June 20, 2004 in Travel

Las Vegas monorail nearly on track

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Associated Press photo

The Las Vegas Monorail passes over Flamingo Road near the Las Vegas Boulevard strip. The monorail was supposed to be shuttling tourists by now between some of the Strip’s biggest hotel-casinos and the Convention Center. Instead, empty cars are being tested while administrators say postponements have been for routine safety testing.
(Full-size photo)

Las Vegas visitors can see and hear a gleaming monorail gliding overhead, plying its four-mile route between the MGM Grand and the Sahara near the Strip. They just can’t ride it. It’s still undergoing tests more than four months after it was scheduled to begin service.

Like so many transit schemes in this city of illusions, the Las Vegas Monorail remains tantalizingly out of reach.

“There are so many announcements and so many plans,” said Deke Castleman, who has covered Las Vegas for 15 years and is senior editor of the company that publishes the Las Vegas Advisor newsletter. “It runs together like glue.”

There are plans to extend the monorail — designed to whisk fun-seekers from one end of the Strip to the other in 14 minutes — to downtown and McCarran International Airport, to revive Amtrak rail service between Las Vegas and Los Angeles and to build a high-speed train system between Las Vegas and Anaheim, Calif. So far, the Strip monorail looks like the only one worth betting on.

Why can’t Sin City get on track?

One reason is the hodgepodge of private and public entities that oversees transit projects for this growth-mad metropolis. Resort-casinos, impatient with government bureaucracy, have installed mini-trams linking a handful of Strip sites. Nevada’s Clark County has erected several pedestrian bridges at corners; three new ones near the Venetian are planned for next June. Two public agencies are responsible for the monorail and its planned extensions.

“We are confident the (monorail) system will be able to open this summer,” said Todd Walker, spokesman for Transit Systems Management, which administers contracts for the nonprofit Las Vegas Monorail Co. But because the trains are being tested, he said he couldn’t predict a date.

Walker said earlier problems had been solved: A drive shaft fell off a train in early January (“an isolated incident,” he said), and there were software glitches in the automated, driverless system.

Meanwhile, the system’s two contractors are paying $85,000 a day in “liquidated damages” — more than $7 million for the $650-million project by late May — to compensate for fare revenue lost to delays. The system was supposed to open Jan. 20.

One-way fares will be $3, compared with $2 for city buses that serve the Strip; existing pedestrian bridges and trams are free. The new monorail runs behind the Strip, not on it, so you’ll need to do some walking. But unlike the casinos’ trams, it will link competing properties, Walker said, and include a convention center stop.

The U.S. Department of Transportation last month gave the Regional Transportation Commission the go-ahead to begin final design work on a 2.3-mile, $453-million extension of the monorail from the Sahara north to Fremont Street downtown. But the transportation commission faces a tight deadline. The federal agency wants to see how the Strip monorail runs before releasing $160 million in funds for the next phase.

At best, construction on that phase won’t begin until next year, with a 2008 opening date. Later phases would take the monorail to McCarran International Airport.

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