Las Vegas Monorail woes continue

[marmar]

from the Las Vegas Review-Journal:



Jan. 24, 2008
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Monorail woes continue

How bad are the prospects for the Las Vegas Monorail? Ridership increased by 13 percent last year, yet the Strip tram is still nowhere close to covering operational costs.

In fact, the monorail missed a scheduled bond payment earlier this month and had to tap reserves for more than $2 million to cover the debt.

A little more than 21,000 passengers ride the monorail each day, paying an average fare of $3.57 apiece. But to balance the books, the monorail needs to increase traffic by more than 60 percent, to about 34,500 daily riders.

Businesses that need to increase sales by 60 percent just to break even don't stay in business very long. If the privately financed, $650 million line were an animal, a compassionate veterinarian would have no choice but to put this poor, sick creature down.

Undeterred, officials with the Las Vegas Monorail Co. are hunting for financing to build track that connects the four-mile route to McCarran International Airport. With global markets in turmoil and financial institutions clamping down on credit deemed to have even the slightest risk of default, the chances of getting the half-billion dollar extension built hinge on the existing line making a miraculous turnaround.

Taxpayers were assured that they'd never be on the hook for the bonds issued in 2000 to build the monorail, even though the Nevada Department of Business and Industry served as a channel for the bond sale and received notice that the company had missed its bond payment. A contingency fund is supposed to exist to cover demolition costs if the line goes bankrupt and has to shut down.

But the fawning by progressives and mass-transit groupies that greeted the monorail's 2004 launch -- and the inflated ridership estimates that ensured its creation -- foreshadow likely political opposition to any effort to dismantle the project. The monorail "will become increasingly critical to mobility in our busy resort corridor," company spokeswoman Ingrid Reisman assures us.

Someone is going to propose a public bailout of the monorail, rest assured. The only question is when.

http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/14177622.html

[nxylas]

1. We need Leonard Nimoy

He'll save the monorail. Him and Batman.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. So they take a form of transit that has never been built beyond short,

single lines in any city, and then they superimpose it on a very automobile-oriented commercial district, expecting it to make a profit.

Yup, recipe for success. :sarcasm:

[Vogon_Glory]

3. Haven't Been A Monorail Fan For Decades

I haven't been a monorail fan for decades. Despite the hoopla, unlike two-rail light rail and subway construction, the roll call for monorail projects have been littered with duds and failures. (Anyone else remember the dud monorail system at the Texas State Fair? I do!) Unlike light rail, monorail is notoriously unadaptable and can't go much faster that thirty miles an hour without a lot of swaying and vibration. But that has never stopped the wanna-be futurists visionaries who, quick to dismiss reliable, repeatedly-proven light rail technology as "too old fashioned" continue to beat the drums for something that only worked on Saturday morning cartoon shows and on Disney properties.

And if anyone has ever ridden a Disney monorail, they've also noticed that monorails don't run faster than 30mph in Mickey's kingdom.

The only long-lasting monorail is Germany's Wuppertahl system which looks (and sounds like) the old Chicago elevated.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Tokyo has a monorail that runs to its older airport (Haneda), but

it was built in 1964 for the Olympics. Since then, the only working monorails in Japan have been strictly local short-range projects. Significantly, when it came time to build a route to the newer airport (Narita, 40 miles northeast of the city) they chose to use surface express trains. You can choose either the JR train to Tokyo (central) Station, or the privately owned Keisei Skyliner, which is cheaper and runs to a different part of town (the one where most of the budget hotels are located).

When they built the Kansai International Airport in the 1990s, they once again chose surface trains for transportation to Osaka and Kyoto: a JR line to Kyoto that passes through the outskirts of Osaka, and a direct train to Osaka that is run by a privately owned regional commuter railroad.

I've ridden the Tokyo monorail a couple of times, but not very often, because I no longer have any reason to go to the old airport. It has no advantages over a surface train, and the elevated infrastructure requires more maintenance.

I think the appeal of monorails, to the extent that they have appeal, is that they resemble the 1960s vision of what the future would look like.