BILL ORDINE Vegas monorail moving along

In Las Vegas, nothing is simply utilitarian. Function must be accompanied by flair. A hotel cannot be just four walls with comfy beds and bathrooms -- it has to a pyramid, a medieval castle, or a doge's palace.
So it comes as no surprise that the nearly completed mass-transit system that will move tourists up and down the Las Vegas Strip will be as much novelty ride as it will be basic transportation.
The Las Vegas monorail -- called the most ambitious privately financed urban mass-transit system in the United States -- is on track to carry its first passengers early next year.
"It's a mix between entertainment and transportation," said Todd Walker, spokesman for the nonprofit Las Vegas Monorail Co., which will run the system.
"And that's one of the reasons it was chosen for Las Vegas," he said. "This is a place unlike New York or Washington or Chicago, where people use mass transit to go [to] and come from work."
No public money
Almost as distinctive as the system itself is that it is being built without local, state or federal money. Bonds are paying for most of the construction, and participating casinos as well as some of the contractors are underwriting part of the cost.
That investment, Walker said, has given everyone involved incentive to get the job done on time and on budget.
The Vegas monorail's first phase is scheduled to begin operation in January, carrying travelers north and south on the east side of Las Vegas Boulevard between Tropicana and Sahara avenues, a route that will cover roughly four miles.
Nine four-car trains, each capable of holding 225 passengers, will operate without drivers and travel at an average of 25 mph, although they can go twice that fast.
The seven stops will give access to eight hotel-casinos and the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Starting at the south end, the stations are: the MGM Grand, Bally's Las Vegas/Paris, the Flamingo Las Vegas, Harrah's/Imperial Palace, the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Las Vegas Hilton, and the Sahara.
An end-to-end ride will take about 15 minutes, and operators are promising average waits of two minutes. In many cases, existing pedestrian bridges across the Strip will allow passengers to disembark and make their way to casinos on the west side of the street.
Expansion plans
Long-range plans include extending the monorail north to downtown's Glitter Gulch (to happen around 2007), then south to McCarran International Airport (2011), and finally along the west side of the Strip (2015).
While the streamlined design of the monorail is fanciful, its realization has been prompted by pragmatism -- getting the estimated 36 million people who visit Vegas every year from one place to another.
"This mass [of people] in that Strip corridor needs to get around," Walker said. "This project couldn't get done in many other places."
And it's that mass of casino-hopping tourists that the monorail's developers hope will make the system pay for itself. In putting together $650 million of private financing, the monorail company projected 55,000 daily riders.
A one-way fare will be $3, and multi-trip and multi-day tickets will be available.
The sleek, gleaming white trains, built by the Canadian firm Bombardier Transportation, recently have been tested on short stretches of guideway, or track, near the north end of the run, and the total system is about 75 percent complete. The infrastructure contractor is Granite Construction.
Stations could wind up being sponsored by major corporations in situations similar to the naming rights sold on stadiums and arenas, and advertising is expected to generate revenue of $6.5 million a year.
How it began
The notion of a mass-transit monorail in Las Vegas emerged from the handful of casino-to-casino people-movers that were built in recent years. Among the more elaborate of these was one that ran about a mile from the MGM Grand to Bally's. Using original cars from Walt Disney World's famous monorail, that free service between the two casinos started operating in 1995. It ended last January to allow for construction of the new monorail.
That Bally's-MGM Grand route carried 5 million passengers a year, and suggested that a larger-scale system could succeed.
Cooperative effort
Still, it wasn't easy getting the current transit system from the concept board up onto the trestles.
"The challenge was getting casinos to work together on one project. Competition among casinos is extremely heated, and they had never worked together before," Walker said.
"We had to make sure that one didn't get anything better than any other."
Eventually, issues such as rights-of-way and station locations were resolved because they made economic sense. And in Las Vegas, it's the bottom line that usually resolves most conflicts.
XContact Bill Ordine at ordineb@aol.com.