Las Vegas’ Epic Sports Push Comes With Growing Pains

There’s no hotter sports town than Las Vegas these days. Home to the defending WNBA and NHL champions, Sin City is set to add Formula 1 and MLB franchises — and could even lure the NBA to join the NFL in the desert.

But locals and visitors alike are now finding that sports expansion comes with plenty of growing pains.

Construction and road repaving on the famous Las Vegas Strip for the upcoming Las Vegas Grand Prix is snarling local traffic and creating frustration more than three months before the November race. The forthcoming MSG Sphere adds to the growing Las Vegas transportation issues.

The design for the Oakland A’s ballpark — now being redrawn after initial renderings were dismissed as garbage — includes an emerging plan to link the new facility into an recently approved expansion of the Vegas Loop, an underground transportation system projected to ultimately include 81 stations and 68 miles of tunnels. 

That transit system is being built by the Boring Company led by Elon Musk, also the controversial owner of X, formerly known as Twitter. The Vegas Loop, however, consists of riders in human-driven Teslas instead of traditional mass transit trains or buses, and early reviews haven’t been good.

“We believe that anything can bring fans to the site without having to drive their cars, [and] making it more convenient for people is a real positive,” Brad Schrock, the A’s director of design, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.