To board the Las Vegas Monorail from the northwest entrance of Harrah's for a ride to the Flamingo, you need to walk 551 paces. That's just 38 fewer steps than if you walked the 589 paces on the sidewalk from Harrah's to the Flamingo - and you wouldn't have to wait for the ride or pay a $5 fare.
Walking through the casino also takes longer. But inconvenience and the closeness between rail stops are probably minor reasons for the monorail's poor performance, highlighted in a recent report that showed fewer riders boarded the monorail in December than in the system's 2 1/2-year life.
The 4-mile-long, $650 million line has lost riders steadily since peaking in mid-2005 at just over 32,000 paid riders per day. December's ridership averaged 15,430 daily. It might be crowded in a casino, but you could easily swing a dead cat at a monorail station and not hit a thing.
Carl Steinmetz, a 57-year-old Pullman, Wash., resident - who happens to be a distant relative of Mark Twain, who once famously wrote of the aforementioned "swing a cat" - states very clearly one day this week why he will never take the monorail, one of the few gee-whiz Strip wonders to fail.
"Look, we know when we come here, we're going to spend money," says Steinmetz, a drug and alcohol counselor from the city named after the Pullman of railroad fame. "But that doesn't mean we're going to just throw our money away."
The idea of spending $5 for a one-way ticket to ride the monorail, he says, "is ridiculous." Especially considering that the bus pass in his hand also cost $5, but is good all day and allows for transfers so he can go just about anywhere, including the outlet mall near downtown. A daylong pass for the monorail is $15.
"The bus is very convenient," he adds, nodding to his wife, Teena, and their friends, Christopher and Debra Mohammed from Vale, Ore.
Steinmetz and yet another visitor, Bob Plant, 68, from Fifield, Wis., in town for a bank board meeting, talk almost wistfully of the convenience of another monorail, the one that goes from the Treasure Island and the Mirage. Not only is that free, but it delivers riders almost to the casino floor, rather than a few hundred yards away.
"That's one of the things that is real different," says Plant, who took a walk to the Flamingo monorail station Tuesday to find a map of its stops.
So maybe the monorail is inconvenient, goes nowhere people want to go, and you'd have to swing a dead cat on a very, very long rope before you'd hit anyone from Las Vegas riding it - so what? As advertised, the monorail is privately financed and taxpayers are never supposed to pay a dime, even if it goes belly-up.
Terry Murphy, a monorail board member since its inception, says the monorail's bonds are "doubly" insured, in case it does face a financial shortfall. Investors, including casinos, are footing the bill and taking the risk. If the monorail fails to make payments on its loan, insurance is supposed to pay off the bondholders.
There is, however, one way that the monorail affects state residents. When Brian Krolicki, the newly elected lieutenant governor, was state treasurer, he helped the monorail get a not-for-profit designation. So like churches or the Red Cross, it doesn't pay taxes on the money it makes.
Looking back, Krolicki says the argument was that the monorail "serves a public good" - no, not by engorging casinos with the tourists who plug the slots and help boost the state's tax revenues - by easing traffic congestion and all the costs and problems that go with it.
Not everyone buys that argument.
"The route doesn't go anyplace that the public wants it to go," freshman Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani says. "It's an antiquated piece of equipment. Even Third World countries don't rely on monorails. They have true light rail. This will never link to a light rail because they are different tracks and systems. It's never been set up to serve the citizens."
Murphy would dispute that, noting that since its inception, the monorail has carried 20 million people.
"That's better than 20 million people riding up and down the Strip. And if they wanted to be on that bus, those buses would be awfully crowded."
The monorail might do better, Murphy adds, if a spur is built to the airport. The Las Vegas Monorail Co. is studying whether an estimated $500 million, 4-mile line to McCarran International Airport would help the ailing monorail. Investors are expressing interest in funding that spur, she added.
Krolicki, who says he goes through McCarran about once a week, always believed an airport line was the most important link to the system. "The taxi line out there is extraordinary," he says.
And still, there are doubters. Transportation engineer Mohamed Kaseko, a UNLV associate professor of civil engineering, imagined a mom and dad with three kids arriving at McCarran, loaded with luggage and having to decide: Monorail or cab?
"It could work," Kaseko says of the monorail-airport line. "But there again, there are some issues. Because at some point, if you have a family it won't be cheap or convenient, and you'd have to haul all that luggage."
For at least 551 steps.
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