Las Vegas Monorail pauses construction

The Las Vegas Monorail Co. has suspended construction of two monorail stops on the Las Vegas Strip due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a local news report.

All monorail activities related to the company’s Mandalay Bay extension and Sands Avenue Station project, which include construction of a monorail stop at the future MSG Sphere entertainment venue, have been put on hold, a monorail spokesperson told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

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Alright, I'll break the trend and reply on a thread in this sub-forum.

As a somewhat frequent visitor to Las Vegas for both work and fun (well at least before this crisis), I'm of mixed emotion on the Monorail. I generally support transit, especially those that use some form of rail. However, I'm not for transit just for the sake of having it; any system needs to be planned out, efficient, and properly targeted.

To me, the LV Monorail is almost a tourist gimmick, and I'm not even sure it can be properly called "transit." It's too expensive ($5 per ride, even if you're only going a few blocks), inconvenient (runs way back from the Strip, the walk from some stations to the west side of LV Blvd. can take as long as the ride itself), and isn't really a form of "transit"-- it doesn't connect either the airport to bring visitors to hotels, it doesn't connect area workers to their neighborhoods of residence, and it doesn't connect the Strip to Downtown. Now I know those are all options that have been proposed over the years, but even if those were implemented, it's still tacking on bandaids to a weak system in the first place.

Now, that being said, I do use it on occasion. When it's too hot/cold to walk outside, or I'm too tired to walk far, I sometimes take the monorail from the MGM stop near my hotel to mid-strip. But if I'm going to Caesar's or anywhere south of that, I'd just as soon walk and blow the $5 elsewhere. I suppose the most useful part of it right now is access to the convention center or the Westgate from the Strip. But if I'm in town for fun, I usually have a rental car because...well there's too much of town that isn't easily accessible otherwise.

I do hope once this pandemic is over, that the city can make progress on a viable transit option. There is a proposal for a system down the middle of the Strip, either underground or elevated. Connect that to the airport, downtown, and working neighborhoods, and now you've got a system. Yeah, I know that's much easier said than done.