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Las Vegas Monorail Finally Ready To Open
doormat writes "The Las Vegas monorail is finally set to open to the public on July 15th! The project has had some problems - it was originally scheduled to open in March. The first part of the monorail, which uses Bombardier M-VI train vehicles, 'a derivative of the famous Walt Disney World Mark VI trains', is 4 miles long and connects several casinos on the east side of the Las Vegas Strip (see map, QT video), as well as the Las Vegas Convention Center (Home to CES, NAB, Networld+Interop and what was Comdex). Future phases seek to expand the monorail to downtown to the North, the west side of the strip, and eventually the University and the airport (which the taxicab and limo groups fight tooth and nail). I swear it's the strip's only choice... throw up your hands and raise your voice! Monorail, Monorail, Monorail! Mono... D'oh!"
Wow, could it cost a little bit more? $3 a ride! $40 for 3 days? No week pass? Mono d'oh indeed.
We also got our first light rail line in Minnesota, the Hiawatha Line. Also driven with Bombardier trains of an original design.
I took some pictures of the opening here.
96,000 people tried out the line last weekend during its debut!
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Other countries also lack the outstanding Interstate Highway System.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Where cities are close together, the mass transit systems are integrated. One can take non-Amtrak trains from Philadelphia to New Haven, Connecticut. Baltimore and Washington are connected by MARC trains, and Oakland and San Francisco are connected by Bart and S.F. and San Jose are connected by CalTrain.
And we do have some long lines, but as you say, they are pretty shitty. But those other countries are much more densely populated and smaller. In the Northeast Amtrak, the commuter railroads and subways make a pretty good approximation of what exists in Europe.
Just like Kim Pedersen. Wired did a nice story on him a few months ago and now he's started the Monorail Society.
Cool!
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
The trains stop running at night and you can outrun it in a car, but you think that's excellent public transportation?
Visit NYC sometime. Trains 24/7 that are faster and cheaper than a car or taxi.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
This is not unique to monorails. For instance, the Montreal subway system uses rubber tires on concrete paths, but it's otherwise identical to a standard subway system (they still have the standard track and wheels on the cars as a backup in case of flat tires). The ride is certainly quieter than metal-on-metal, especially around the corners, but it can be fairly bouncy.
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
I am a frequent visitor of Vegas and I doubt I will EVER use the new monorail. First of all, the construction of this monorail closed a number of FREE trams/rails that I often used. There was an excellent free rail between the MGM and Ballys, as well as the Monte Carlo -> Bellagio tram. Both closed down for this construction. Now going from MGM to Ballys will cost $$ and the Monte Carlo Bellagio tram still remains closed! It's on the other side of the street for god sakes. There was no reason to close this excellent free service.
Second, the cost. I usually go with a group of friends, and if the 5 of us split a cab, it always cost $10 or less total, AND takes us door to door instead of only a few stations WAY at the back of the casinos. This is also 24 hrs a day. The monorail closes at midnight!! Who the hell heads back to their room at midnight in vegas?!
The only advantage the monorail has is a direct route to the convention center. Large conventions could make good use of this, but otherwise, I'd suggest tourists stay away.
The main purpose of this monorail is to create easier travel between the LVCA (convention center) and the strip. The conventnion center is a good distance away from the strip if you walk, this will make staying on the strip and traveling to the LVCA much easier. Plus most travelers will be business and be paying with business account more then likely. Others will be people who just need a quick way to get around. I'm sure day passes will eventually be released for this system. But its not always easy to get around between areas in vegas, even if it doesn't seem that far. While this is useless for locals its perfect for travelers who want to see different areas of vegas. Once this reachs out to Downtown this will provide much more bsuiness for that area that is hard to reach right now and that most people dont' want to pay the extra money to go and visit. sinc down town is a few miles away from the strip and is renovating also to become popular again this is a great thing for the las vegas economy.
But for the most part vegas gets most of its income now adays from CONVENTION TRAVELERS. Which means that making it easier to get back and fourth to the convention center is always a plus. The stations they have built for this system are really nice and will also help the business traveller
I can't believe its not butter!
This _sounds_ good on the face of it, but history says otherwise.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the US had far and away the largest amount of public transit, larger than any country in europe. In the 19-teens more miles of streetcar track existed in the United States than in the entire rest of the world combined. Inter-city rail was commonly used, and relatively affordable and dependable as compared to many of the nations we currently associate with rail such as Germany or France.
It's hard to identify true root causes, but certainly between the 1920s and the 1950s, american culture and spending patterns had fallen so heavily into the pattern of the automobile, that much of this was lost. Some might point to the american habit of so strongly valuing the new (cf. electricity, plumbing, etc.), while others might talk about our devaluing of the collectivist, thus valuing individual transportation. Still another point of consideration is the ugly side of capitalism, when private industry and infrustructure can sometimes poorly interact. Recent examples include Enron and the California power disaster, historically one can look to rail companies and their self destructive rail non-maintenance habits.
In any event, public transit thrived despite our lack of physical density for a good 60 years, and then died. Perhaps the point could be made that it could no longer successfully compete against private transit in our relatively non-dense environment, but even the bostonwash DC corridor has very poor transit now as compared to history and yet remains rather dense.
The problem is a good deal more complex than you suggest.
-josh
The BART system was designed and intended as a driverless system. This turned out to be a bit of an overconfidence issue since the automatic systems had several kinks, the most significant of which being the train-near sensors.
The basic problem was that BART trains were designed so as to be able to detect the presence of another train relatively near ahead on the tracks. I'm not sure what the method used was, whether it was designed to simply detect objects (radar or something similar) or whether trains produced signals that the other trains picked up. Certainly detecting large objects seems insufficient for trains designed to travel at large speeds which must also operate inside tunnels etc. In any event, during hot weather outside, the sensors would have false-positive problems, detecting trains that did not exist, and would refuse to continue. To limp past this problem, drivers were necessary to take over the role of choosing when it was no longer safe to advance. By default the trains still operated autonomously in most other ways.
Casual observation indicates a number of issues with the trains are apparently mildly driver-operated. Trains which are less than full length seem to have their stop position adjusted by the 'driver' (sometimes very ineptly). The 'driver' sometimes adjusts stop times, which is quite useful for rush hour or event-related crowds, although I sometimes wish it was pre-set so people would board more efficiently. Also it seems the 'driver' has some possibility to affect train speed, as there have definitely been cases where a change of driver just north of Union City resulted in a much changed rate of progress for the duration of the trip, although I suspect this input is optional, and infrequently used.
Certainly the BART train console is relatively elaborate, but after the manner of a point-of-sale terminal, with several print-insert buttons and no visible analog inputs of any sort. When I have watched bart train 'drivers', I have certainly seen entire station-to-station journeys made with no input at all.
-josh
Monorail beamway has a significantly smaller footprint and blocks less sky than traditional elevated two-rail guideway. See pages 14/15 and 38/39 of this PDF for some pictures. Sorry, a quick google search did not return any web pages with pics.
If you compare it with at-grade two-rail, then the advantage is that an elevated monorail has no road crossings. Of course, this is true of any elevated transit system.
Note that the small beam makes monorail evacuations more difficult than elevated light-rail evacuation. For light rail, people can just walk to one end of the train and step out onto the guideway. The Las Vegas monorail system installed emergency walkways between the beams. Riders step out of the side train doors onto the walkway. Disney World does not have emergency walkways and evacuates to the roof of the train. You then walk across the top of the train to one end and shimmy down the windscreen to the beam, and then walk the beam. (The beam is 26 or 28 inches wide). No WDW monorail has ever been evacuated, although there was a train fire years ago in an old Mark IV train.
" don't thing so. Europe is 3,837,000 Sq. Miles and the US is 3,537,438 Sq. Miles."
That statement is misleading as it includes part of Russia.
The European Union, for example, is about 1/3 the size of the continental US, and it has about 150 million more people (1.5 times as many).
That's approximately 4.5 times more people per square-km as the US.
Go to Wyoming some time and tell me that a nationwide mass-transit system is feasable. It's not.
That said, we could do much better. Amtrak is a disaster, and we need more "short-haul" solutions. I can take the bus from my city (Fort Collins, ~100km north of Denver) to Denver, but there is no rail. There should be.
Now, the truth is that it's simply more convenient to drive. Everyone goes ~130kph on the Interstate, and there is rarely any traffic north of Denver, so it only takes about 45 minutes to get to Denver. Compare that to a rail service which would have to be much faster to even compete (to compensate for the time spent getting to the station).