Click image for enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson. Double-decker 'Deuce' buses make their way north on the Strip. The Regional Transportation Commission wants to put an express bus line down the center of the busy tourist corridor. Photo by John Gurzinski.

A proposed express bus line down the center of the Strip will likely vie for some of the same riders as the struggling Las Vegas Monorail, local public transit authorities said this week.

But Regional Transportation Commission officials believe there are enough potential riders within the resort corridor to support two rapid transit systems.

"With more than 38 million tourists coming to Southern Nevada (annually), there are plenty of riders to go around," Tracy Bower, spokeswoman for the Regional Transportation Commission, which is backing the express bus plan, said Wednesday. "If you go down the Strip any time of day or night, there's thousands of people trying to get around."

Attempts to interview monorail officials this week were unsuccessful. But in a phone message, Ingrid Reisman, vice president of the Las Vegas Monorail Co., said she had not seen the RTC plan and therefore could not comment on its effect on the monorail.

The RTC's plan, called the regional fixed guideway, calls for replacing Las Vegas Boulevard South medians with bus-only lanes from Sunset Road to Sahara Avenue or beyond by 2014 as part of a planned $980 million fast bus line that someday could stretch from North Las Vegas to Henderson via downtown Las Vegas, the Strip and McCarran International Airport.

In the resort corridor, the line would run parallel to the monorail, which plies a 4-mile route behind the Strip's east side from Tropicana Avenue to Sahara.

The $650 million monorail has struggled to gain riders since first opening in 2004. Ridership has floated between 20,000 and 30,000 daily passengers, far less than the 50,000 daily riders first forecast.

The monorail has yet to produce a profit and had its bond rating fall to "junk" status, though deep cash reserves have kept the system afloat.

Already, officials at both the RTC and Las Vegas Monorail Co. had said the monorail appeared to be losing as many as 6,000 riders per day to "The Deuce," a double-decker bus service that launched service on the Strip earlier this year and carries more than 50,000 passengers each day.

Some planners believe tourists are choosing the gridlocked "Deuce" over the faster monorail because of the bus's more central location on the Strip itself, as opposed to being behind Strip hotels. The guideway would conceivably combine prime location with high speed.

"There may be some crossover" among targeted riders for the guideway and monorail, Bower said. "It depends where people are starting their trip and where they're going."

The buses would be similar to the bullet-shaped Metropolitan Area Express buses that already ply Las Vegas Boulevard North, making infrequent trainlike "station" stops instead of pausing at numerous corners as do traditional fixed route buses.

The aim of the guideway plan is to create a fast, dedicated path so that buses can avoid congestion without taking away traffic lanes on the vehicle-clogged Strip. It's projected that 113,000 riders would use the resort corridor route each day.

"Our goal is to provide a service that will work for both the visitors and local residents," Bower said. "We hope this will help alleviate the pressure on nearby streets that are used by employees."

The guideway's Strip route is a revision of its originally planned path through the resort corridor along Frank Sinatra Drive, between the Strip and Interstate 15.

Under that plan, RTC officials anticipated the two systems would service entirely different ridership groups, with the monorail carrying tourists and the guideway serving resort workers.

"We don't think it'll be competition to the monorail. The two of them would be complimentary," RTC general manager Jacob Snow said in 2004. "If you're going to work at the Bellagio, that's where you go, off Frank Sinatra. All the employee parking is there."