If you’ve ever driven from Las Vegas to Los Angeles at the end of a weekend, you’ve surely seen so much traffic that you wondered whether or not your car could handle a dirt road or wondered whether to just call it should stop and stay in Primm forever. Fortunately, there will be a little relief soon.
Here’s the deal: 15 has three southbound lanes out of Vegas, but that narrows to two from Primm to just south of the California-Nevada border, resulting in hours of backups. To alleviate the problem, the governors of both states have agreed to temporarily convert the hard shoulder to a lane during peak times.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak jointly announced on Sunday a plan to add the five-mile part-time track, which is expected to begin construction in mid-spring 2022 and be completed by the end of this summer. Primarily on Sundays and Mondays, the southern hard shoulder of the freeway between the Nevada border and CDFA Agricultural Station will be open to drivers during rush hour. At this point the motorway naturally returns to three lanes, so that the lane expansion should hopefully compensate for a bottleneck in which the travel times between the border and Barstow routinely double or triple.
Of course, this won’t fix the traffic single-handedly. Newsom noted that this was “just a temporary solution,” while Sisolak said they still need to work towards a permanent path to accommodate the 11 million annual car visitors to Las Vegas. There’s also the induced demand idea, which explains that as you add more lanes to a street, more cars fill those lanes, creating more traffic – a phenomenon we’ve already seen here in LA with the expansion of the 405. As for non-car- or airplane-based alternatives, plans for a train between LA and Vegas are currently in the hands of private rail company Brightline, which hopes to begin construction on a high-speed route between Las Vegas and Victorville in the next year (and finally Rancho Cucamonga).
