KVIG Informative

Henderson has 300 miles of trails. Summerlin has more than 200. Sunrise Manor, an unincorporated community of 200,000 people on the east side of Las Vegas, has a wash trail, a broken beltway trail segment, and roads built for cars doing 45 miles per hour. The difference is not geography. It is money, planning, and who gets counted.

The Las Vegas Valley is ringed with bike trails. They follow flood channels, beltway corridors, and wash systems.

In Summerlin, they connect neighborhoods to parks, schools, and shopping centers across more than 200 miles of maintained paths, planned and built by a private developer in partnership with public agencies from the community’s founding in 1990.

In Henderson, they total more than 300 miles, including the 35-mile River Mountains Loop Trail, described as Nevada’s premier paved cycling destination. The city’s Master Bicycle and Trail Plan governs ongoing development and maintenance.

In Sunrise Manor, the unincorporated Clark County community of approximately 201,000 people that sits east of downtown Las Vegas, the options are a 14-mile wetlands loop partially accessible by bike, a wash trail with a dangerous on-road gap at Nellis Boulevard, a beltway trail segment that runs through Henderson and Paradise but does not reach deep into the community’s residential core, and arterial roads with high speeds and no protection.

The disparity is not new. It has been accumulating for decades. But it is now measurable, visible, and consequential in ways that the research on pedestrian and cyclist deaths makes impossible to ignore.

What Henderson Built

Henderson’s city website describes its trail system as one of the most extensive in the state of Nevada, totaling over 300 miles.

Its flagship is the River Mountains Loop Trail, 35 miles of fully paved, dedicated cycling path connecting Henderson, Lake Mead, and Boulder City, with rest stops, shade structures, water fountains, educational kiosks, and bike repair stations along the route.

The Harry Reid Union Pacific Railroad Trail adds 11 miles of rail-trail paved cycling connecting Green Valley to Railroad Pass. The McCullough Hills Trail runs 8 miles of desert mountain biking through Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area. The St. Rose Parkway Trail covers 5 miles of family-friendly cycling with mountain views.

All of this is governed by a Master Bicycle and Trail Plan that Henderson updates and publishes publicly. The plan outlines individual trails, distances, landmarks, and connectivity goals.

Henderson’s trail development has been supported by the Reimagine Boulder Highway project currently underway, which includes elevated, protected bike lanes on both sides of the full 7.5-mile corridor being rebuilt for $184 million. When that project completes in 2027, every resident along Henderson’s stretch of Boulder Highway will have a protected cycling route connecting to the broader trail network.

What Summerlin Built

Summerlin presents a different model of infrastructure development, one built entirely around private capital and master planning from the start.

The Howard Hughes Corporation has developed more than 200 miles of interconnected trails since Summerlin began taking shape in 1990. The system was designed from the community’s inception to connect neighborhoods to parks, schools, and commercial centers.

The trails run in three layers. Neighborhood trails are paved paths through residential areas providing residents direct access to parks without crossing arterial roads. Bike lanes on collector and arterial roads connect villages and serve more experienced cyclists. Regional trails, built as public-private partnerships between Howard Hughes, Clark County, the City of Las Vegas, and the Bureau of Land Management, link Summerlin to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area and the broader valley trail network.

Howard Hughes is currently working with Clark County, the BLM, and the Federal Highway Administration on a planned 20-mile trail connecting Summerlin directly to the Red Rock Visitors Center alongside State Route 159. Clark County’s own resources are being committed to extending a private developer’s amenity network westward.

Summerlin’s trail system is planned to eventually exceed 250 miles. It hosts an annual 80-mile cycling event, the Tour de Summerlin, that draws regional cyclists and coordinates with city officials annually to optimize road conditions along the route.

What Sunrise Manor Has

Sunrise Manor is not without trails. But what exists reveals as much through its limitations as through its presence.

The Clark County Wetlands Park sits on Sunrise Manor’s eastern edge along the Las Vegas Wash. Its Wetlands Loop Trail is 14 miles around, though cyclists are only permitted on the paved 11.5-mile section. Trailheads provide access at multiple points, and the trail connects to the River Mountains Loop Trail via the Wetlands Trail Connector and the Flamingo-Arroyo Trail at the Sunrise Trailhead.

The Flamingo Arroyo Trail is a wash-following path that runs through Paradise, Winchester, and Sunrise Manor. TrailLink’s 2026 guide describes it as offering safe crossings at nearly every major road. It also documents an unresolved problem: between Nellis Boulevard and Sloan Lane, the trail has a gap where the reconstructed Desert Rose Golf Course blocks the logical direct route.

Trail users must instead ride north on busy Nellis Boulevard, east on Sahara Avenue, and south on a sidepath along Sloan Lane to rejoin the off-road trail. These are high-speed, high-volume arterial roads with no protection for cyclists.

The I-215 East Beltway Trail, which runs between Warm Springs and Pecos roads, is about 7 to 9 miles long depending on the section measured. It runs through Paradise and Henderson along the southern beltway, not through the residential core of Sunrise Manor. It does not reach the Boulder Highway corridor. It does not connect to the neighborhoods where Sunrise Manor’s 201,000 residents live.

Clark County’s Get Healthy Clark County page notes that there are over 550 miles of bicycle lanes across the full county, with significant expansion planned. That number encompasses all of the county’s jurisdictions and geographies. It does not distinguish between a protected bike lane in a Summerlin village and a painted stripe on Nellis Boulevard.

Why the Gap Exists

The difference between east and west in Las Vegas cycling infrastructure is not random. It follows the same patterns that govern road funding, park investment, and pedestrian safety infrastructure.

Summerlin’s trails exist because Howard Hughes Corporation, one of the largest master-planned community developers in the country, required trail infrastructure as part of its product offering to homebuyers. The trails were a selling point. They were planned before the first house was built. The public-private partnership model that built Summerlin’s regional trail connections means Clark County and the City of Las Vegas contributed resources to infrastructure that primarily serves a community designed for and marketed to higher-income buyers.

Henderson’s trails exist because the city has a dedicated public works department, a Master Bicycle and Trail Plan, a history of successful federal grant applications, and an elected city council empowered to bond and appropriate for long-term capital projects.

Sunrise Manor has none of those structural advantages. As an unincorporated census-designated place, it has a Town Advisory Board with no governing authority. It cannot bond. It cannot levy taxes. It cannot apply directly to federal grant programs. Its infrastructure budget runs through the Clark County Commission, which governs more than 300 square miles of unincorporated land and must weigh competing priorities across that entire geography.

The Nevada Current documented in 2019 that eastern Las Vegas, including Sunrise Manor, has the longest average school commute times in the region at 18.8 minutes, indicating residents travel more, have lower rates of vehicle access, and depend more heavily on walking and transit than their counterparts in Summerlin or Green Valley.

Those are the people most in need of safe cycling infrastructure as a transportation option. They are the people with the least of it.

Who Pays the Price

The Clark County Health statistics documented by the Nevada Current and the NDOT show that cyclists and pedestrians who die on valley roads are disproportionately concentrated in lower-income, minority communities on roads built to move cars, not people.

Between 2015 and 2019, Clark County accounted for more than 75 percent of all bicyclist deaths in Nevada, according to state traffic safety data cited by People Powered Movement. Eight to nine cyclists died per year in the county during those years. Those numbers have not improved materially in the years since.

Sunrise Manor’s arterials, Nellis Boulevard, Boulder Highway, Lake Mead Boulevard, Flamingo Road, carry high traffic volumes at speeds between 40 and 55 miles per hour. Bike lanes on these roads, where they exist at all, are painted stripes on the pavement without any physical separation from traffic.

In Summerlin, the planning documents describe bike lanes as part of the streetscape, separated from motor vehicles by design. In Sunrise Manor, the bike lane is what remains when the engineer has finished designating car lanes and still has four to six feet of asphalt to account for.

The Reimagine Boulder Highway project is bringing Henderson’s section of that corridor protected, elevated bike lanes. The Clark County section is getting chain-link fence in the median. The disparity in cycling infrastructure follows exactly the same pattern as the disparity in pedestrian safety investment documented in the prior Boulder Highway investigation.

What Would Fix It

Erin Breen, director of UNLV’s Road Equity Alliance Project, has consistently argued that the solution to vulnerable road user deaths is road redesign, narrower lanes, dedicated transit corridors, and protected facilities for non-motorized users.

Those interventions require capital. They require planning. They require a governing structure capable of committing to long-term infrastructure investment and executing it.

The RTC’s Streets and Highways program manages a Capital Improvement Program of 256 projects valued at $1.42 billion for fiscal years 2026 through 2035. That program works with member agencies including the City of Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas, and unincorporated Clark County. Projects are programmed by member agencies, meaning the city councils and county commission that prioritize them.

Sunrise Manor does not have a member agency of its own. Its interests are aggregated into Clark County’s share of that program, alongside every other unincorporated community in the county.

Until the governance structure changes, or until a champion with Henderson-level institutional access fights specifically for the east side’s cycling infrastructure the way Henderson fought for its $40 million INFRA grant, Sunrise Manor will keep getting paint on the pavement.