Columnist Susan Snyder: Monorail a tourist attraction

Friday, July 16, 2004 | 4:23 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

WEEKEND EDITION

July 17 - 18, 2004

I don't get it.

Of course, there's no reason for me to get it because, as a Las Vegas resident, I honestly don't need the Las Vegas Monorail for anything.

And that's OK. As was mentioned (buried, actually) in one report among the many that appeared during the monorail media love-fest last week, the monorail isn't for me.

Or you, or us.

It's for them who bring money to burn to the Las Vegas Strip.

Now, far be it for me to malign anything that takes gawking tourists from behind the wheels of their cars and places them up in the sky and out of the way. Wish we could do the same with all the drivers who use cell phones but not turn signals.

But "public transit" kept creeping into the monorail sound bites, and that image doesn't seem to fit the image of this $650 million tourist toy that is tax exempt as a "nonprofit charity." No sales tax. No property tax.

The media invitation for Wednesday's VIP ride and reception was a cardboard monorail that listed the opening gala's events next to an artist's rendering of the riders inside.

Judging by the picture, the target audience is thin, young, well-dressed and drinks a lot of martinis. Suffice to say, nary an MGM Grand housekeeper was among them -- at least, not one dressed as if heading to work.

There was a showgirl. But I'm thinking that beyond Wednesday's event she won't have a reason to hop aboard for a $3 one-way trip on a train that might not have a stop near the hotel where she works.

The monorail is not intended for the hired help, which would be most of us.

But we're desperate in our desire for a transit system that allows us to trade our personal car trips once in a while for one that doesn't take two hours.

The well-heeled backers of the $650 million Las Vegas Monorail "charity" said that although it didn't offer residents a true transit amenity -- like, say, pedestrian overpass escalators in other parts of a town with the nation's highest pedestrian death rate -- it would improve our qualities of life because fewer of the people with whom we sit in traffic every day would be tourists.

Big whoop.

Those lines of traffic trailing out to Summerlin and Henderson every afternoon aren't made up of visitors from Toledo.

The people getting hit and killed because they didn't want to walk half a mile from their bus stop to a crosswalk and half a mile back to their apartment complex across the street aren't tourists. The motorists hitting them aren't tourists.

The pitifully inconsistent, and often virtually invisible, school zone markings and lights don't affect the daily lives of children whose parents bring them to the adult entertainment capital of the world

These are the kinds of issues to address as "public transit." How come these business people can't come up with a transit charity for us?

Maybe they could devise a plan to truly reduce the number of motor vehicles idling on the Las Vegas Strip by closing it off to anything with a motor. Let pedestrians and pedicabs reign over the National Scenic Byways.

Just imagine how many people would have to ride the monorail.