Adding airport to monorail has baggage attached

Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2005 | 8:51 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- The head of McCarran International Airport says he has no objection to an extension of the Las Vegas monorail to the airport, but he suggested there is a problem getting airline passengers to ride it.

It's the baggage.

Clark County Aviation Director Randy Walker told a Senate-Assembly transportation committee Tuesday there is a tentative location at McCarran above the taxi pit for the monorail that now ends on the Strip.

Asked by committee members about the monorail extension, Walker talked about the potential ridership. A study shows most of those who arrive at the airport are tourists and they come with 2.3 bags each.

"If you're coming with a husband and wife or with a girlfriend or whatever, you have four to five bags," Walker said. "So the problem with the monorail and getting passengers to and from the airport, you have figure out what to do with their bags on the front and back end so they can ride the monorail with virtually no bags or with just a carry-on.

"If we can accomplish that, it makes a lot of sense to have a monorail at the airport."

At present tourists would be unlikely to want to haul their bags and would rather take a taxi for $20 to their hotels, he said.

But there could be a potential solution in the future. The airport, he said, is working with three or four airlines and three or four hotels to start a test later this year for hotel guests.

When leaving their hotel, the guests would check out and then check into a station at the hotel for their flight and their boarding pass. The bags then would be transported to the airport, go through the screening process and loaded aboard the plane.

"This would cut the whole airport experience out of the airport process," Walker said. "In Las Vegas a lot of people have to check out of their rooms at noon and a lot of flights don't leave until late at night.

"So I can get rid of my bags and I can do whatever I want," he said, referring to the tourist experience using the suggested hotel baggage check system. "It's a great service."

The test will run for several months to get rid of any bugs and "once successful it will be extended to the full community," he said.

This system, with a different technology, was operating when 9/11 hit and it was closed down for security reasons. But the new proposed system has greater screening capability.

The airport is installing a $125 million automated baggage handling system with part of it to start this summer and the rest early next year. It would detect explosives, be quicker, and free up space now being used in the terminal for baggage checks.

The bags would be put on a conveyer belt, be screened by an electronic unit and if problems were found, workers for the Transportation Security Administration would then examine the bag. Once cleared, the bag would be shipped to the airline and loaded.

"It will reduce the staffing of the Transportation Security Agency, we will be able to reclaim our ticketing space and queuing space. We would get the ticketing experience back to the pre 9/11 experience," he said.

If the electronic system detects a potential explosive, the bag would be inspected manually, he said. Most of the alarms now are false. But if an explosive is found, there is an emergency procedure. "We never want to have that," he said.

"Certain things create false alarms. Things that show up like explosives but are not, like fertilizer. So if you've been golfing and have fertilizer on your spikes and have them in your bag, it may show up and you get a false alarm," Walker said

He added "The vast majority of bags will be cleared automatically by the machine and go on without human intervention."