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Friday, July 16, 2004 - Page updated at 09:45 A.M. Is Las Vegas monorail right for Seattle? By Mike Lindblom
On their second day, they say their luck finally took a turn for the better — after they found their way to a monorail station. "It's affordable, clean, excellent," said Goss, one of the first riders on the new Las Vegas monorail that opened for service yesterday morning. He said he couldn't walk the vast distances between casinos because of a workplace explosion that burned his leg. "So this is a blessing." Opening-day passengers raved about the congestion-free 4-mile trip along The Strip, at cruising speeds of about 40 mph, that would make thousands of Seattle residents jealous.
City Councilman David Della said after a trip to Vegas that its monorail is a great transportation system — "for Las Vegas." He wasn't necessarily maligning the voter-approved 14-mile Green Line in Seattle, but pointing out how different the two cities are. At the 5,035-room MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, the monorail station takes some effort to find, across the gaming floor from the lions in a glass terrarium, two disco bars, and a fast-food court called the Farmers Market. Across the street, at New York, New York, a replica Brooklyn Bridge and Statue of Liberty dominate the sky. In other words, it's easy not to notice the monorail tracks in Vegas. In Seattle, those tracks won't be nearly so inconspicuous. Las Vegas also has the advantage of 25,000 hotel rooms within walking distance of the stations, with some population densities comparable to Manhattan, said John Haycock, chairman of the Las Vegas Monorail Co. What Seattle does share with Sin City is traffic — and the chance to learn from the nation's first attempt to use monorail to solve transportation headaches. How does it work as public transit? With seven stops, the average speed of the Las Vegas monorail is only 16 miles per hour, or 15 minutes to complete the 4-mile run. That's still faster than cabs or buses, which cruise the Strip from early afternoon past midnight. On Wednesday, police shut down Las Vegas Boulevard because of a suspicious package, stopping the flow completely. "I'd use a monorail over a bus system," said Rick McGreevy of Sacramento, who wasted an hour in the traffic mess. At midnight, he boarded another full bus that turned away a family with a stroller. It took about 20 minutes to go a block, comparable to downtown Seattle on Mariners game days.
The Las Vegas line sacrifices efficiency to fit with existing buildings. There are six sharp right-angle turns where trains are slower than a bicycle. The tracks rise at a 6-degree slope to go over a footbridge at the Convention Center, where the trains slow and vibrate during the climb. Current plans in Seattle contain slopes downtown and around the sports stadiums, but two teams of potential builders are free to propose alternatives. The Vegas line is entirely double-tracked, while about a third of the Seattle line is proposed for single-track layout that requires less bulk but slows the trains. The four-car train in Las Vegas, supplied by Bombardier, one of two companies competing to build Seattle's Monorail, are supposed to carry 224 people. But with that number aboard, the trains are completely packed. VIPs at an opening party were jammed shoulder to shoulder on the first train. A load of 150 is about the limit for a pleasant ride, which is the goal of the tourist industry anyway, said John Haycock, chairman of the Las Vegas Monorail Company. One solution is to provide trains every two minutes, as Bombardier does on its larger Vancouver, B.C., SkyTrain, instead of the current four minutes apart. "We have got an option with Bombardier to take more trains, and I suspect we will be exercising that option soon," said Haycock. That would cost tens of millions of dollars, but Haycock said that if ridership is that high, the financing will be easy. At $3 a trip or $10 for a day pass, the price is considered low for gamblers, but not for low-wage workers, who live largely outside The Strip. They can take a bus on Las Vegas Boulevard for $2, or a new shuttle bus from downtown to the Sahara Hotel for 50 cents. A downtown extension, planned to start construction next spring, would turn the line into more of a public service than a casino shuttle. "It's going to be beautiful, yes," said Victor Dominguez, who hands out erotic-entertainment ads on the sidewalk for minimum wage. He lives downtown in a $250-a-month room and takes up to two hours to reach The Strip. He knows casino workers who have lost their jobs by arriving late. A few feet away, buses were taking five minutes just to load passengers as tourists fumbled for exact change.
"Seattle is much more about moving our citizens, and I want to make sure our monorail is accessible to everybody," said monorail board member Steve Williamson. who is head of the King County Labor Council. "It's got to be for working people, people of low income. It's got to be a people's monorail, no question." Among the starkest differences between the monorail projects in the two cities are the political and financial realities. The Las Vegas monorail, believed to be the first privately funded rapid-transportation system built since World War II, is financed by station sponsorships, advertising and fares. And while it opened six months behind schedule, the project has generated little controversy.
What does it look like? The monorail planners in Las Vegas put their line over roads and alleys behind the casinos, instead of obscuring the world-renowned lights of The Strip. "It's very open, undeveloped land really, and not a pedestrian corridor," said Richard Borkowski, a Seattle opponent of the Green Line. But through Seattle's narrower downtown streets and residential neighborhoods, say critics, that same monorail would seem intrusive and out-of-scale. Stations in Las Vegas are a bit over 250 feet long, inconspicuous compared with the hotel towers.
Las Vegas stations use a simple design with exposed steel beams and curved steel roofs. Instead of elaborate shapes and materials, the stations were constructed so that private companies could easily build around them. In a few weeks, Nextel will open a service center that it constructed directly over the Convention Center station. Passengers must walk through it to reach the monorail, which adds time but also spreads out the crowds after a convention. "It's Vegas — on a day like today, going on an air-conditioned escalator for another two minutes isn't going to hurt anybody," said Irwin Miller, an architect on the Vegas project. The Nextel deal also brings in $4 million a year for the monorail.
One of the Las Vegas switches — movable beams that allow a train from a shared single track to a double track — at 35 feet wide and roughly 180 feet long, is big enough to cover about half a Seattle block. Seattle monorail planners have proposed more than two dozen of them, some larger and some smaller. The monorail board's Williamson said while aesthetics are important, "for me, the monorail is a utility. It's not a design feature of the city." He's confident the Seattle project is under so much scrutiny that taxpayers won't stand for anything less than top value for the dollar. Williamson insists the most important lesson from Las Vegas is that it now has a working monorail. "What's great about it is the reality of it," he said. "People are going to love this thing in Seattle. They're going to say, 'Give us more.' " Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com
Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company
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