Vegas via DesertXpress

The road to Las Vegas is welltraveled and usually backed up by the tens of thousands of regular visitors from Southern California. Could this be the ideal corridor for the US’s first new high-speed line?

Las Vegas is a very special place. With some of the world’s most famous hotels, casinos and restaurants, it attracts nearly 40 million visitors every year. It is a destination with huge appeal and, for many, a resort to be visited, and re-visited every year.

Around a third of Las Vegas’ visitors come from its nearest neighbor in Southern California, with most arriving by car along Interstate 15, the highway connecting Las Vegas to the south. Freeways from across Southern California converge on I-15 in San Bernardino County, and then it’s a 190-mile run across the Mojave Desert to the Nevada border and on to Clark County and Las Vegas.

At the busiest weekends, I-15 carries daily flows of 40,000 vehicles – with more than 80% of this traffic heading into or from the resorts along the Strip and their neighbors. For a transportion planner, there is another unique – and important – aspect of this traffic; the great majority of these travelers head straight to the parking lot at their resorts – and leave their cars there until they depart at the end of their visit.

What a natural target for a rail line! Knowledgeable travelers who don’t need (or want) their cars at their destination.

DesertXpress Enterprises has been developing the case for this high speed railway for over eight years, and in the summer of 2010, commissioned Steer Davies Gleave to carry out an Investment Grade (IG) study.

As with any IG study, it was essential to base our analysis on a robust understanding of who is traveling where, what travel options are available, and how travelers value the different attributes offered by the different modes.

In Las Vegas, we started with an important advantage. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority (LVCVA) collect and publish extensive statistics on visitors and their behavior. At the same time, the resorts themselves collect enormous amounts of data on their customers through highly sophisticated marketing and loyalty programs. Through use of personalized resort cards, the casinos have access not only to standard personal data, such as name, address, and contact details, but also the spending habits of each customer on gaming activities, food, drink, retail, and entertainment. Together, this provides an understanding of the present traveler that is rarely available.

However, we still had to learn where travelers came from within Southern California. Using the latest advances in technology with cell phone data, we have been able to anonymously track more than half a million travelers between Southern California and Las Vegas to build trip distribution tables and measure speeds. This is an approach to building trip tables which we are increasingly using.

Finally – and just as importantly – we had to build up a picture of what people want when they travel. To address this, we commissioned an extensive program of qualitative and quantitative analysis – with focus groups, face-toface interviews, and internet-based questionnaires including a highly sophisticated stated preference analysis.

Good analysis has to depend on a good market understanding – and here in Southern California as across all of our studies – Steer Davies Gleave has developed advanced approaches to answer the key questions, ‘Who is traveling and what do they want?’

Today, there are approximately 20.6 million potential DesertXpress riders traveling between Southern California and Las Vegas, including the markets from both ends. With the project’s regulatory and financial review process nearing conclusion, could this be the first new high-speed line for the US?