EDITORIAL: Las Vegas monorail ticket sales not living up to the hype

Can anyone believe any of the numbers bandied about by those running the Las Vegas Monorail?

In an effort to drum up support for a $110 million expansion from the MGM Grand south to Mandalay Bay, monorail officials have projected the extension will boost ridership by 2 million people within two years of completion. Ticket revenue is supposed to double.

A USC transportation expert told the Review-Journal that such numbers would make the new Mandalay Bay stop the “most productive transit stop” he’d ever heard of.

But that didn’t stop Clark County commissioners from tangling up the taxpayers in this potential mess. The board earlier this month voted unanimously to set aside $4.5 million a year in tax revenue that monorail officials may seek to tap in an emergency. The reserve fund is necessary to help the project attain favorable financing — which speaks volumes.

And now comes word that, as local officials are touting the benefits of the multimillion-dollar expansion, the monorail — which emerged from bankruptcy four years ago by stiffing creditors for millions — continues to underperform.

The Review-Journal’s Michael Scott Davidson reported Tuesday that “ticket sales are expected to fall millions of dollars short of predictions for 2017 and 2018,” according to monorail company documents. The number of customers has actually fallen since 2014, and ticket sales are lagging about $6.5 million behind assumptions made in a 2016 study conducted by an outside engineering firm.

Is it possible that the authors of the study were telling monorail officials what they wanted to hear? How else to explain that the numbers failed to account for the rising popularity of ride-hailing outfits such as Uber and Lyft?

“I don’t really think it’s sensible to dismiss these technology platforms because they’ve been competing very effectively ... on just about every front,” James E. Moore II of USC’s Transportation Engineering Program told Mr. Davidson.

In fact, it’s hard to see how the words “sensible” and “monorail expansion” can be used in the same sentence without at least one obvious adverb.