It was on July 15, 2004 that the Las Vegas Monorail -- a project that had been mooted since the 1970s -- finally became an operating reality. And to say it got off to a bumpy start would be an understatement. Here is some coverage, first from an archived "Question of the Day" (11/5/2005), annotated by us now in places for emphasis, followed by some pertinent "Today's News" items.
A: We pick up the saga of the Las Vegas Strip Monorail in December 2004, after its 107-day shutdown due to technical mishaps. It reopened on Christmas Eve and performed flawlessly through May 1, when it shut down again for two days, due to a communications failure between the control center and the trains. The exact cause for that failure was never identified, or at least it wasn't revealed publicly, but it was quickly rectified. Since then, there have been only a handful of very brief delays.
As far as ridership is concerned, the monorail hit a low of approximately 680,000 riders in January, then jumped to a million paying passengers in March.
The system celebrated its one-year anniversary in mid-July 2005, having carried 5.5 million passengers over the 245 days it was operational, for an average of approximately 22,500 paying passengers daily, well below projections. According to numbers from Moody’s Investor Service, the monorail needs 42,000 daily riders paying an average of $2.94 in fares to turn a profit. The monorail company, however, factoring in other revenues, such as advertising on trains and in stations, estimates the breakeven at closer to 35,000 daily riders.
July was the monorail’s best month ever, when it carried just over a million passengers, for a daily average of 32,928. But September saw the lowest ridership since February (a 28,983 daily average). September fare-box revenues totaled $85,000 per day, well short of the estimated $140,000 in passenger and advertising revenues the monorail needs to break even.
The prognosis for extending the monorail north or south is a bit bleak so far. In early 2005, the Federal Transportation Administration rejected the monorail’s request for more than $321 million to extend the system from Sahara Avenue to downtown Las Vegas. Funding approval was based on its financial viability, which has yet to be demonstrated. The monorail can reapply in 2006 to receive the federal money in late 2007, which would put the downtown extension on track to be ready in 2011. Running the line out to the airport would follow.
TODAY'S NEWS
Bloomberg reports that the company returns to bankruptcy court in Las Vegas next week to seek permission to send its reorganization plan to creditors for a vote. The proposed plan would cancel $207.3 million in bonds without any repayment and replace $500 million in higher-ranking debt with $44.5 million in new debt. Bondholders say they're preparing a competing plan.
Okay, you get the picture, so enough of the doom and gloom. In May 2012, the monorail was finally given the green light to exit Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, after a judge found that financial projections were more realistic than the previous plan and had a good chance of coming to fruition. By September of that year, virtually all of its former debt had been erased, thanks to a two-year-long reorganization plan, and the management of the transit service was looking toward a possible route expansion. While that aspiration has yet to come to fruition, in January of this year came word that the monorail had actually seen an increase in passenger traffic in 2013, albeit a modest one percent increase, while use of the facility during this year's CES expo was up 2.5 percent on 2013. So, things are looking up and since 2012 they've been working with Las Vegas Advisor, offering an exclusive online discount to LVA members, so we certainly have no issue with Las Vegas Monorail and its new management.
But, to step back in time once again, here's the promised back story to all the above, penned by veteran Las Vegas journalists Steve Sebelius and George Knapp. It’s called Next Stop: Suckerville and became very hard to find online when Las Vegas CityLife, which originally published it, was shuttered earlier this year after 21 years in print, but you should be able to read it here.
