It's not an impossible task to determine the amount of traffic the opening of the Bellagio hotel-casino will generate on the Strip and Flamingo Road. In fact, that's the easy part. Road improvements are made based on studies conducted during peak traffic hours.
Engineers look at traffic flows and they count how many cars turn left, turn right or go straight.
They plug the number of hotel rooms and square footage of the building into their fine-tuned formula and come up with an estimate on the additional traffic the megaresort will cause on nearby roads. It's the pedestrians that are unpredictable. The addition of two eastbound lanes to Flamingo Road adjacent to Bellagio, studies show, should keep vehicles traveling through the Las Vegas Boulevard intersection at a smooth pace. It's incredible how detrimental pedestrians are to traffic. They can shut down a whole intersection.