“If you’re driving in Las Vegas, and the light turns green? Wait.”
Local performer Amy Saunders, aka Miss Behave, drops this line in her show-opening monologues, where it always gets a brittle, self-aware laugh because we’ve been on every side of that intersection. We’ve been in near-misses with drivers flying through red lights at high speeds; we’ve blown through those signals ourselves, traveling at speeds well over the posted limit; we’ve been the pedestrians crossing those streets, anxiously wondering if we are visible to our neighbors in their 5,000-pound machines; and we’ve been victims of collisions, learning the truth behind that terrifying joke in the hardest way.
According to a report issued by the Nevada Department of Public Safety’s Zero Fatalities initiative, Nevada suffered 381 traffic fatalities in 2025, with Clark County alone accounting for 237 of those. Even though that number represents a decently sized falloff—there were 420 traffic-related fatalities statewide in 2024, a gruesome record high—it’s still a big enough number to give one pause when the light turns green, and big enough for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to maintain a list of the 50 most accident-prone intersections in the Las Vegas Valley, drawn from each of its 10 area commands.
Published in January, Metro’s list of “top crash intersections” includes corridors touched by construction, like Flamingo Road and Maryland Parkway, which is receiving surface infrastructure improvements, and Charleston and Decatur Boulevards, which is getting underground utility work. It includes tourist-heavy intersections like Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard, and the largely local-use intersection of Desert Inn Road and Eastern Avenue. It’s got mega-busy intersections—Rainbow Boulevard and Flamingo, each one nine lanes across—and some intersections so obscure, like Lamb Boulevard and Colorado Avenue, that I had to look them up in Google Maps.
All these intersections have three things in common: cars, pedestrians and crashes, and enough of each that Metro allied with other law enforcement agencies for the Joining Forces Speed Awareness Campaign earlier this year. “It’s a priority for Sheriff [Kevin] McMahill,” says Officer Robert Wicks with Metro’s public information office. “We’ve been hitting this message hard for the past three months.”
The intersection of East Flamingo Road and South Maryland Parkway on March 31.
The message is a relatively simple one: slow down well before you even enter one of those intersections. Speeding increases the potential of losing control of your vehicle, increases your stopping distance and could make potential collisions deadly. That means keeping to posted speed limits and slowing down in wet weather. “Even at 45 miles per hour, your car won’t stop before entering the crosswalk on the other side of the intersection,” Wicks says. “Everyone should drive defensively; that’s the best advice at any time. And leave your house five to 10 minutes earlier.”
Metro is fully invested in the three-pronged approach state and local agencies are taking to reduce—hopefully eliminate—traffic-related fatalities, keeping those numbers falling from their 2024 high. “We’re addressing this through what we call the Three Es—enforcement, education and engineering,” says Wicks, adding that the first E is an absolute given: “There’s no more leeway. We’re writing citations.
We’re going to start holding people accountable.”
That leaves education and engineering. The former is about getting us to change our ways; we’ll get back to that one in a minute. But the latter raises lingering questions about roads in Nevada, and those in other Western sun belt states with a high number of traffic fatalities: why do we speed in the first place?Why are our roads so dangerous, both for those in cars and on foot?
“One fatality is way too many, not just as a state, but as a nation,” says Lacey Tisler, chief traffic safety engineer at the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT). “And that’s the reason I have a job. That’s the reason we partner with Metro, and truthfully, that’s the reason we’re having this conversation, because the goal is zero fatalities. And everybody needs to be involved, together.”
I’ve written about the Valley’s traffic issues many times before, even though I’m not an engineer and most of what I know about road infrastructure comes from interviewing civic engineers and listening to geeky influencers, like 99% Invisible podcast host Roman Mars and CityNerd’s Ray Delahanty. I’m compelled to do it because my time living in Vegas is broken up with a 10-year stint in Seattle, during which I got high on the whole idea of the so-called “15-minute city.” That’s a city where nearly everything you need to live—work, school, food, entertainment, culture and support for a healthy life—is within a 15-minute, non-motorized reach.
Las Vegas is not a 15-minute city. Las Vegas is Radiator Springs, the desert town from the Disney-Pixar Cars movies—a city built by machines, for machines. People don’t exist in that world—only race cars, trucks, sedans, tractors, fire trucks and fighter jets with windshield eyeballs and literal, toothy chrome grills. (It’s terrifying.) Our city was built out after World War II, when everybody and their brother bought a car. As a result, Vegas’ streets are too wide, which encourages drivers to speed. Our sidewalks are skinny and frequently contain obstacles—light poles, zap boxes. Our city blocks are long, which encourages jaywalking. And the parking lots in front of our supermarkets, box stores and strip malls are entirely too big.
Delahanty calls these wide, flat thoroughfares “stroads,” a portmanteau of “streets” and “roads.” Las Vegas has little but stroads, and they’re probably the reason you’ve never walked to the supermarket. Even if you live within walking distance of one, you should be reluctant to cross an unshaded nine-lane road and ocean-sized parking lot in 90-degree weather to shop there.
“That comes down to drivers who never travel outside of their climate-controlled couch,” says Erin Breen, with a rueful chuckle. Breen, director of UNLV’s Road Equity Alliance Project, advocates for safer roads in several professional capacities, including as director of Ped Safe Vegas, a pedestrian safety education group. When she speaks to groups, she asks if people purposely park as far from the doors of the supermarket as possible, trying to get drivers to identify with pedestrians.
“Occasionally one or two people raise their hands and I say, ‘Oh, new car?’ or ‘Getting those steps in?’, because that’s who parks in the corner,” she jokes. “Everybody else you know slams on their brakes the second they see a close parking spot. But those very same people have zero empathy for the folks that we’re asking to walk that long city block.”
Breen doesn’t think intersections are necessarily the main problem. “As it pertains to vulnerable road users, unless you’re a motorcyclist, intersections are not where bicyclists and pedestrians die. They die mid-corridor most often,” she says, talking about the people killed jaywalking across our too-long city blocks. “It’s not the intersection or the corridor. It’s how we build our streets.”
“Enormous roads do encourage speeding behavior. In general, the street grid systems that we see out west all experience varying levels of pervasive speeding,” says NDOT’s Tisler. “And that’s not just high speeds, [it’s] the systemic speeding, going 5, 10, 15 miles an hour [over the limit], that we see everywhere in a grid system. … As vehicles change, our systems aren’t changing. There’s cultural impatience—the way our brains respond to speed and the other cars around us.”
A woman with a motorized wheelchair prepares to cross South Decatur Boulevard at West Charleston Boulevard on April 3.
The good news is that Southern Nevada is beginning to take the steps necessary to calm our streets. Maryland Parkway is getting wider sidewalks and a dedicated lane for bus rapid transit, bicycles and the steadily increasing number of e-scooters and e-bikes on our streets. (Tisler notes Nevada Assembly Concurrent Resolution 4, passed during last year’s special legislative session, directed the Joint Interim Standing Committee on the Judiciary to study new regulations for e-vehicles: “What are the rules around them? What are the space requirements? How do they fit into the [traffic] system?”)
And the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada and the City of Henderson are currently working together to tame the behemoth that is Boulder Highway, which is such the stereotypical “stroad” that the CityNerd YouTube channel devoted an entire episode to it. (Search for “Stroad Bingo.” Delahanty fills out his entire card: “Ginormous parking lots,” “excessive posted speeds,” “tight curbs/no sidewalks” and too many more.) The Reimagine Boulder Highway project promises a reduction of traffic lanes, reduced posted speeds, mid-block pedestrian crossings with traffic signals, buffeted bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, improved pedestrian access and more.
Engineers commonly call this right-sizing a “road diet,” and it’s a delicious indulgence following a meal of orange traffic cones. Main and Commerce streets underwent road diets a few years back, and while it sucked at the time, the pedestrian throngs now packing the 18b Arts District on weekends speak to its success. It’s not just Vegas that’s right-sizing, it’s the entire country—adopting electric vehicles that will eventually park themselves, utilizing rideshare and public transit in increasing numbers, and discovering the simple joys of walking or e-biking from A to B. If you had told me 20 years ago that the City of Las Vegas would have a successful bike share program, I’d have said you were nuts.
It’s possible to make Radiator Springs into a place where humans are welcome. We just need to be patient as the engineers do their thing, Breen says.
“Everything comes down to the individual that’s using the street. And as soon as they hear words like road diet, they go into a complete panic, because they think it will affect their commute for the time that it’s under construction, and I’m not going to lie about that, it absolutely will affect their commute.” (Breen sympathizes with me when I mention that I live on Maryland Parkway.) “But where we differ is on what the results of those improvements are. We’re not taking away capacity; we’re taking away from those oh-so-comfortable-to-speed-in travel lanes that are 14 feet wide or better, making them more narrow so that you’re not so comfortable speeding, and then taking the extra space that we gain and giving it to people who travel by foot, or bike, or now, as it turns out, by [electric] mobility device. When roads are built for people and not for cars, those roads are safer for every road user.”
“These are generational changes,” Tisler says “They’ll move quicker when the community can come together. It’s very hard to drive change when you’re alone.”
Put that way, “leave the house earlier” doesn’t sound like a curse. There’s a common saying among urbanists, a kind of infrastructure-geek koan: “You’re not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.” Engineering will only take us so far in making the roads safer for everyone. We need to re-educate ourselves, to calm ourselves, to slow ourselves. And perhaps someday, when the light turns green, Las Vegas’ drivers won’t have that moment of existential doubt.
“There is value to driving the speed limit,” Tisler says. “I would challenge everyone to take their time getting from point A to point B. Watch their drive and watch the environment they’re in. Get curious about the road, take your time and feel and just reflect on how different it feels than when you’re rushing, and reflect on your travel time differences. Take it as a challenge, and we can continue to have a safety conversation.”
Las Vegas Metro’s most dangerous intersections
A fatal accident scene on southbound Boulder Highway on April 17, 2024.
In January, Metro issued a list of its 50 “top crash intersections,” drawn from its 10 area commands. These are intersections that see a disproportionate number of accidents where Metro issues citations for speeding 11-20 MPH over the posted limit, running a red light or driving without a valid license, registration or insurance. These are the top-listed intersections from each of those area commands. Go carefully.
• Charleston and Valley View
• Desert Inn and Paradise
• Eastern and Stewart
• Blue Diamond and Durango
• Eastern and Tropicana
• Lamb and Lake Mead Blvd.
• Cheyenne and Tenaya
• Charleston and Durango
• Charleston and Nellis
• Decatur and Flamingo
(source: Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, January 2026)
Listen to this story:
Click HERE to subscribe for free to the Weekly Fix, the digital edition of Las Vegas Weekly! Stay up to date with the latest on Las Vegas concerts, shows, restaurants, bars and more, sent directly to your inbox!
