Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Leaving Las Vegas, Heading South - Away From The City's Field Of Energy
By Robert L. Candiotti
The only efficient way to get out of Las Vegas - by automobile - is to take Highway 15.
Leaving town on the freeway,
passing along Las Vegas' Strip, you see many of the most intoxicating hotels on the planet - such as Venetian,
MGM Grand, Caesar's Palace, Mandalay Bay. The hospitality industry in Las Vegas is one of the modern wonders of the world.
They may make it look easy, but it most definitely is not.
The last hotel/casino you pass when heading south is
the relatively new South Point, and then - kaboom - you're in the suburbs. New homes rise and condemned homes crumble.
There are tracts of vacant land, especially to the east. You see a sprawling bus yard with probably 100 yellow
school buses.
Sloan is a grizzled, desultory industrial town. It has no resemblance to Las Vegas, but
you still feel like you're in Las Vegas' energy field as you pass through Sloan.
Here, the roadside billboards
are advertising Primm, 20 miles to the south, but in Sloan you still feel the powerful gravity of Sin City (which, in case
you don't know, is where I have lived for the past nine years).
Then you pass through low-rolling, totally
undeveloped hills. There are train tracks. A long train slithers north to Las Vegas and beyond. The old Los Angeles-Las Vegas
Highway is running parallel on the east, hosting sparse, iconoclastic traffic that can use the road only as far south
as Jean.
You pass by a huge dry lake bed that was probably quite fertile 10,000 years ago. Here, the open
spaces start to seem vast. The is an ancient feeling to the land. Las Vegas is losing its grip. Your thinking reverses. You
sense it is Las Vegas that is the anomaly, not the desert. The desert seems wise and wizened, with an unpretentious knowledge
of survivability.
And then you descend gently into Ivanpah Valley.
On the wind, you
start hearing a different song. Ivanpah Valley sings its own song. I listen closely. The melody invokes simultaneous
thoughts of the past, present and future. The arrangement and instrumentation are yet to be written.
Ivanpah Valley,
when the new Ivanpah Valley Airport is completed, will necessarily exist connected to Las Vegas by efficient
transportation. Travel along "the corridor" will need to seem almost effortless. But the two end points - Las Vegas
and Ivanpah - will have distinctly different personalities.
The heartbeats
of both will be strong, but they will have two different hearts.
That's
the way I feel today, leaving Las Vegas, heading south to Ivanpah Valley.
8:39 am pst
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Immediacy With Fewer Emissions - The Way It Needs To Go
By Robert L. Candiotti
A copy of Sushi Economy by Sasha Issenberg came into my hands.
Issenberg describes in blue depth a unique,
and revealing, facet of globalization. Bluefin tuna caught in remote waters have to be on the plates of urban sushi
lovers, at the four corners of the planet, within hours of being caught.
The sushi business is a
metaphor for Americans' addiction to immediacy.
And for me, Sushi Economy reinforces the
feeling that Ivanpah Valley Airport will ultimately be built.
The craving for immediacy is not going
to go away. In the fast-developing Southern Nevada area, immediacy demands will require Ivanpah for the sustenance
of the Vegas Reality. It seems pretty simple to me. But it won't
be easy.
The challenge is to sustain immediacy in a much "greener"
way. As I see it, the goal is to maintain immediacy - with far fewer emissions.
6:59 am pst
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Ivanpah Planned To Have Two Runways To Handle The Most Advanced Long-Haul Aircraft
By Robert L. Candiotti
The Clark County Department of Aviation (CCDOA) is planning for Ivanpah Valley Airport to have two runways.
Reading
CCDOA's Project Definition and Justification Report for the Ivanpah Airport Project, it appears one runway
would have a length of 15,000 feet, and the secondary runway will be 12,000 feet long.
The aviation authority is
expecting a variety of long-haul aircraft to use Ivanpah, such as the 747-400, 777, A340 and A330. These aircraft have airport
reference codes up to, and including, D-V.
CCDOA is
also anticipating at Ivanpah Valley Airport the newest and largest long-haul aircraft, such as the A380 and proposed 747-800,
which are placed in the D-VI reference code.
Therefore, the
CCDOA has proposed the supplemental airport to be designed up to airport reference code D-VI.
The forecast of airport operations at Ivanpah predicts around 42,000 airport operations in Ivanpah's launch
year of 2017, and approximately 172,000 annual operations by 2025. A main concern of Clark County's aviation authority
is that all large commercial airport types can be accommodated at opening, and far into the future.
10:04 am pst
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Ivanpah Valley Airport's Transportation Corridor - A Key Aspect Of Success
By Robert L. Candiotti
In 2000, when the United States Congress enacted the Lands Act to authorize the transfer of land in the Ivanpah Valley
to develop a supplemental airport and its infrastructure, Congress also directed the Department of the Interior to create
a "transportation and utilities corridor" between Las Vegas Valley and Ivanpah Airport.
The development
of this transportation corridor will begin once the construction of the Ivanpah Valley Airport is approved (the Environmental
Impact Statement Record of Decision is projected to occur toward the end of 2010).
To this writer, the transportation
corridor is an area where creativity and technological intelligence can positively distinguish this airport in exciting ways.
The corridor needs to be highly efficient, vibrantly fun and generally humanistic. It needs to be as unique as the
juxtaposition of the nation's newest international airport with one of the world's most exciting and dazzling cities.
It needs to be "cool."
To Ivanpah Valley.com, this transportation corridor
will be one of the key aspects of Ivanpah Valley Airport's success, so everyone needs to put on their thinking caps now.
6:33 pm pst
