Monorail a no-go for busy summer holiday

Stephen Curran

Monday, June 14, 2004 | 10:57 a.m.

During the busy Fourth of July weekend, visitors will have to stick to their regular modes of transportation as the long-anticipated Las Vegas monorail system still won't be running, the man in charge of the company created to run the project said.

The $650 million system, originally slated to open in January, will carry an estimated 20 million passengers from the MGM Grand on the south end of the strip to the Sahara on the north.

The route is the first step in a larger system that would eventually connect McCarran International Airport to the Strip and downtown Las Vegas.

A succession of glitches with mechanical and computer systems pushed the start date back several times as technicians work to correct the problems. The delays have caused the project's launch date to become "a moving target," said Jim Gibson, chief executive officer of the for-profit Transit System Management, which will run the monorail.

"We're not fixed on an opening date," said Gibson, who is also the mayor of Henderson. "I can't tell you when (it will open) exactly. If I had my way it would be earlier rather than later."

As of Friday, project leaders were sticking to previous estimates that the monorail would begin shuttling passengers mid-summer.

But Gibson said rumors the project would be running in time for the July 4th holiday are untrue.

"I'm sure like many other dates, it's been a possibility," he said, adding that setbacks have forced the projects past that date. "(Opening) July 1 is not possible."

The weekend, which last year drew more than 270,000 visitors, is one of the city's busiest, with about 94 percent of hotel rooms citywide booked, said Marina Nicola, a spokeswoman for the Las Vegas Visitors and Convention Authority.

This year's estimates will not be available until the last week in June, when hotel bookings are available to the agency, she said. Traditionally, holidays that fall on a three-day weekend are the busiest.

The holiday fell on a Friday last year and the high occupancy rate made for an above-average visitor volume, Nicola said. This year, Independence Day falls on a Sunday.

Once visitors get here, private vehicles and taxicabs are the most frequently used forms of transportation, according to the authority's monthly executive summary, which chronicles monthly visitor statistics.

With several computer and mechanical glitches still to be corrected, opening the monorail on a high-volume weekend would be asking for trouble, Gibson said.

"If we had been able to open July 1 the challenge would be meeting the traffic we're going to see for the fourth of July," he said. "As we work on this rolling target (date), we're considering all the activities that would strain the system. The way the process goes we would have to be a bunch of ninnies to have done that (planned the opening for that weekend)."

To be fully operational, the monorail must run trouble-free for 30 days, a goal that has so far kept the system from opening. Once a problem arises, engineers must restart the 30-day demonstration period, Gibson said.

"I don't think there are any issues that have hit us that are unknown to us at this point," he said.

Bombardier Transportation, the Canadian contractor building the system, is liable for fines of $85,000 a day for construction delays. The company had run up a tab of more than $9 million last month.

And, while the project has not been trouble-free long enough to set a launch date, Gibson said operators and contractors continue to make progress toward an opening date.

"When you get to this point (in the construction) even if you discover a problem it's not a setback," he said. "It's important to find these problems before we begin."