LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Four temporary vehicle bridges will allow hotel guests, employees, and first responders to navigate around the Las Vegas Grand Prix circuit during the race. The bridges will allow guests at the nearly 23,000 hotel rooms enclosed by the 3.8-mile track access to the rest of the city.
On Tuesday one of those four bridges was tested with heavy vehicles to ensure it worked for fire trucks and other large vehicles. The largest bridge will be four lanes wide and 760 feet long. All the bridges are designed to highway grade said Project Manager Terry Miller.
“We don’t have a lot of overpasses in the resort corridor that allow traffic to move freely over the main circuit area so we have to build the overpasses,” he said. “There are a lot of things that are just different here in Las Vegas than anywhere else in the world for an F1 event.”
The largest of the bridges will be constructed on Flamingo to go over Koval. Other smaller bridges will be located at Audrie and Harmon and another from the Top Golf parking lot to Caesars.
During the race weekend, the bridges will be restricted to people with credentials like hotel guests, employees and emergency services. That restriction will be in place between 7 p.m. and 2 a.m. each night. Everyone else will have access to the bridges when the race is not going on.
You will start to see the bridges going up in those areas around mid-October.
“We are working really hard to make sure we don’t have gridlock. And the way we don’t have gridlock is communication. So we are developing a plan that will come in the next one to two months that communicates basically how to move around the circuit,” Miller explained.
If you’re thinking you may catch a glimpse of the race on one of those bridges think again. There will be barriers that will prevent you from seeing any of the race while on the bridge along with netting to prevent anything from falling on the track.
In addition to the vehicle bridges, they’re also building three to four temporary pedestrian bridges that will be used just during F1.
They anticipate reusing all the bridges they construct for the next decade of races.
The cost of all of this according to Miller is still to be determined.
