The monorail dream: It's better left in Vegas
Mossback on the road: The Las Vegas Strip line once inspired boosters of the Seattle Monorail Project, but the Vegas system looks like it's crashing, too. Can showgirls save the day?
Those who followed the rise and fall of the Seattle Monorail Project will remember a key moment: City Council member Peter Steinbrueck's desert conversion. Steinbrueck in 2004 visited Las Vegas with the monorail project's executive director, Joel Horn. Like a 5th century pilgrim calling upon a pillar-sitting stylite monk in the Syrian wastes, Steinbrueck left a skeptic but returned a convert after seeing the marvel of his elevated St. Simeon: the Las Vegas monorail.
Despite Steinbrueck's born-again boosterism, the Green Line in Seattle mercifully collapsed the next year under the weight of its untenable financial model. Nevertheless, as I predicted when voters finally put the Green Line out of its misery, monorail boosters and opponents would find future opportunities to say, "I told you so."
Seattle's transportation woes, especially the Alaskan Way Viaduct debate, have seen some onetime Green Line boosters remind anyone who will listen that everything is worse because the monorail isn't there to help move people through the north-south waterfront/downtown corridor, especially would-be Green Line beneficiaries in West Seattle. If only we'd built the Green Line, goes the lament. We'd be 20 years ahead of solving this traffic mess.
In the meantime, Steinbrueck has undergone another conversion. This time he's decided against running for a sure-win re-election to devote himself to not an elevated solution but the opposite: a surface replacement for the earthquake-vulnerable Viaduct that would almost eliminate "elevated" transport from the city (an exception being the barely chugging 1962 Alweg monorail, itself nearly dead from intentional neglect during the city's Green Line dithering).
But now, the other side of the "I told you so." Peter, have you been to Vegas lately? Your much-admired Las Vegas monorail is in serious jeopardy. According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, ridership is way below projections and, worse, is declining year over year.
March 2007 ridership is down about 3 percent from March 2006, and a whopping 36 percent from 2005. Revenues are falling short of expenses and the line is being kept afloat by a dwindling reserve to cover losses. The good news for Vegas is that their $650 million non-profit monorail project is not publicly financed. The bad news: a credit rating firm has given them junk-bond status and predicts the monorail could be in default as soon as 2008. Last year's losses are estimated to be about $20 million.
Vegas monorail boosters at one time predicted as many as 50,000 riders per day. The monorail hasn't been able to average even half that. They need about 27,000 daily riders to cover costs.
In short, the Las Vegas monorail is in serious trouble. What to do?
There's one answer: hire showgirls.
In an effort to promote the Vegas monorail, the line's promoters have hired leggy, mini-skirted "ambassadors" in sexy stewardess outfits to work the Las Vegas Strip, passing out discount coupons to boost ridership. It might work, I suppose. The Strip is where you'll see lots of "Girl's Gone Wild Film Crew" t-shirts.
I didn't see any of these high-level diplomatic dignitaries on a recent whirlwind visit to Vegas, but I did have a chance to ride the monorail and gain some man-on-the-Strip insights into its problems.
First, on the plus side, the stations are good looking and the ride is fine, though it seems less like transit than a kind of shuttle ride you'd take at the airport between gates. The cars are small, have few seats, although with the ridership, that's not really a problem.
On the downside, it's expensive. A single ride is $5; two rides is $9; an unlimited day pass is $15 – more than a lobster dinner at Vegas prices.
Another problem is location. The monorail couldn't run down The Strip because it would have blocked the views of all the fantasy architecture, neon, and jumbo-trons touting entertainment has-beens. (Did you know that Carrot Top is not only alive but playing the Luxor?) Why walk The Strip if you can't see that stuff?
Also, being elevated, a monorail is a street-life killer. One of the main attractions of the boulevard is people-watching – street life achieved not by urban density so much as urban perversity, Disneyland style. Who wants to watch from the air?
So the monorail runs along the backside of The Strip stopping at stations connected to major hotels and gambling joints, from stations at the Sahara to the Flamingo/Caesar's Palace to the MGM Grand and points between. But the problem here is that in getting the monorail off The Strip, it is now hidden backstage. It doesn't have the visual landmark presence like Seattle's Alweg (thanks to its iconic connection to the Space Needle and Elvis) to make it part of the cityscape. And it's invisible to most tourists.
Worse, feeding passengers into the hotel complexes puts visitors into carefully crafted mazes that make it difficult for you ever to find the street again. You wander an obstacle course of shops, restaurants, casinos, bars, and other attractions. As a result, hopping up and down The Strip by monorail is untenable, though it is a convenient way to get from one end to the other quickly (in about 15 minutes).
I was surprised when I asked about the monorail at a state tourism office. They seemed unenthusiastic about it. They handed me fare and route information, but then encouraged me to take a wheeled "trolley" or one of the double-decker shuttle busses that runs up and down the Strip at grade. They're easier to hop on and off and you can see the action at ground level. If you're stuck in traffic, no problem. Part of cruising The Strip is being entertained while stuck in gridlock.
In short, it seems to me that the Vegas monorail is ill-conceived.
Which is not deterring monorail boosters, gamblers who are eager to double down. They are proposing to build a $500 million, four-mile extension of the monorail to get it to the airport. Why is it that cities like Seattle and Vegas have so much trouble getting rail to airports in the first place? That seems like it would probably be useful – at least the thing would have some distinctly useful purpose. And according to the May 18 USA Today, tourism and airport traffic in Vegas are booming. But how is a nearly bankrupt, junk-bond-rated entity going to build more monorail?
I didn't find that answer in the desert. Maybe if Peter and Joel flew down there for another weekend they could figure something out.
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Comments:
Posted Tue, May 22, 7:19 a.m. inappropriate
Is my trip to Vegas deductible NOW?: Seattle's neighborhoods died with the monorail. You can stop dancing now, Mr. Berger.
Posted Tue, May 22, 8:53 a.m. inappropriate
You are not asking the key question: Would any fixed mode (e.g. underground light-rail) succeed in the Las Vegas alignment you describe? And at the rates of $5/ride?
If not, then the fact that it was a monorail which is failing is irrelevant.
Posted Tue, May 22, 9:24 a.m. inappropriate
I hate to say "I told you so", but...: Ok, Knute, we get it - thanks to your tremendous foresight and common sense, you could easily see the flaws in the monorail plan that the big idea people and their fancy educations could not. We are all quite impressed.
Now that we've given credit where credit is due, perhaps you could reveal to us the inexpensive solution for fixing our failing transportation system.
I know you aren't so naive as to support throwing away billions of dollars into more and bigger roads - hundreds of cities have tried that, and it just makes things worse. From what I can extrapolate, it seems your solution is to build a time machine that will transport the city back to the good old days when Seattle was a "little guy's" town that didn't have such complicated issues. That sounds promising - care to fill us in on the details?
Posted Tue, May 22, 10:24 a.m. inappropriate
Get over it!: Jesus, Skip, your side won already!
Posted Tue, May 22, 10:33 a.m. inappropriate
Vegas Monorail should go to McCarran Airport.: The Vegas Monorail acts as a people mover during heavily attended conventions and as a shuttle for hotel/casino/restaurant/bar employees. Paramedics and fire department vehicles many times have to avoid the Strip and use all the back alleys and entrances. The airport connection probably is opposed by the taxi cabs and the shuttle bus folks. Put slots on the Monorail cars; allow beverages and lap dances in transit; all will be fine.
Posted Tue, May 22, 11:51 a.m. inappropriate
No vision: Knute has no vision. Yes, the monorail cost was a serious problem, and yes, it would have cost us a lot more. But I for one would be willing to pay even $10 a day to use it. And I'm not rich. It would have been worth it. I think most people feel as I do. The powers that be killed this project because the paving industry told them to. It's so obvious.
Posted Tue, May 22, 12:41 p.m. inappropriate
RE: No vision: That's really funny. The paving industry.
Posted Tue, May 22, 3:42 p.m. inappropriate
RE: No vision: I blame the Masons.
Posted Tue, May 22, 6:17 p.m. inappropriate
The Piper
Posted Wed, May 23, 7:28 a.m. inappropriate
Just a side note... The current monorail is far from limping...: but still underutilized. Now that it can only carry 200 passengers maximum rather than the 450 some it was rated for, it is now half as efficient on those premium festival and concert days. In it's 44 plus years of operation on less than 2 miles, it has carried more passengers than Amtrak does each year, and even more passengers than our state ferry system does each year. (Average of 2 million plus passengers a year since 1962, vs. Amtrack at 25-26 million last year, and WSF at 27-28 million a year)
That is hardly limping along. At least play fair with your descriptions...
Posted Wed, May 23, 11:23 a.m. inappropriate
The Take Away: Naysayers to Knute seem to resent the fact that the failing Vegas Elevated Choo Choo is failing and Knute has reminded them of that failure. They seem to think it's really a success BECAUSE:
- Knute apprently went to Vegas and was able to expense it
- Knute is committing the sin of gloating, should stop "dancing now," "Get over it!" because "Your side won already!"
- Knute didn't offer an alternative solution to the people of Las Vegas (hindsight is always 20/20 so let's not apply the lesson of the Vegas Monorail to Sound Transit, er, I mean the defunct Monorail project.)
- Knute is living in the uncongested past, and that is bad, because in the future we'll always have congestion, and, for a small subset of trips, some sort of 19th century transportation technology is the right answer regardless of cost and regardless of how much money is diverted away from maintaining our road system.
Monorails, light rail and roads all have costs and benefits, so ultimately ANY infrastructure investments can be very poor investments either if the price is too high or the benefit is too low. After filtering out the ad hominem attacks, the Vegas monorail's declining ridership and failure to meet projections really screams out (i.e., the declining benefit), as does the doubling down of infrastructure investment, and thus the increasing cost.
I'm personally a fan of monorails and wish they'd built the Gree Line. But this is public infrastructure and has large public cost, so shouldn't be justified by a collection of anecdotal preferences such as mine. In my book all infrastructure should pay for itself. Certainly this doesn't happen with roads, so they appear free to drivers, thus they get over-used and we end up huge congestion and with our current transportation funding crisis. The fact that roads are perversely free, doesn't mean that other transportation infrastructure projects shouldn't pay their own way and that ridership revenue shouldn't pay those costs. The idea that transportation infrastructure projects such as Sound Transit don't really have to financially justify their existence is a form of faith-based public spending that belongs right up there with soviet style central planning (not that there was anything wrong with communism...)
Posted Wed, May 23, 11:49 a.m. inappropriate
RE: No vision: Yeah, it must have been the Elks! They're big in the Vegas mob-connected paving industry. They're the one's that put severed Elk heads in the rental cars of out-of-town mass transit lobbyists...
Posted Wed, May 23, 1:43 p.m. inappropriate
RE: The Take Away: What gets me about transportation debates in this town is that everyone has to "pick sides" and then argue from that viewpoint starting with their vision of transportation while working towards "solutions". This is a strangely Bushian phenomenon that I initially found surprising until you break it down to its core: fundamental "true believers" argue ideology not facts. "Facts" may be used to support a conclusion that has already been made, but for the most part nobody has been debating solutions for transportation, but rather "solutions for transportation" have been proxy wars over ideology. In order to participate in this debate, one must either directly or indirectly take a "side" and all discourse gets funneled through that "side's" lens.
I voted for the monorail. Twice. And once it manifested itself as a horribly planned and executed project, I was happy to see it go. I voted for the rebuild of the viaduct because I see the surface/transit option as ill-conceived and poorly thought out as the monorail. Good Idea (tm) does not automagically mean successful implementation. "Faith-based public spending" is a good way of putting it.
So good for Knute for going to look at the Vegas monorail, because maybe, just maybe, even if we HAD built the monorail it wouldn't have worked out. Maybe it would have. It is something to think about, which is all this piece seemed to be doing from my perspective.
What I've taken away from this whole monorail/viaduct debacle is that we need to start having reality-based discussions about solutions to what amounts to a technical problem: moving people and goods efficiently from A to B.
We need to define goals and objectives that we can use to judge solutions with real numbers. A goal/objective could be to demonstrably reduce single-occupancy trips within areas of the city, but we should approach that objective as a technical requirement of a sound plan not as an end in itself.
The lack of a coherent regional transportation strategic plan (is there one?) is indicative of a failure of leadership, but the pundits and self-anointed transportation experts in this town haven't delivered either. Where are the civil engineers and urban planners? Can we import someone from Chicago or NY to put this together?
Or better yet, why doesn't Crosscut do a multi-story special report that talks about what a regional transportation plan really is and how other cities do it?
I'd like to see more objective exploration of options and less tit-for-tat bellyaching. There is a frustrating lack of facts that leaves little else but ideologically inspired "notions" that has little public value.
Posted Wed, May 23, 2:27 p.m. inappropriate
RE: The Take Away: I don't care about Las Vegas' monorail. It is as relevant to our traffic problems as otter slides in Minnesota. What I do care about is that Seattle's traffic problems go on without solution, and I think that's the idea: Lessor Seattle by monkey wrenching Seattle.
Posted Wed, May 23, 6:37 p.m. inappropriate
BTW...am I the only one who thinks Mossback took a vacay in the American Southwest ony to write the whole thing off because of a couple articles he wrote? He's more clever than I thought!
The Piper
Posted Wed, May 23, 6:40 p.m. inappropriate
Here's an idea: Send a telegram to the Seattle City Council, Mayor Nickels, Ron Sims, and all the other talking heads in town that says, "All is discovered...Flee at once!" Then go down to the bus depot and see who gets on (courtesy Mark Twain).
The Piper
Posted Thu, May 24, 10:25 a.m. inappropriate
RE: The Take Away: Dye the hair, get a perm, grow a beard, put on a few ... Emmett, is that you under all that moss?
Posted Thu, May 24, 2:36 p.m. inappropriate
Ramtha Channeling Emmet Watson: You're on to me. From my grave I have two forms of communication with the world. The first is a Comcast cable internet connection that lets me keep up my MySpace and FaceBook accounts and also lets me use Skype to do a little reporting on the side. The pay isn't great, but at least they don't take out FICA.
My more important medium of communication is Ramtha who regularly channels me for the benefit of various environmental groups and government prognosticators (Sound Transit gets their ridership projections from me, then they multiply by 50 and that's what they publish). Ramtha's insights are particularly relevant to Lesser Seattle because my goal and hers are similar. Hers is
"Enlightment within 4 days or your money back."
Mine is "Give me the money and I'll give you Lesser Seattle enlightenment."
Back in the good old mossy days, my goal was to keep Boeing from expanding like a weed and to stop the influx of Californians from Californicating Washington. That's what used to go for humor back then. You had to have been there. Now being dead, has its pluses. The old bodily ailments don't seem to matter as much (though they're much worse), and mainly what I care about is my Lesser Seattle legacy. Remember the Schumacher book "Small is Beautiful"? Well, it is. Look at the computer and the cell phone and the Prius and low-flow toilets and microlending and the human genome project and a billion transistors on a chip instead of in one giant heap in the backyard. Small is better in Seattle too. That's why we should have more affordable homes and fewer BIG BUILDINGS and LESS CONCRETE and FEWER PEOPLE. That saves the environment where all the little critters live. I look over at the EASTSIDE and all I see is BIG $135M mansions on the water. Who wants to live in a mansion? I've got plenty of elbow room and I'm dead! And don't get me going on zero-lot-line development, which means homes with no backyard. Most people I know (or knew) want to live in homes with backyards. But now outside is out and inside is in. The large indoor mausoleum replaces the modest home with a backyard. On the Eastside they want to build really big Mausoleums (with a capital M). Don't let that disease spread to Seattle! Make sure the neighborhoods stay neighborhoods and homes stay homes. Make sure you don't become Manhattan. Make sure you don't succumb to the great Pig Goddess Greed, which is what can happen with pork barrel politics, mega-infrastructure boondoggles, and people too rich or not quite rich enough to care about anything other than being rich.
By the way, the reason there's chaos at the transportation leadership and governance top is that chao provides great cover for the people stuffing the money in their shirts while they do their do-nothing jobs. Oops! Gotta go. Ramtha has a KC bureaucracy contingent out here on the ranch and needs the bandwidth...
- Emmett
Posted Thu, May 24, 2:50 p.m. inappropriate
The Piper
Posted Thu, May 24, 11:37 p.m. inappropriate
The poor location of the Vegas Monorail is the big problem: I made a point to check out the monorail on a recent visit to Vegas, and I think the biggest downfall is the location that does not serve the general public or connect to the rest of the Clark County transit system. It was a major challenge to find the monorail stations through the maze of the different casino's. As Knute points out the logical place for mass transit is on Las Vegas Blvd, and while the shuttle bus runs often, it is slow and gets frequently stuck in traffic.
The whole concept of privately financed mass transit simply does not work. You can't build a system for the public with private funds and expect it to serve the public. Mass transit will work in Las Vegas when public funds are used to connect popular tourist areas like the strip and downtown with the airport and transit facilities that serve the rest of the city.
Las Vegas could start with a BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) system on the strip. As a rapid system BRT travels in its own lane with traffic signal priority. Eventually this system could be upgraded to a light rail line.
The important lesson here for Seattle is to think about how we are building our transportation for the future. Are we creating mass transit that connects neighborhoods, job centers and tourist attractions? Are we planning for new growth in a transit oriented way? Or, are we piling lanes unto freeways and allowing growth to continue to spiral out of control?
I advocate for transit and smart growth at The Urban Environmentalist
Posted Fri, May 25, 4:22 p.m. inappropriate
This is why we left Seattle last year: So the only way to pay for the Seattle Monorail was by rent-a-center financing? You sure about that?
We get for vote for it 4 out of 5 times and then not build it?
No second chance vote on the boondoggle light rail plan that duplicates existing service, takes up space on some surface streets, and goes nowhere slow?
And the Vegas Monorail that goes from point A to point B in Vegas is analogous to the Ballard/West Seattle Green Line how?
Sorry, the level of illogic got to be way too much. Bye-bye Seattle.