(The following article by Michelle Koidin Jaffee was posted on the San Antonio Express-News website on July 14.)
LAS VEGAS, Nev. — If you didn’t already think of this city as the largest playground for adults, beginning today it will offer a theme park-like monorail system to zip tourists to different spots to drop their dough.
And with an ever-increasing number of visitors only too happy to do so, the monorail could draw throngs of tourists and business people trying to get to another part of the long, congested hotel-casino-shopping Strip or the Las Vegas Convention Center.
“It’s really going to open up the Strip,” said Kevin Mortimer-Hampson of Fort Worth, who planned to ride the monorail after this morning’s opening with his wife and his parents, who are in their 60s and had been sticking to their hotel. “It’s way too hot for them.”
Around the country, metropolitan areas struggling to ease traffic will be watching the $650 million monorail, especially cities such as Houston, where a new light-rail system has seen about four dozen collisions in the less than nine months since testing started.
The electricity-powered Las Vegas Monorail has had problems of its own, and the much-anticipated opening comes after pricey delays to smooth out software kinks such as doors not opening as expected.
But on Wednesday, all that seemed to be in the past as the state’s governor took an inaugural ride with monorail developers, showgirls in giant feather headdresses and celebrities such as Gladys Knight and Penn & Teller.
“It’s on the cutting edge,” Gov. Kenny Guinn said of the driverless, automated monorail, which takes riders to seven stops, a 14-minute ride from one end to the other 4 miles away.
There’s not much to look at during the ride, since the rail, running from 20 to 70 feet above ground, weaves along behind the Strip and past parking lots and motels.
But it is air-conditioned, and tickets are $3 one way, about a third of what it would cost to take a cab the same distance.
A day pass is $10.
The governor joined developers in lauding the public-private partnership that spawned the sleek four-car trains, projected to carry about 50,000 passengers a day, most of them visitors.
From 1993 to 2003, Sin City saw its number of visitors rise by about 50 percent to 35.5 million.
Texas ranks second to California in the number of people flying into Vegas.
With the monorail’s opening, “the most exciting city in the world becomes just a little more exciting,” said John Haycock, chairman of the nonprofit Las Vegas Monorail Co.
The monorail is being paid for with tax-exempt state bonds, to be repaid with money raised from fares and advertising.
Developers hope to later expand the route to downtown Las Vegas and to the airport.