EcoTrust blogger Tim Sullivan visits two sides of Las Vegas -- a sprawling foreclosureville in North Las Vegas and newly planned streets threading through downtown -- and compares the two different visions of urban planning:

But before we parted, she offered some hope. She mentioned there was new blood in the ranks of the engineers who ran the Las Vegas valley’s public works departments. They were beginning to shake up the standards and confront the politics.

A few hours and a long, sweaty bike ride later, I walked in downtown Las Vegas with one of those engineers. Jorge Cervantes had come to the City of Las Vegas as an assistant traffic engineer and had risen through the ranks, recently becoming the city’s public works director. As a young engineering student, Cervantes had been taught that a roadway existed to move vehicles.