The little engine that can’t

There's a hulking eyesore at the corner of Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard where you can always find more pigeons than people.

Neonopolis was derided as a flop even when the city cleared the lot to build the retail complex and shoveled some dirt to the tune of Petula Clark's "Downtown."

Then the city poured some money and plenty of word-of-mouth marketing into the colossal flop to help it rise to three stories of failure.

In near time, the public finally will begin to recognize another giant failure in our midst. And by then, it will be too late to do anything about the four miles of monorail tracks looming behind the Strip like an ugly path for a ghost train.

Fitch Ratings says financial default is "probable" for the little engine that can't, otherwise known as the $890 million Las Vegas Monorail.

But the blind mice running the junk-bond machine aren't thinking of default or the so-called fund they could tap to tear down the structure. No, they want to spend another half-billion dollars to run the trains to the airport, where someone might actually choose to ride it.

Even then, though, there'd have to be a special car to haul luggage. And those riding the monorail would still probably have to hail a cab to get to their hotel from whatever station was closest.

It's time for county transportation officials to admit the inevitable -- the little mass transit experiment has gone on long enough.

It's time to put one of the trains in former Lt. Gov. Lonnie Hammargren's yard as a museum piece and sell the others.

And it's time to take the tracks down.

Fitch, a New York City-based credit rating firm, already junked the monorail's bond status. Now the firm thinks the monorail has cash reserves to take it to 2010 -- at best.

The Review-Journal's Omar Sofradzija reported Wednesday that Fitch can already see the pending financial breakdown.

As recently as last year, the monorail's cash was supposed to last till 2012. But the cash will fly out the door "slightly more rapidly than was previously estimated," Fitch reported.

The monorail's got about $69 million left, according to Fitch. How much is it going to take to tear down the tracks? The monorail claims it has a separate contingency fund for that.

The Catch-22 for the monorail is that it has to reduce fares to increase ridership. But ridership has to really pick up to make up for the loss in revenue. In 2006, the monorail took the opposite route -- increasing fares to $5 from $3.

Having actually paid $5 to ride it, I can assure you it would have to cost $2 or less for me to ride it again. (And that would only be because my son digs any form of transportation that isn't a car and is already asking when we can go to Japan to ride a bullet train.)

It's time for the good folks at the Regional Transportation Commission (which, in theory, is a separate entity from the monorail) to realize they have helped spell the train's doom.

A monorail down the center of the Strip (however unsightly) would be a tourist train, the same way the RTC's double-decker bus, the Deuce, is ridden by the camera-toting set.

And that route would actually afford passengers something to see. The current path takes you to the back of the house, over crappy motels with emptied pools.

Bailing out and tearing the tracks down is the best option.

Instead, the monorailers are dreaming that the new attempt to link up with hotels through the Internet will be the train's saving grace.

Just because the monorail has transported 24 million people during its plagued history does not mean it should be a part of the region's long-term transportation solution.

Just because I once drank at Neonopolis doesn't mean I have returned to drink there again.

There's a certain charm in the train that visitors might find interesting the first time they come to Las Vegas. After all, it's a train with cool wraps that make it stand out above the street. There's also a great curiosity about monorails for anyone not from Seattle.

Anyone who's used the monorail system at Disney World or the much smaller version at Disneyland has a certain nostalgic admiration for the technology.

But the Las Vegas Monorail is not that quaint. It may be the only mass transit system that has to work to convince people it's safe to ride it. There's even a Reason to Ride section on its Web site. The very first reason (Cruise the Strip in just under 15 minutes) is patently false unless you consider Paradise Road the new Strip.

It's time to call the monorail what it really is -- an absolute failure -- and push the company to get rid of it before they're too broke to tear it down.

Erin Neff's column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at (702) 387-2906, or by e-mail at eneff@reviewjournal.com.