Editor's Note: The monorail: A dissent

The monorail is under siege. Mechanical problems have subjected the Strip transit line to media questions and public ridicule. Just a few months after it opened for business, the monorail is closed and may not resume service for several months. While inspectors review every aspect of the monorail operation to find problems and make repairs, hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue are lost. Things, it seems, are going to get worse before they get better.

But things will get better. They will, because they have to.

Those mocking the monorail today--whether for wheels falling off or for its mysterious public-private status--have every right to do so. Obviously the folks who constructed the monorail made some mistakes that, if they didn't exactly put people's lives at risk, certainly raised flags about quality control and safety. And there's no question that the complex, secretive nature of the monorail's financing and operation deserves intense scrutiny to make sure taxpayers aren't getting shafted.

But amid the boos and hisses, we can't forget that Las Vegas desperately needs the monorail. No, we don't need a glorified thrill ride, which is basically what the monorail's current incarnation amounts to. But the monorail also is the first leg of a valleywide mass transit system. It represents the bare beginnings of Las Vegas' version of San Francisco's BART, Chicago's El and Washington, D.C.'s Metro.

The monorail is the modest first piece of what should become a truly useful transit network that would accomplish several things, not the least of which is giving commuters an alternative to time-wasting, gasoline-burning, air-polluting, blood pressure-raising highway and street driving. Phase two would extend the monorail to downtown and phase three would stretch the system to McCarran International Airport. The airport link would take many tourists (in rental cars, taxis and limos) off the roads, easing congestion for local motorists. Besides being good for Fremont Street tourism, the downtown leg--terminating at a new bus and rail transit hub--would increase the number of Las Vegans working on the Strip who could use the monorail to get to work.

That's just the beginning. Transportation planners already are making plans to run a commuter train along an old Union Pacific rail line to Henderson, and talks proceed on a proposal to send a light rail line along U.S. 95 to the northwest.

Transportation planners, for all their faults, are good at seeing the big picture. They look at how Las Vegas is growing and believe that mass transit must be incorporated into our long-term plans. They have studied larger cities and know how congested they can get.

Today it's not always a big hassle to motor around Las Vegas. If you avoid the morning and afternoon rush hours, it's possible to scoot around the valley's highways at a pretty good pace. It's also still possible to use surface streets to span fairly long distances in decent time. But rush hours are another matter, with a growing number of chokepoints that slow cars to a crawl, and when there's a fender-bender, you're in a world of hurt.

With about 1.6 million people in the metropolitan area, our traffic congestion is bad but not terrible. We have to realize, however, that unless we plan to put the brakes on growth--fat chance of that--we soon will hit 2 million population. And then we'll hit 2.5 million and then 3 million. I don't want to imagine a million more people here without a viable mass transit system.

In these pages recently, columnist George Knapp sagely speculated that the pseudo-private monorail outfit eventually will turn over its burden to the taxpayers. In one sense, this is alarming, in that it means we probably would have to subsidize an unprofitable transit system. But the fact is that the monorail and its eventual extensions should be publicly funded and managed anyway. There are few if any examples in the world of a profit-making mass transit system, and it's unrealistic to think Las Vegas would be any different. Like health care, mass transit is one of those things that doesn't fare well in the rough-and-tumble marketplace.

In recent history, taxpayers have made substantial commitments to improving transportation facilities in Southern Nevada. We've spent billions to expand McCarran Airport (as well as smaller airports), to improve highways and interchanges, to build the beltway, to create Citizens Area Transit. We've built the Desert Inn Super-Arterial, Frank Sinatra Drive and pedestrian bridges on the Strip. We've widened dozens of major streets, installed hundreds of traffic signals and even established a few bike lanes.

We've done most of what we can do to serve motorists. Little stuff is all that's really left. But we soon will reach a point where the street and highway network will be overwhelmed. A serious, smart mass transit system is the next logical and necessary investment.

Mass transit systems such as San Francisco's BART (32 years old) and Washington's Metro (28 years old) no doubt had their setbacks and naysayers. But the large communities in which they operate simply could not imagine what life would be like without them.

Perhaps 10 years from now, Las Vegans will have that feeling about the monorail and its appendages. And we'll have trouble remembering those few months in 2004 when the system was in the shop.

--GEOFF SCHUMACHER