March 6, 2008

In defense of the ultimate juice job: Save the monorail?

By STEVE FRIESS

The Las Vegas Monorail is our Iraq.

It’s clear now it was a badly conceived idea. The naysayers were wrongly ridiculed as pessimists; the profiteers will never be held accountable. The expectations were, in hindsight, idiotic. The price was vastly underestimated. The crisis management was woefully inadequate. There were a few unlucky operational breaks along the way that didn’t help matters much.

And now a growing chorus that includes such once-supportive John Murthas as the Review-Journal’s Geoff Schumacher say it’s time to get out.

Except that we shouldn’t. That would be a horrid error.

So call me John McCain, but it’s clear that what we really need is a Vegas version of The Surge: A connection to McCarran International Airport. And perhaps more than that. At taxpayer expense, if necessary. Which it will be.

Vegas is looking down the barrel at a massive traffic disaster in the Strip corridor. Tens of thousands of new hotel rooms are in the offing, millions of additional visitors are en route, and there is absolutely no way to meaningfully widen the thoroughfares that matter: Flamingo, Sands/Spring Mountain, Tropicana and, of course, Las Vegas Boulevard.

It’s true the privately funded Las Vegas Monorail is only moving around less than half of the predicted 53,000 passengers a day. But it’s still keeping about 20,000 people a day—no tiny sum—out of cars. And it is reasonable to believe an airport connection would instantly alleviate gridlock on the roadways around the Strip and UNLV.

The strangest part of the debate surrounding the monorail is that those most vocally against it—a variety of local columnists—are in every other way good, big-government liberals. They come at the monorail from a place of understandable suspicion, disgust and schadenfreude because of the promises broken and the unsavory political and economic connections that birthed it. Schumacher, for whom I have great respect, recently declared it’s time to tear it down before it runs out of reserve funds around 2010.

The big refrain is that the monorail must never become a public liability. And yet the notion that efforts to alleviate traffic ought to be something subsidized by the public is not only a liberal one but, in every other city on the planet, the standard. While the monorail is a different animal—it’s a public transit system that doesn’t serve the local residents—so, too, is Vegas different.

As much as locals enjoy demonizing casino bosses as greedy, wasteful scoundrels, precious few jobs here aren’t in some tangential way connected to the Strip’s success. And so it is in all our interests to get Joe and Mary from Omaha around with as little hassle as possible so they’ll spend more time in the casinos and nightclubs rather than sitting pissed in a cab.

What about the region’s broader transportation needs? Those are important, but that problem has more to do with locals unwilling to shuck their cars. The valley has an extensive bus system poking deep into lower-income urban areas where it’s most needed. It is clean, safe, efficient and punctual. I use it. It may not run in any meaningful way to Spanish Trail or Anthem, but those people are never, ever going to take a bus or a train.

Strip tourists will and do. And there’s growing evidence that companies who were in on the monorail at first and viewed it as theirs, theirs, theirs have learned a lesson. Last week, MGM Mirage President Jim Murren told me the monorail must be fixed as one piece of a broader transportation plan that also could include “a people-mover system, light rail, a tram or something else along one of the avenues or the center median.

“Anything we can do” to improve the monorail, he continued, “regardless of what it does for the competition, is good for Las Vegas.”

When he said this, the Paris stop sprang to mind. From that platform, you can spit on the back entrance to Planet Hollywood, but to access it you must walk through Paris to the Strip and enter P-Ho from the front. Would that hassle end, even if the P-Ho isn’t a monorail investor? Murren said yes.

It might seem specious to trust the words of an exec whose company is building thousands of units at CityCenter, but they do seem to have built in some traffic-friendly factors. The main avenue into CityCenter, Murren said, is as wide as Manhattan’s Park Avenue and will be Vegas’ widest road. A people-mover that will at first ferry folks from Bellagio to CityCenter to the Monte Carlo may expand to New York-New York and possibly south to Excalibur, Luxor and Mandalay Bay, all owned by MGM Mirage. They’re trying, as they have as far back as their original MGM-Bally’s tram.

“The public might have to get involved” in the monorail’s salvation, Murren said. Just watch the R-J editorial board go into orbit. And so what? They’re almost always wrong about these things anyway.

To tear down the monorail is not a serious option. It merely feeds a sense of justice sought by those who rightfully fought it from the start.

But a defaulted monorail, with mostly insured bonds, would be an amazing bargain for the community. Someone else’s money built it! All the public would have to do is to run it, expand it, make it fit logically into a broader plan. Why not make that the revenge on those who juiced it into existence?

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