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Hardly Anyone Wants to Ride the Las Vegas Monorail (vice.com)
Motherboard describes riding the Las Vegas monorail in 2008. "I was literally the only person on a train built to carry 222 people," arguing that "the tale of the Las Vegas monorail is an allegory for almost every other monorail that exists on this planet." An anonymous reader quotes their new report:
Las Vegas has struggled to deliver on its monorail promise since the 3.9-mile track opened in 2004. The track runs parallel to the Strip -- behind all the massive, block-wide hotels. When the project was first proposed, promoters hoped to bring upwards of 20 million riders a year. In 2016, just 4.9 million monorail rides were taken. For reference, nearly 43 million people visited Las Vegas last year, according to the city's visitor bureau, and the city has a population of about 632,000.
In 2010, the not-for-profit company in charge, named Las Vegas Monorail, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after failing to repay $650 million in construction loans. (It exited bankruptcy proceedings two years later.) But in true Las Vegas style, instead of taking the loss and heading home with its tail tucked between its legs, the company is doubling down. Now it's anticipating spending an additional $100 million in private financing to extend the monorail from the MGM Grand to Mandalay Bay -- a distance of less than a mile by foot. The company also asked the county to give it $4.5 million of public funds a year for 30 years to support the extension.
A Las Vegas newspaper got a succinct appraisal of the extended monorail's prospects from the director of USC's Transportation Engineering program: "I'm glad it's not my money." Next year ticket sales are expected to bring in just $21.4 million -- "the lowest amount since 2014" -- with the Monorail Co. blaming "additional competition" from Uber and Lyft.
But Motherboard argues that it's not just a Las Vegas problem. "In most cities where monorails exist, most people can't figure out what they're good for. In Mumbai, India, a three-year-old monorail does just 17,000 daily rides -- significantly short of the 125,000 to 300,000 passengers per day planners and backers anticipated."
In 2010, the not-for-profit company in charge, named Las Vegas Monorail, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after failing to repay $650 million in construction loans. (It exited bankruptcy proceedings two years later.) But in true Las Vegas style, instead of taking the loss and heading home with its tail tucked between its legs, the company is doubling down. Now it's anticipating spending an additional $100 million in private financing to extend the monorail from the MGM Grand to Mandalay Bay -- a distance of less than a mile by foot. The company also asked the county to give it $4.5 million of public funds a year for 30 years to support the extension.
A Las Vegas newspaper got a succinct appraisal of the extended monorail's prospects from the director of USC's Transportation Engineering program: "I'm glad it's not my money." Next year ticket sales are expected to bring in just $21.4 million -- "the lowest amount since 2014" -- with the Monorail Co. blaming "additional competition" from Uber and Lyft.
But Motherboard argues that it's not just a Las Vegas problem. "In most cities where monorails exist, most people can't figure out what they're good for. In Mumbai, India, a three-year-old monorail does just 17,000 daily rides -- significantly short of the 125,000 to 300,000 passengers per day planners and backers anticipated."
You have to actually make a monorail do something for which there is no alternative transportation. The Vancouver Skytrain is actually the most efficient way to get across the city, so they get 117.4 million passengers in 2010 and 137.4 million in 2016.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
When I was in Vegas it was almost always further to walk to and from the monorail than it was to just walk down the strip to where you wanted to go. It needed to be build on the strip, not behind the resorts.
They destroyed the utility of this monorail by designing it so that many of the stations are at the BACK of the hotels. This forces people to take extremely long walks through the casinos to get to and from the station.
The transportation services that people actually use are accessed from the hotel lobby.
Make stupid station choices, get stupidly low ridership.
https://slashdot.org/~fluffernutter observed:
You have to actually make a monorail do something for which there is no alternative transportation. The Vancouver Skytrain is actually the most efficient way to get across the city, so they get 117.4 million passengers in 2010 and 137.4 million in 2016.
We lived in Vegas when the monorail was built. There was, as you might imagine, a lot of coverage of the proposal, the construction of the track, and the grand opening of the line.
Of course, the coverage by the major dailies and the local media was mostly of the cheerleading kind. The alternative weeklies did a better job, but it didn't keep the deal with the Clark County supervisors from being made mostly behind closed doors. (The Strip, proper, lies entirely outside the City of Las Vegas, so the Vegas city planning commission, city council, and mayor had no seat at the table.)
What it boiled down to was that a private, non-profit (!) corporation formed by the casinos where the train actually has stations floated the bond for design and construction, with the voters on the hook to repay it - a typical Vegas klind of backscratching deal. If you didn't kick in, you didn't get to take advantage of the monorail traffic. Of course, since it was the big casinos financing it, one of the conditions they imposed was that it run behind them, so that patrons would have to walk through the gaming floor of each stop on their way to and from the train.
McCarren International Airport management took one look at the proposal and said, "No, thanks.". (It would have required McCarren to donate, get permits for, and clear the land across which the track would run, and build a terminal station, too - all at no expense to the hotel-casino operators who would gain the only real benefit from it. I thought McCarren's decision showed surprising common sense, under the circumstances.)
So that's why it doesn't run to the airport - or to the actual Strip - or stop at more than a handful of big casino properties. And, likewise, that's why it's an abysmal failure.
Vegas, baby ...
Check out my novel.
I've lived hear nearly 30 yards, and the monorail was a stupid idea from the start.
The *only* way it would have or ever will make sense is if it went to the airport. The taxi companies have raised a ruckus whenever that has been suggested.
The stupid thing goes to the convention center and half a dozen participating hotels; it is nothing more than an attempt to lockin conventioneers to that set of hotels. Any expansion will just be more of the same.
Now, if you built something that went to the airport, the length of the strip, and downtown, it would be useful. But that's just not in the cards.
AFAIK, the only thing its ever done right is to escrow demolition funds when it was first built.
And now similar geniuses want to build a high speed train from Vegas to . . . Victorville. OK, other dumb ends have been proposed, but anything other than San Diego, LA, or *maybe* someplace in Orange county is back to just plain dumb. LA or San Diego without stops could actually make sense, as a 200mph run would take less time than dealing with two airports. But drive 100 miles to Victorville to catch a train to vegas??? Or take a train from vegas and, what, walk to LA
hawk
YVR (which I've been on as well) is a really great monorail because it connects two places tons of travelers will be going to or from - cruiser terminal, and airport.
Well, technically speaking, SkyTrain isn't a monorail. Both systems (Canada Line and Expo/Millenium Lines) operate on standard-gauge rails. The only really comparable thing is that they're both (mostly) elevated/grade separated systems.
The big issue with actual monorails, such as the one in Vegas, is that you can't switch tracks easily, can't have Ys, and all the other things that you can do with reasonably standard rail technology. Even if they wanted to expand the Vegas monorail, it's an incredibly inflexible system. Skytrain, on the other hand, if they have an issue at a given station, they can short run the trains at the stations on either side and run a bus bridge or similar.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Shared transit benefits society in hundreds of ways..but if you prefer to sit in a Taxi stuck in rush hour traffic, be my guest.
That is absolutely true. Transit systems are amazing when they provide efficient means to get lots of people from their origin to their destination.
The problem with this monorail (and far too many public systems as well) is that it does not get people from their origin to their destination. The system does connect with one well-populated endpoint (in this case the downtown casinos on the Las Vegas Strip) but does not connect them to other useful locations. There are many good systems that connect popular destinations, usually a combination of city centers, a major airport, multiple major residential areas, and often some lesser destinations like executive/private airports, smaller civic centers and community centers, shopping venues, and other places people want to go.
I've been in cities where the mass transit connects things well. New York does the connectivity part very well, assuming you can stand the smell of the system. San Francisco's BART is hit-or-miss, either you get a great employer with shuttles to a station or offices near a station on one end plus happen to live relatively close to a station, or the system is near-worthless except to reduce traffic. Salt Lake City does it surprisingly well, mostly because the 2 million people live between a strip of mountains and lakes about 5 miles wide and 100 miles long, with long-distance rail systems running the entire length and short-distance rail systems running in the middle 40 miles, all fully integrated with a bus system. Others in the topic have already mentioned Austin's system, which runs from downtown up to a university, and then meanders through a single residential area with very few stops; it completely avoids the airports, the major shopping districts, and has virtually no stops in residential areas and also has no spurs or coordinated buses in residential areas, so it gets very little use.
All mass transit systems have difficulty with the 'last mile problem' in residential areas, but for good transit systems that is the only difficult issue to overcome.
The Las Vegas monorail is NOT one of those systems. It fails in the first step of actually connecting both the origin and the destination. The cities that connect people with the places they want to go generate massive ridership numbers.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
MOST major airports have GREAT public transit.
Trust me, I fly a lot.
Maybe you speak about the US?
But my last US destination was Dallas. DART took me from my downtown hotel to DFW in no time. Cost me $5.