Rename Beltway the H2H

Last Tuesday, I left the old homestead about 6:30 a.m. to speak at a breakfast meeting of the Summerlin Rotary Club.

I took county Route 215, better known as the dreaded Las Vegas Beltway. Or, as I now call it — with all due respect to the hit song by the aging rock band AC/DC — the Highway to Hell.

As anyone who has ever driven the H2H knows, virtually everyone drives it with the speed and predictability of bats outta you know where. My experimental commute this Tuesday morning was no different.

I caught the H2H at Ann Road and proceeded south to Summerlin Parkway. While driving that 5.5-mile stretch, I set the cruise control for 5 mph over the posted speed limit. Guess how many times I got passed? Nineteen.

Guess how many times I passed someone? Zero.

Ding! Ding! Ding! End of experiment. Even at 6:30 in the morning — speeding a nickel over the limit at a time when commuters are just waking up — the H2H once again proves itself a very dangerous stretch of pavement.

Forget the Nevada Highway Patrol. That agency is hopelessly outmanned on the H2H. The answer, good people of Las Vegas, is to use traffic cameras.

As I’ve argued twice before this hot summer, we ought to put sophisticated traffic cameras up along every inch of the Beltway and at every intersection. It will, I feel safe in promising you, change driving habits, save lives and, courtesy of those batty drivers who can’t resist putting the pedal to the metal, add a nice little revenue stream to local coffers.

If the question is how much money (which it is not), let’s take a stab at quantifying the economic benefit of doing the right thing. Loyal reader Teresa Purvis sent me a nice letter, enclosing a column written by Laurie Roberts of The Arizona Republic.

Arizona has a pilot program for speeding cameras. They are installed on the Phoenix area’s beltway, known as Loop 101, but only around Scottsdale.

Roberts, who seems to be a reluctant fan of cameras, points out that “the cameras on Scottsdale’s 6.5 miles of the 101 has so far netted a profit of $3.6 million over nine months. Of that, Scottsdale cleared $800,000, the courts got nearly $500,000 and the state saw a tidy $2.3 million. And that’s with 17,000 of the 90,000 tickets still to be settled.”

I understand the reluctance of some Las Vegans to make the Beltway a privacy-free roadway. But to borrow a phrase from Roberts: Darn it, it’s worth it. And besides, since when is there any expectation of privacy on a public roadway?

So let’s do that math. Assume that the Las Vegas H2H is 75 percent as busy as the Phoenix beltway. If Phoenix-area governments got $3.6 million in nine months (or $4.8 million annualized), we can expect to get about $3.6 million in a year.

Now, if $3.6 million for a 6.5 mile stretch can be extrapolated along the full 53-mile H2H, then we could make around $29 million a year from Beltway speeding cameras.

The primary reason for putting cameras on the Beltway, of course, is to make the road safer. But raising an extra $29 million a year is a bonus that, spent wisely, might make a dent in a worthy project or, perhaps, further improve transportation infrastructure.

No matter how you spend it, it’s a chance at a big win-win. Why not take it?

Sherman Frederick is publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media. Readers may write him at sfrederick@ reviewjournal.com.