Letter from the Founder

Dear all,

We’re trying to do something unthinkable in this city: we’re going to push for world-class public transportation in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area.

We’re going to get better bus service throughout the region. We’re going to make it possible for people to take trains to get to work in Las Vegas. We’re going to push for walkable, mixed-use, urban development.

But frankly, what we’re trying to do is borderline impossible.

Las Vegas grew extremely rapidly during a time when national investment in public transportation was in decline and when car-oriented development was the norm. There was simply little incentive for the state and for the region to focus on transit-oriented development because the tourist dollars kept coming into the state.

Master-planned communities dominated development of the suburbs. Real estate created pretty neighborhoods with high property values and resort-style amenities. Tourists still kept traveling in droves to the Strip.

Now we have neighborhoods where it’s often 5-10 times quicker to drive than to walk to the grocery store; where seniors who can’t drive are effectively trapped in their homes; and where children regularly get injured or killed trying to cross the street.

However, I’ve always been a fan of moonshot thinking. Yes, we’re fighting half a century of car-centric development. Yes, our work will not be completed overnight. Nonetheless, if we follow through, the upside is truly generational, transformational change in the region.

Motivating Our Vision

Back in summer 2019, I flew to the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) for the first time. I was there for my university’s pre-freshman summer research program. I thought being able to not need a car to travel from the airport to my college was the coolest thing ever. In retrospect, trying to haul a backpack, a carry-on luggage, and a checked luggage collectively weighing more than myself through two trains and a bus transfer over two hours was kind of insane, even for a regular transit user. But it was possible. And only three dollars to travel halfway across the DFW metroplex!

A few years later, I ended up moving back in with my family in Las Vegas. And I felt a profound sense of isolation. In my area, third places were far and few between, buses only ran hourly, and transfers made getting anywhere interesting in a reasonable amount of time impractical.

I took trips to the East Coast to help remind me of the kind of world I hoped to be in after graduating. The first time I rode the New York City Subway, I was attempting to watch Hadestown¹ after arriving from Penn Station. I confused myself into taking a train headed to Brooklyn, causing me to miss nearly a third of the show.

But I enjoyed the thrill of knowing that I stepped foot in a city that gave me the freedom to be anywhere I chose to be, only requiring me to literally take steps in the right direction. To see millions of people using transit to reliably get around gave me a profound feeling of pride for my country and for humanity.

But every time I came back home, I felt a little embarrassed that my city, one with a name that was known internationally, could barely scrounge together a bus system worthy of the respect of its residents.

After years of merely tolerating my personal situation, I saw a real opportunity to improve the place I spent half my life. Instead of moving to somewhere on the coast to “make it in the big city,” I would make the choice to try to improve the world I lived in right then. I would take the knowledge I’ve learned about civic engagement in Student Government back in college and years of urbanist YouTubers to build better transit experiences for Las Vegans.

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We live in the Mojave Desert. Pushing for New York City-style subway and density here is likely not practical, so our vision is going to have to be something different. It’s going to have to be something that accepts the limitations of our region’s history and the political reality of our state, county, and municipal systems of government.

Many urbanists discuss the development of cities in terms of language that can easily be perceived as technocratic. And to be clear, they are right: mixed-use, walkable, higher-density development tends to produce more economically valuable, socially connected, and politically important neighborhoods and communities. However, better urbanism is never an end in itself. The whole point of better urbanism is to create better places to live.

I want tree-lined bike paths. I want bus stops with shade. I want buildings on streets that invite me and my friends to stay in, not encourage drivers to speed through. I want to see streetcars within neighborhoods. I want to see community hubs instead of strip malls with more space for parking than the businesses they serve.

For this vision to work, we’re going to be open-minded and practical without losing sight of the city we’re trying to build. This initiative cannot just be cyclists merely pushing for better bike lanes or urbanists pushing for more effective zoning. We don’t just want trains or better buses for the sake of “better transit” because transportation is, after all, just a means to arrive at an end.

Just like the roads that our region has, our city often feels like people are just passing through. It’s clear we need a bolder approach to building an actual home in the desert.

Therefore, Las Vegans for Better Transit is going to take a holistic approach to improving our communities through transit, centering on a vision that has young people working with institutions to create a more sustainable environment and a more resilient region.

State of the City

As of Spring 2026, Las Vegas does not have any public transit advocacy organizations. It doesn’t have any clear community associations for urbanists. In a manner of speaking, if the city had any kind of aspiration to be anything besides a tourist hub surrounded by suburbs, it’s very far behind.

Despite being one of the most iconic cities in the country and the world, that level of iconicity does not exist outside the Strip. Tourists see a sensory paradise of pleasure while the locals who make it happen get endless strip malls and neighborhoods with cookie-cutter homes.

The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, the RTC, is left dealing with an impending fiscal cliff that most Las Vegans don’t realize will affect them, even if only indirectly. If the people who currently rely on transit are forced to get a car, that means that streets will become even more congested; that many people may never ride RTC ever again; and that the system will enter a death spiral that may take over a generation to recover from.

Fortunately, there is reason to hope.

The young people I’ve talked to on a regular basis as a fry cook and cashier do, at least in concept, see the need for better forms of transportation throughout the city. They recognize that the way our transportation system works leaves people stuck in traffic and often worried about other “stupid drivers” who will cause them harm.

Transit isn’t just “something poor people have to use.” When done right, transit can provide more freedom than the illusion of the freedom of being forced to pay for gas, licensing and registration, and loan repayments. We recognize that car ownership will be a necessity for most people in Las Vegas for the foreseeable future. But when most trips are less than a mile, it should be possible to walk, bike, or otherwise not have to drive to accomplish most everyday tasks. Las Vegas does not yet live in this world.

Making Friends

In order to achieve our vision, we’re going to have to make a lot of friends with a lot of people in a lot of places. Unlike metropolitan areas with more established community networks and organizations related to urban planning and general social advocacy, we’re going to be starting partially from scratch here—but not totally.

We’re going to have to be open-minded in our approach. Everyone from local business owners who would benefit from transit to social organizations like the Nevada Homeless Alliance and Mothers Against Drunk Driving and, of course, existing RTC transit riders, is on the table. Community organizations will be vital to helping communicate our message and advocating on our behalf. And most of all, we’re going to need to collaborate with local elected officials and vocally support those who are aligned with our mission as they are the ones with the structural power to help make our vision a reality.

For this initiative to work, we’re going to have to function as less of a traditional social advocacy nonprofit and more of a nimble, mission-driven startup that’s willing to think creatively about how to engage the residents, businesses, and organizations in this community to correct the unsustainable development patterns of the past and help build a city through world-class transit.

We’re going to inevitably encounter opposition, whether from people who have a vested interest in preserving what currently exists or from people who don’t understand what we’re fighting for (and that we’re fighting for them!). Nonetheless, we’re still going to push for our vision. What we may find in attempting to connect the Las Vegas metropolitan area with transit is that we create communities that connect across city lines.

Onward and Upward

I am often reminded of what Gustavo Petro, the president of Columbia, once declared back in 2018:

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

Yet as the richest country in the world throughout all of human history, it’s impressive how undeveloped we are by this standard.

Frankly, I’m unsure whether at this point in the metro area’s development that a lot of our vision is doable within a generational timespan. There’s a lot going on in the country right now. But that’s what makes this venture so thrilling for me and hopefully many others who live here: if we get this right, we can make real investments that will improve the lives of both the adults who work in this valley and the children who will grow up here.

The idea for this organization will remain simple: build a community of transit advocates who could truly transform the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area from a car-dependent city to an oasis in the desert, and actually do what we can to get us there.

This doesn’t just have to be a city that caters to tourists. There are over 2.4 million people who live, work, and play in this region. It’s time we start thinking about how to solve their needs using transit and more effective land use. It’s time we think about why we’re okay with being the third-most deadly city in the country for pedestrians² when we know the better alternatives. It’s time to stop wasting money on gas and wasting days of time each year to traffic. Yes, my friends, it’s time we fight for better transit.

The road ahead (pun intended) is anything but simple. We’re going to have to advocate for investments in the future while addressing the real needs that residents here have in the present. Broader trends in state and federal funding in addition to this country’s macroeconomic state may require us to change our approach. But we will not compromise on our vision. We will be the voice for transit that this region deserves.

In any case, this next year for us will be a very exciting one.

All aboard, Las Vegans for Better Transit.

Footnotes

1. Which, by the way, was amazing. ↩

2. Las Vegas ranked as one of the most dangerous cities for pedestrians, Las Vegas Review-Journal ↩