City of Las Vegas

For the first 50 years after its founding in 1905, the City of Las Vegas (CLV) was primarily a dusty whistle-stop for the railroad. Modest growth between 1955 and 1985 was accompanied by typical urban and suburban development with roads, streetlights, homes, hotels, and so forth. In the 1980s, however, a flood of money from Wall Street created a paradigm shift where the famous Las Vegas Strip saw a surge in the development of excellent resort casinos. The gaming and hospitality transformed and bloomed, and that success attracted more development, which meant new residents. This boom continued for decades, and Southern Nevada saw its population explode from 500K to over 2.3 Million today. The number of tourists also increased dramatically from 12 Million annually to over 42 Million annually now.

CLV is an internationally renowned leader in the global economy with strong, livable neighborhoods. From humble beginnings to exponential growth and the reinvention of its downtown, it has been driven by determination, ambition, and innovation. CLV’s future depends on how its leaders and residents respond to opportunities and challenges today and plan for continued change tomorrow. Its residents have witnessed the power of visionary thinking to meet new demands while continuing to attract the boldest and brightest people to come work and live here. By pioneering smart city technologies that drive new markets and diversify the economy, all neighborhoods, residents, and businesses benefit from this level of strategic thinking, planning, and execution.

As a city focused on sustainable and equitable growth, CLV has committed to creating cutting-edge ‘smart city’ priorities and initiatives. While smart strategies have typically referred to using technology as a means of improving urban performance, CLV’s smart strategy also refers to the people living and working in the community. Its economic growth is related to the education of its residents. Growing a smart population requires more than just good schools; it requires a holistic economic strategy that attracts the best and the brightest minds.

To this end, in 2016, the CLV city council formed an Innovation District within Downtown Las Vegas and created a comprehensive 'smart Vegas' innovation initiative built around public safety, economic growth, mobility, education, social benefit, and health care to become a ‘smart city.’ Smart Vegas establishes a framework for developing innovations and emerging technologies to position the city to attract and grow many desired industries. Smart Vegas strives to serve as a test-bed and incubator for smart technology, innovations, and the Internet of Things. Central to this experimentation is the expansion of the fiber network and connected corridors to allow for the deployment and implementation of autonomous and connected vehicles.

 CLV is an internationally renowned leader in the global economy with strong, livable neighborhoods 

The city of Las Vegas has been a leading smart city, partly because so much of its infrastructure and development has taken place rapidly and over the last thirty years, which has seen a massive technological revolution. Since the 2000s, new sets of tools and ‘smart’ products have become mainstream and are in widespread use in our daily lives. These systems have made their way into infrastructure and use digital technology to communicate information and data for beneficial and practical uses. Smart technologies also have the capacity to help citizens monitor their use and impact of resources.

CLV has led this transition with the creation of an Innovation District within downtown Las Vegas as well as the establishment of the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada to regulate local telephone service but in a limited capacity. Wireless providers are permitted and regulated by CLV with respect to infrastructure siting, design, and typical operations. The local power provider NV Energy developed one of the nation’s first ‘smart grids.’ Through the use of smart metering, a wide range of data is collected for each customer and informs the transmission and distribution networks. CLV, along with its partners, The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, the Nevada Department of Transportation, and other local public entities, embrace the Freeway & Arterial System of Transportation (FAST), one of the first integrated transportation system infrastructure management entities in the nation.

With nearly one million visitors every week, the city faces significant pressures on its infrastructure and its logistics capacity. The intelligent application of technology is essential to provide decision-makers with detailed information about what is happening in real time. CLV must capture, analyze, and share relevant information rapidly to provide the appropriate response to sometimes rapidly evolving situations. CLV has deployed a multitude of different sensors monitoring activity within the city. These include CCTV cameras paired with analytics software, as well as sensors to monitor other potential impacts on the city, including traffic flow and weather. CLV is exploring a mix of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and sensors to enable real-time decision-making, enabling faster responses to emergencies.

Building a connected urban area has enabled CLV to collect data efficiently, but with huge amounts of data collected, the quandary CLV faces is limited resources to analyze and act on. That is where artificial intelligence and machine learning have removed a major burden for city officials. For example, data generated by traffic flows is used to intelligently route vehicles, reduce congestion, and get people to their destinations faster. This allows emergency services to be deployed with extreme accuracy, dispatching the right resources to handle any issue.

The ultimate vision of the Smart Vegas plan is to continue testing and piloting innovations that connect citizens and technology for an enhanced quality of life, improved economy, and future-focused environment. Future innovative smart city projects and programs, in addition to mobility and connected or autonomous vehicles, are expected to include technology that better informs first responders and connected and intelligent medical devices in health care to encourage a broader view of well-being.