Decade of Growth Leaves Glitter Gulch Gridlocked : Development: Las Vegas is booming. But it’s choking on newcomers seeking a haven from congestion, smog.

From the cockpit of the Skyview Traffic Watch copter, Thomas Hawley saw the week from hell arrive last Friday afternoon in the form of a solid, slow-moving steel snake inching along Interstate 15 from the Western horizon all the way to the Strip.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1993, the worst traffic day in memory and the busiest day in Las Vegas history. Nearly 200,000 revelers choked the city, so many visitors that Las Vegas Boulevard was closed and at least one Treasure Island hotel bar stopped serving drinks because of the crush of bodies.

“You couldn’t find a room New Year’s Eve within 20 miles. No place, no hotels, no motels, no nothing,” Treasure Island bellman Frank Jackson said. And the people! He laced his fingers tightly together and held them out. “This is how close people were packed in on Las Vegas Boulevard.”

The New Year’s crowd had barely filtered out when the gadget mongers of the International Winter Consumer Electronics Show--among the biggest conventions of the year--began to arrive late Wednesday night, heralded by oversold flights into McCarran International Airport and long, snaking lines for taxicabs.

In a city with 11,000 brand-new rooms at three luxurious hotel-casinos, even the humble Travelodge--where warnings against stealing the linens are posted in each room--is near capacity. “I’m here because I can’t get in anywhere else,” one New York City entrepreneur in town for the electronics show said as he waited in the registration line at midnight Wednesday.

So many people have come to Las Vegas, either visiting the newly capacious Strip or permanently fleeing the stagnant Southern California economy, that the city is hard pressed to absorb them all. Twice as many people live here as did a decade ago. But the roads they traverse have barely changed.

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Drivers spend twice as much time in their cars as they did five years ago, according to the Regional Transportation Commission. At peak times, it takes an hour to get a cab and just as long to drive the four-mile Strip. The two-block drive stretching from Tropicana Avenue to Flamingo Road can chew up a good 30 minutes.

An ambitious master transportation plan to fix what ails the Las Vegas infrastructure is being implemented, but for the short term, the construction is causing more harm than good. An estimated 170 public works projects broke ground in 1993. “Road Construction Ahead” could be the new city motto.

“Our goal is to tear up every damn street in the county as soon as possible,” said Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, who is considered the guru of transportation planning. “If we hope to catch up with growth, we can’t improve the system one road at a time.”

“It’s gotten worse and worse every year; it can’t get better,” said cabbie Bill Seymour, who every day must navigate Tropicana Avenue and the Strip, (a.k.a. Cardiac Corner) the worst intersection in Nevada. “Every back road in Las Vegas is under construction for the past six months.”

To many new arrivals--those expatriates who have helped the population double to nearly 900,000 in the last decade--the changes here contribute to a certain sense of deja vu, an edgy feeling of “Didn’t I come here to get away from the smog and traffic?”

“I come in to work at 7 a.m. and don’t go home until 6 or 7 at night,” said Mark Albers, assistant general manager of Games of Nevada, a gaming machines company. “I blame it on the traffic. It gets real bad between 7 and 8 in the morning and any time after 3 p.m.”

And it has gotten worse, particularly in the past year. Las Vegas violates federal standards for carbon monoxide and particulate matter, and “this winter alone, we’ve had seven days where we’ve exceeded the carbon monoxide standards compared to two last year,” said Lee Gibson, planning coordinator for the Regional Transportation Commission. “And there are still 45 days left of winter.” The increase in pollution, he said, is due at least in part to traffic and construction.

Once November’s and December’s visitor figures are tallied, 1993 will most likely boast nine of the 10 best months in Las Vegas tourism history, said Myram Borders, bureau chief of the Las Vegas News Bureau, which is part of the city’s Convention and Visitor’s Authority.

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The unexpected year-end rally, she said, comes thanks to Treasure Island, Luxor and the MGM Grand hotel-casinos, which opened nearly 11,000 rooms to the public in the last three months and contributed significantly to the crunch on Las Vegas Boulevard.

And this, the first full month of simultaneous operation of all three hotels, is already looking good. With the Consumer Electronics Show drawing an estimated 80,000 conventioneers to the city, all three hotels are completely booked.

And so is Las Vegas Boulevard.

“I rented a car at the airport, but I left it at the MGM Grand,” Arthur Wagner, president of New York-based Active Media Services, said as he wandered through the convention Thursday morning. “I wouldn’t dream of driving.”

A few blocks away from the convention, the Googie-esque Monaco Motel drew its own small crowd Thursday afternoon for a slightly different kind of Las Vegas experience: a demolition.

Government officials had briefly considered imploding the Monaco a la Steve Wynn’s bomb-fest at the historic Dunes hotel two months earlier.

But they quickly came to their senses. The motel, after all, was being destroyed to make way for the Desert Inn Super Arterial, a stop-free roadway that should allow residents and visitors to quickly bisect the city by going over Interstate 15 and under the Strip. An explosion would simply draw more traffic, so they opted for a big yellow bulldozer--discrete by Las Vegas standards.

To “Chopper Tom” Hawley, who watched the Monaco fall, “the long range looks good” for Las Vegas. “But for the short term--at least the next couple of years--there are great problems.”

But will the gridlock in Glitter Gulch drive away the tourists? Not to worry, says Jim Cammisa, publisher of the Miami-based newsletter Travel Industry Indicators.

“It’s all looking up for Las Vegas,” Cammisa said. “ ‘Entertainment destinations’ are in. . . . They’re out in front in terms of what the American public wants. But from where I sit, they can keep it.”