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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."
I visited Vegas a couple of years ago, and the monorail was expensive, well hidden, and didn't go anywhere useful.
I don't think any of the potential passengers are likely anti-mono-rail, they just want to be taken somewhere useful for a reasonable price. They don't want to walk a block out of their way (and then a block back) to pay a ton of money, to take a trip that would have been faster to walk anyway.
This is a common problem with the "build it and they will come" mentality. Sometimes you have to build it somewhere people want to be...
If there's no alternative transportation, then it's a monopoly and probably doesn't deserve its success.
To actually be successful, the monorail has to do something better than the alternative modes of transportation. Given Vancouver's terrible streets (no left turn lanes! Anyone wanting to turn left simply stops in the "fast" lane and waits until there's a break in opposing traffic, meanwhile blocking all traffic behind them), its monorail is one of the best ways to travel around many parts of the city.
If there's no alternative transportation, then it's a monopoly and probably doesn't deserve its success.
Try again. Mass transit works just fine. The london underground has no monopoly, since there are trains, and roads with both private cars and buses.
Except the roads aren't an alternative not because the underground has a monopoly but because it has vastly greater capacity than the roads.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The problem with the monorail is that it was designed as spectacle, not as transit, yet even as spectacle it fails because it's so out of the way that most people never even stumble across it, and if you do take it, all you see are the backs of hotels. It's even priced as spectacle. $2.75 gets you anywhere in New York City via the subway and bus, but it costs $5 to take the monorail just to go 4 miles along the backs of casinos in Las Vegas.
The monorail should have been built in the middle of the Strip. The Strip is a dystopian nightmare highway bifurcating one of the most walked streets in the United States. It's so dangerous that in many places there aren't even any at-grade pedestrian crossings; you have to go up stairs/escalators set back from the strip, go across a bridge, and then back down, often being forced to detour through one or two casinos in the process. It's the ultimate triumph of automobiles over people for no goddamn reason at all.
The mass transit should have been run right down the middle of the Strip. Instead it was forced to the margins where it remains unused, when it was really the car traffic that should have been forced to the margins. Las Vegas should do a NYC-style "Summer Streets" a few times per year and entirely close down the Strip to car traffic for half a day and let pedestrians use it as they'd like, like Mardi Gras. Then people would realize what they've been missing.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Exactly, the original project was between a select group of casinos. It wasn't about moving people around efficiently, It was about moving people from one group of casinos to ones owned by the same people, bypassing the rest. It was about making money for some casinos, not about moving people around.
What you are saying about monorail is untrue and is one of the most common misconceptions about the technology. Years ago I saw a video of a track switch operating on the Tokyo Haneda Line. I can't find it now, unfortunately. Monorail track is incredibly simple - either a single iron rail or else in the case of, say, Disneyland, just an extruded block of concrete. Still, you can make movable blocks of concrete, with curved cuts in them to make a smooth switch surface.