UPDATE (8/29/23): About a year after it was initially supposed to open, California has finally finished a part-time extra lane on the southbound 15 freeway just south of the Nevada border. According to Caltrans, as of August 27, the shoulder will be open to drivers on Sundays and Mondays from 10am to 8pm, which effectively widens the notoriously backed up freeway from two lanes to three.
In 2022, Nevada added a permanent third lane along the half-mile stretch between the Primm exit and the state line. California did the same for a one-mile span just south of the border. Now, with the conversion of this additional 4.5-mile shoulder into a part-time lane, the southbound 15 will have an unbroken stretch of at least three lanes from Las Vegas to roughly 15 miles south of the state line. (Here’s hoping Mountain Pass, where the freeway goes back down to two lanes, doesn’t just push the Primm bottleneck farther down the road.)
As for car-free alternatives to what’s still sure to be an unpleasant commute, Brightline West’s proposal for high-speed rail between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga recently received federal environmental approval and is aiming to break ground by the end of this year.
Our original story from December 7, 2021 appears below.
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If you’ve ever driven from Las Vegas to Los Angeles at the end of a weekend, you’ve surely experienced traffic so bad that you’ve debated whether or not your car could handle a dirt road, or wondered if you should just call it quits and stay in Primm forever. Thankfully, a little bit of relief is finally coming soon.
Here’s the deal: The 15 has three southbound lanes leaving Vegas, but that narrows down to two from Primm to a bit south of the California-Nevada border, causing hours-long backups. To help alleviate the issue, the governors of both states have agreed to temporarily convert the shoulder into a travel lane during peak periods.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak jointly announced the plan on Sunday to add in the five-mile-long part-time lane, which will begin construction in mid-spring 2022 and be finished by the end of that summer. Primarily on Sundays and Mondays, the southbound shoulder of the interstate between the Nevada border and the CDFA Agricultural Station will be open to drivers during periods of peak congestion. The freeway naturally returns to three lanes at that point, so the lane expansion should hopefully smooth out a bottleneck that sees travel times between the border and Barstow routinely double or triple.
Of course, this won’t singlehandedly fix traffic. Newsom noted that this is “just a temporary solution” while Sisolak said they still need to work toward a permanent way to accommodate the 11 million annual carbound visitors to Las Vegas. There’s also the idea of induced demand, which explains how if you add more lanes to a road, you’ll just have more cars filling up those lanes, thereby creating more traffic—a phenomenon we’ve already seen here in L.A. with the widening of the 405. As far as non-car or plane-based alternatives, the on-again, off-again plans for a train between L.A. and Vegas currently rests with private rail company Brightline, which hopes to begin construction next year on a high-speed route between Las Vegas and Victorville (and then, eventually, Rancho Cucamonga).