A bike safety advocate and author, he closely covers the business side of Las Vegas sports, Alan Snel, Founder of LVSportsBiz.com, is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Described as part man, part bike, he's bicycled across the country by himself twice.

A veteran journalist, he's worked at newspapers across the country as well, including in New York, South Florida, Denver, Seattle, Tampa, and, of course, Las Vegas.

Alan Snel, Founder of LVSportsBiz.com, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

(Alan Snel) It's great to be here.

Happy holidays.

-Yes.

And I was saying that I wish in the introduction I had written that you are the man that is on the plaque that is on the parking garage at New York-New York, because of why?

I think that a lot of people might recognize you from that.

-Well, at T-Mobile Arena, MGM Resorts had a former exec, Rick Arpin, who I got to know when I was covering this issue of the building of the structure for the Review-Journal newspaper.

And I told Rick--I had this knack of politely badgering people--and I told Rick, Please make sure you have bike racks at your nice new arena on the Strip.

And he goes, Well, I'm going to put up a plaque for you.

I thought he was goofing around and just joking.

I had left Las Vegas, and lo and behold, when the arena opened in 2016, some of my photographer friends took photos of the plaque, posted on Facebook, and that's how I found out that Rick Arpin was not kidding.

I literally fell off my chair when I saw those photos.

-Do you remember the wording of it?

-It was just kind of-- -It acknowledges your efforts for fighting for bicyclists.

-Right, and pedestrian safety, specifically on the, you know, in the Las Vegas area and also on the Strip.

I mean, shout-out to Rick Arpin for actually putting that plaque up, because he was one of the few executives I've actually met here in, at the time, he's no longer with MGM Resorts, but he had a mind about safety for pedestrians and bicyclists, which I found really refreshing.

-How accommodating is the Las Vegas Strip for bicyclists?

-Not very.

You know, for events that I cover for LVSportsBiz, I actually park several miles outside of the Strip.

I actually, I won't give you-- I won't reveal my secret little parking space, but it's on a little quiet street off of Valley View, west of the Raiders stadium, west of Allegiant Stadium.

I bike over the Hacienda bridge, I follow the little back streets and little nooks and crannies, and I find my way to the properties along the Strip.

And I got to tell you, it's a real mixed bag in terms of, not only are you not really accepted on the Strip as like a fellow transportation user, sometimes the properties don't really even have like places to put a bike rack, you know, to lock your bike, which is why I so appreciated T-Mobile Arena having the bike rack there.

-This is something that you fought for, for the Raiders stadium as well.

-Yeah, I would-- in fact, when I cover Raiders games, I always park, bike on over.

It's very convenient.

They have bike racks right outside of the media entrance.

-But you had to lobby for that.

-I had to lobby for more bike racks, actually.

So many employees were using the bike racks that I went to a-- I covered the Stadium Authority Board, and I actually had to take my hat off as a reporter, put on my bicycle hat on, not my helmet, but my hat, and I said, Hey, can you put more bike racks at Allegiant Stadium?

And they did.

-Tell me about your first introduction to a bicycle.

-Well, I mean, to me, I was, you know-- as a kid, to me, bicycling represents freedom.

And I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, very car-oriented society and community.

And to me, bicycling was my freedom.

And I'll note, this is kind of a funny story.

My very first "long" trip, which was, at the time, maybe three or five miles from my house, and I'm kind of aging myself.

I shouldn't even be doing this.

But my first trip was to go to see the movie Jaws at a movie house in New City in Rockland County.

I lived in a place called Muncie Spring Valley area.

I remember biking on these roads.

That was our first.

I biked with about three friends, and that was like our big expedition by ourselves without our parents, seeing the movie Jaws at a movie house in New City, New York, north of New York City.

-And it was freedom.

Who taught you how to ride a bike?

-It was my dad.

My dad's pretty athletic, and I think I followed suit.

And I'm just kind of a physically hyper person, and I found the bicycle thing was perfect for that, because, really, it's kind of laughable now, because we have electric bikes that give you a hand.

But to me, when I came out with my book Bicycle Man, I have a very specific section in the book where I talk about how-- you know, for bicycling, all you need is willpower.

That's the only thing it requires is that you-- you have to have, obviously, good safety sense, you have to understand the rules of the road, but it just requires, I mean, you don't need gasoline.

Your power, the beautiful thing about the bicycle is that the passenger is also the engine at the same time.

And to me, it just required willpower, and that's what I had a lot of.

-I ask you about your dad because you told me ahead of this that you are currently riding his bike?

-So I have five different bikes.

Their use is for all kind of things.

For road, I do a lot of mountain biking.

I live just outside of the metro area, across from the Red Rock Conservation Area, so I take a mountain bike right, right onto trails.

But I do have my old bike that I gave to my dad as a present back like in 1989, maybe, and he rode it, and I said-- as he got older, I said, you know, I told my dad, there are bikes that can make life a little more easier for you.

And you can, you can buy an electric trike, even.

He wanted to keep this old steel Raleigh bike.

So when my sister and I moved our father into a new home and he gave up his bike, I said, You know what?

I can't trash this thing.

I need to keep this bike.

It's the bike I keep in my car that I drive to my spot that I use to go to the different spots along the Strip corridor for stories.

-Okay, so his spirit is with you as you're riding that bike.

-Absolutely.

-That was a difficult time, though, because you were mentioning, you know, he had to give up, not just his bike, but his car as well?

-Yeah.

-And that, I see a connection to another story in your life, the bicycle accident that almost-- you tell me what happened and who was the driver of this car.

-Right.

So I left the Review-Journal in February of 2016.

I went to Vero Beach, Florida, which is a little town north of West Palm Beach, and Fort Lauderdale.

And one morning in-- it was actually June 7 of 2017.

I was doing my morning bike ride along the intracoastal, and a motorist was distracted, just smashed right into me from behind.

He had a Chevy Cruze vehicle that has a low bumper.

When the car has a low bumper and hits you from behind, you go flying backwards.

Thankfully, it was not like-- you see all these big pickup trucks with very high profiles.

When they hit you, they will just put you, push you forward and run over you and typically kill you.

In this case, I flew backwards, survived the crash, and, literally, that was the impetus behind-- I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the catalyst for me to return to Las Vegas in June of 2017 to start LVSportsBiz.com.

I wrote a book about it, Long Road Back to Las Vegas, about the whole concept of going through kind of a, you know, a trauma in your life and moving forward.

And at the time, when I started in June of 2017, this was kind of a little convergence with the Vegas Golden Knights.

They were picking their team.

They were actually picking their expansion team roster literally a week or two after I came back here in Vegas, and all the sports things that were going on with the development of the Raider stadium, and the ACES came, their new soccer team.

So much stuff going on.

Reporting and writing about all the sports development actually kind of gave me a sense of moving forward.

My sister is a clinical psychologist.

She actually helped me with how you move forward after getting through these kinds of things, and you don't really get over these things.

What you do is move forward.

And covering all the business developments and the stadium construction, it gave me an anchor to hold on to as I moved forward.

That was my first book.

Two years later, during the pandemic, I knew this was not a pretty thing for our country, and I said I have a million different bicycle stories I've written.

I basically figured out a way how to categorize all these bicycle experiences, and from the cross-country bike rides to working-- I left journalism and worked six, seven years in Tampa on bicycle right issues on behalf of a coalition of bike shops.

And I was able to figure out a way to organize all those stories into the bicycle book that you referred to.

-The accident, who was driving?

-It was an older gentleman who actually died from-- actually, in the research of my book, the first book, Long Road Back to Las Vegas, I actually did research on him.

He actually died of cancer within a year after that, and there was hardly, there was hardly any settlement.

I was told by my lawyer that Florida has a very unusual thing where you have to sue the driver and his assets.

So there was not much of a settlement.

I said, You know what?

I have my life.

A friend came over and said, You know what?

You covered the business of sports for the local newspaper.

You're only a year removed.

Go back, start your own news site, and that's exactly what I did.

He's a good friend of mine from Denver.

He's an author himself, and that was really the pivot point in my life in 2017.

-This person probably should not have been driving at his age.

-I don't think so.

-And any kind of penalty that he faced?

-And that's a great thing about-- it's interesting you bring that up.

I had worked on the-- so this is on the east side of the state of Florida.

In the Tampa Bay market, I had made a name for myself for kind of standing up for people, for bicycle rights.

And the Tampa Bay Times actually did a big story on like, you know, just the "irony" of a guy who worked on bicycle right issues getting smashed into and surviving.

And a big point of the story was that the local county, which was St. Lucie County, the sheriff's office did not even give a ticket to the driver.

And that gets you-- and that tells you in this country a little about how we treat bicyclists in this country, that you can drive a car, obviously show that gross level of negligence, smash into a bicyclist, and not even get ticketed, which brings up, you know, the safety issues of here in Las Vegas.

You know, we need to crack down on just horrific, horrific, you know, motorists versus bicycle problems here.

You know, I've worked on this issue, kind of around the country, and there have been some of the most horrific bicycle crashes and deaths here.

We unfortunately-- you know, in early December, December 10, I believe, you know, it marked, I believe, I think, four-year anniversary of one of the worst bicycle, really, killings we've had in this country.

Five bicyclists were killed south of Boulder City if you recall by a box truck driver who had meth in his system.

And then we had, you know, a few years after that, we then had a retired police chief killed by two teenagers in a car.

You know, their idea of a joyride was smashing into bicyclists.

-It makes me think of something you told me off camera, that you have found here in Las Vegas, that there is a group of people, that there are people who just simply do not like bicyclists.

-There are people who literally just don't want you on the road.

They just don't feel like-- you're taking up space.

You know, maybe they get mad at just slow drivers too.

You know, the beautiful thing about bicycling is that it takes all forms, and one of the forms for me is transportation.

It is a terrific form of transportation.

I mentioned how I get to a lot of my assignments, and I cover the games.

So just showing up, locking the bike up, and boom.

And it's so practical.

I don't have to worry about parking problems, and it's-- and there are some people I've noticed in this area who they simply don't want you on the road, which is kind of disappointing.

It's aggravating.

-Yeah.

Alan Snel, we have run out of time.

I wish we could go on, but we really appreciate your time.

Thank you for joining Nevada Week.

-Thanks for giving me this time to talk.

Appreciate it.

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