all its money is.