As Las Vegas preps for the upcoming influx of Chiefs fans, 49ers supporters, and Swifties — even as a possible transit strike looms — transportation becomes an increasingly fraught issue. Not very high in the convo: the monorail. Our podcast host Sarah Lohman (🎧) recently spoke with local writer and monorail fan Eric Duran-Valle. A few excerpts:
So what do you like about the monorail?
“As someone who's grown up here, seeing how other cities work, and wanting to see Vegas grow as a city, I've always desired more public transit, and the most apparent execution of that in Vegas has been the Las Vegas Monorail. … Now I'm at an age where I know that driving sucks. And parking is even worse — just the other night I was at Resorts World, and their flat parking fee is $18. So my hack is, park at the Sahara, which is free, and the Sahara has a monorail station built into it.”
Tell us about the role of public transportation and empathy.
“When you're in traffic and the person in front of you is driving slow, it's not a person — it's a 2,000-pound hunk of metal that won't get out of your way. So it's very easy to dehumanize other people. When you're in public transit, when you're sitting across from another human being, the really big value of it is the exposure to other people, recognizing your place in a community. It's not something that should make you feel small. It should make you feel connected.”
What’s the future of the monorail?
“It's not the brightest, because the trains are very old, and the company that makes them, Bombardier, doesn't exist anymore. So I don't know if a company's just gonna try to make a train that can fit on those tracks, or if they're just gonna cut their losses and say, Let's put it in this Hyperloop instead.”
(Edited for length and clarity.)
