Question of the Day - 28 February 2019

If the monorail went downtown I'd go downtown every trip instead of hardly ever going downtown. 

The only monorail I have used in Vegas is the one that runs between Treasure Island and The Mirage.  Usually rent a car, stay on the strip, and make frequent trips local casinos since they have some of the best table games going.  

I always stay my first day or two downtown, then head to the strip for the rest of my stay.  I typically use the monorail at some point anyway, but if it went from the airport to downtown, I'd be on that thing everywhere I went. 

The primary reason why the Moronrail is a failure is that its stops on the Strip are wayyyyy in the rear of the Strip hotels. It's a fifteen minute walk to the Strip after you get off. Using that same planning logic, if it went to the airport, it would drop people off at the end of one of the runways, and if it went downtown, it would drop people off at the Mission of Mercy homeless shelter.

if it ran downtown it would be great but I still use to get to convention center. Too bad Hilton went crazy and did away with the Star Trek exhibit, we went there every year

Schlepping luggage and carry on items to/from, on/off the monorail car and, as Kevin pointed out, the long and winding maze to get there, is a deal breaker for us.

We rode the monorail once, from Harrah's to MGM Grand, destination Tropicana.  We can get there faster on foot.

The monorail project was a terrible implementation of a good idea. The majority of ridership for it would have been between the airport and Strip hotels. Many visitors want to stay on the Strip, especially first-time visitors. And most visitors, especially foreign visitors, do not rent cars. So the monorail would have worked well for millions of tourists. Going from the airport to the Strip hotels should have been the first phase of the construction. It also should have dropped people off close to the hotel to make it convenient so people would want to use it. That means running the monorail overhead above LV Blvd, or having a way to easily move people (moving sidewalk, secondary monorail, etc) from the monorail stop at the rear of the hotel to the front of the hotel.. Had they had the spine to do it this way it would have been successful. Then in the 2nd phase it could be extended to Fremont St and that would've helped there immensely. The poor way it was done is why so few use it.

The hotels themselves fought the monorail running down the strip, fearing that the monorail lines and the big, bulky monorail stations would block the views of the strip and ruin the experience. That is why it runs behind the hotels. Unfortunately that is also what is killing it. It is unfortunately no one had the foresight to run a subway line down the strip (why would you need to back in the day, with such little traffic and easy surface parking lots right in front of every hotel). 

I think it will be used to get fans to and from the Raiders Stadium (if that extension is actually built) but even with it's poor location behind the hotels, for people not bringing big suitcases, an airport extension would be much cheaper, and often faster, than taking a cab or an Uber. 

As for the downtown extension... that would be such a long extension, and require tearing up so many roads, or taking out so many buildings, that I doubt that will ever see the light of day.