If you are there, below me, on the Strip today, you are going nowhere. The car in front of you is stopped, and the car in front of the car in front of you is stopped. If you're facing north, you can probably see the top of the Stratosphere. If you're facing south, maybe you can see all the way to Mandalay. Hope you're enjoying the view. I am the Las Vegas Monorail, and I'm zooming past you, and you can joke all you want about that time I stopped for 40 minutes, or that other time I stopped for 107 days, because, well, who's stopped right now? I hit the brakes for repairs. You hit the brakes as a way of life.
I am, as I heard on Fox-5 News last night, "plagued with problems." Attached to me—and I hear this again and again, as if the Beltway was free—is a price tag of $650 million. Occasionally, as these talking heads won't stop reminding you, pieces of me fall off and crash to the ground.
Well, get this, and get it clear: That was last autumn's problem, and—It. Is. Solved.
Get this, too: I, and my brethren public transit devices, are your future. That is, if you want a future. Because if you don't want to move forward, you can always just stay in your car and stand still.
It's not too late for you, Las Vegas. You're young and not fully formed. You've got a case of the sprawls, but not an incurable one. You're in much better shape than LA, which was already a lost cause by the time it put in its lovely Blue Line trains in the 1990s. You still have a chance to build a city that can be gotten around and give yourself a sane way to get around it. A great city is one where you can walk a few blocks from your house, hop on public transit and go anywhere you want, any time, no worries about where you'll park, or how you'll beat the traffic, or how much you'll poison the air, or how you'll get home after a cold one or three. It cracks me up—we monorails have a sense of humor, you know—when I hear about my own breakdowns; old Chopper Ted bleats the words "final clearing stages" about eight times a day, and he's generally not talking about me.
I've been through a lot. My planned link with Downtown has been, as they say, "mothballed." At one point, my bond rating fell to junk. My earnings, you see, had not met projections because I was shut down for a while. Well, there's forward-thinking in action: A brand new, extraordinarily sophisticated device halts service in order to be made better and safer for its customers—and gets punished for it! Would it be better for me to just keep going until someone winds up hurt? Demanding instant perfection is a good way of asking for a cover-up. In any case, I seem to recall that things didn't go so smoothly early in the Apollo program, and that got us clear to the moon.
I'm sorry, have I made an immodest comparison? Well, monorails aren't made for modesty. I've got to tell you, though, that they're planning a train that might even be more important than me, if not quite as pretty. They've slapped the thing with an awful working title—the Regional Fixed Guideway—but I'm sure a more marketable moniker is on its way. The train would travel 33 miles from Henderson to North Las Vegas along the old Union Pacific route. Now the Not In My Backyard crowd in Henderson is telling us that they don't want it in their back yard. Oh, dear ...
Every once in a while I get postcards from my Uncle MAX in Portland (Mr. Light-Rail to you) or old Grandpa El in Chicago. They know I'm a good-looking fellow, on a gorgeous street, in a glamorous town. They tell me they envy me. I'm always tempted to write them back: Yes, I would say, but you are loved. I've never actually sent that letter, though. I can't help hoping that one day you'll look up from your cars, see me whooshing by, and decide that you love me, too.