Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025 | 2 a.m.
The Las Vegas Monorail has been transporting passengers in the Resort Corridor for the past two decades.
The 3.9-mile system stops seven times between the Sahara and MGM Grand. It carries an average of about 10,000 daily passengers to conventions, sporting events, shows and more without clogging traffic on the Strip.
The system’s lifespan has about eight to 10 years remaining, said Steve Hill, CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, in a wide-ranging interview with the Sun.
Hill points to late November when four of nine monorail trains were temporarily grounded with the system running around the clock during the Formula One race weekend.
“We had a couple of periods where we were down to five trains because something went wrong. That is what the end of life of monorail looks like,” Hill said. “They are starting to go down to the point that we can’t keep these things running on a reliable basis. It makes the system unreliable for passengers.”
Here are some highlights from our conversation:
What is it about Las Vegas that in your time here has seen the biggest change? How has it stayed the same, and then how has it changed?
I’ve been here longer than most — 37 years. Moved here from Dayton, Ohio. When I moved here, Vegas and Dayton were about the same size. The biggest change is just the growth the city has had. You know, there were 600,000 people here in ’87 and nothing had been really built for about 15 years. All the money that was in the industry had gone to Atlantic City. And, you know, Vegas was the only place you could come to gamble legally. All of that has changed now. The country has accepted what Las Vegas’ original premise was. Now what we offer isn’t exclusivity. It’s just an experience you can’t get anywhere else.
How would you write a job description for yourself? You wear all these hats. You’re on these boards. You’re helping make policy. What’s your job description?
It is to drive demand for Las Vegas. I mean, our organization, largely, is responsible for doing that on behalf of the entire city. Now, each of the individual properties do it for themselves, but there are things that individual companies can’t do, and they’ve basically pooled their money and hired us to do that.
You read The New York Times story that talked about how conventions were evolving, and participation after COVID had kind of shifted, and more meetings are virtual. Your take on that reporting?
There are any number of reasons that a community may need and want a convention center, but it’s easy to do the math here in Las Vegas. From an operations standpoint, we make a little bit of money running the convention center, not including paying for the building itself. So we pay about $120 million a year in bond payments for this building, and the city makes an awful lot more money than $120 million on this convention center.
How is convention attendance post-COVID? Is it down, still the same?
The footprint of the show is pretty much the same, or maybe growing, but the companies are sending a percentage of the number of people they used to send. So we’re at about 90% of what we were in 2019. We think we will surpass that in the coming years, but not because the same shows are going to grow past what they were in 2019. We’ve got workers who are selling new shows.
How do conventions look in five years? How do they evolve? How is Las Vegas — and in the big campus here — evolving to meet the changing demands of conventions?
There’s still a real demand for in-person meetings and in-person conventions. You’re right. That’s always changing, and it changes by industry. … They want a more personalized experience. They want the trip to feel efficient, so that they get everything they want in the few days they’re here, instead of maybe feeling like they’re wandering a little bit. It’s all those things our show organizers are concentrating on.
What does Las Vegas offer that is different from other cities that are known for hosting conventions, such as Orlando, Fla., and Chicago?
We’re a city that is basically a platform for people to come and put events on. There is no place else like it. Orlando has some similar characteristics, but they don’t have the critical mass in such a tight footprint that Las Vegas does. I’ve said this about the Super Bowl. It applies to shows. There’s no place else in the world who can treat tens of thousands of people like a VIP all at the same time. Nobody else has that ability, other than Las Vegas. We have three of the largest convention centers in the country — all in the same city. And so we can trade off weeks where somebody’s show is moving in here, there’s a show at Venetian or a show at Mandalay, and the next week we have a show here and they’re moving somebody out, so we always have something big going on. Other cities don’t have the ability to do that either.
Everybody is asking: When are we getting our second Super Bowl? The minute that first one ended, were you getting the paperwork together for the second one? What’s the process?
We’ve certainly talked to the NFL. I was there with a couple of our folks a couple of months ago, and we had that conversation. They have a process they go through where they ask cities that they’re interested in potentially hosting the Super Bowl again, whether they’re interested and what years they’re interested in. I think 2030 and ’31 are in consideration with the NFL right now, and we certainly expressed our interest to have them back as soon as they want to come.
Looking back at the week or that stretch of 10 days (in February for the Super Bowl), what was the highlight for you?
We were fortunate in things we couldn’t control. Yeah, it was a great game. It was a great matchup. The matchup brought Taylor Swift and more eyeballs, those kinds of things. The weather was fantastic by the time we got to game day. And then the event itself was just great. Traffic around the event was fine. Everything went pretty close to perfectly for that whole week. We knew the city would do a good job, but the city did a better job generally across the entire time frame than we could have hoped.
Formula One, Year 1 to Year 2, it seemed to run slightly smoother. Your thoughts on how Year 1 to Year 2 went?
From a disruption and community perspective, they were both hugely better than Year 1. Year 1 was a remarkable achievement by Formula One. We announced a race on March 30, 2022, and had a race on Nov. 18, 2023. It’s hard to do — and it showed. Once we got to Year 2, we learned an awful lot — and that showed as well. We didn’t have to build the circuit again, which took five and a half months of disruption out of the cycle. But also, the setup and tear down of the track was much smoother, much less disruptive, and that’ll continue to improve as we go through the coming years.
From an economic impact standpoint, it’s kind of the other direction. The first year you do an event like that, it’s going to be, hey, this is the first year, everybody wants to be there. So the impact of the race, economically, fiscally, for Las Vegas and the state will be less in Year 2. But we’re, you know, kind of finding an equilibrium point from both angles, both from a congestion standpoint and from a financial standpoint.
Teslas drive through the Vegas Loop central loop station at the Las Vegas Convention Center Monday, Dec. 9, 2024.
I’m going to take the Vegas Loop and I’m pretty excited about that. Long-term, is that supposed to go to UNLV, or is that still years away?
The regents have approved that concept. They’re working through that. I don’t know exactly what the timing is. I don’t think it is years. They have launched on Paradise right across the street from the Thomas & Mack. It’s right next door to the Thomas & Mack parking lot, which is going to be beneficial for a number of purposes. They have two machines coming up Paradise that will tie into the system that we have here. We’re getting ready to open the Westgate station. We’ve got a tunnel completed to the Wynn. We’re getting ready to launch the second one to the Wynn. We have one tunnel to Resorts World that’s operational now and in the early part of next year start the second tunnel to Resorts World. The Thomas & Mack parking lot will be tied to all of that. We’re looking at legs, over to MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay … looking at a leg to the Strat, and then down to Fremont Street garage and Circa. There’s 68 miles of tunnel that are land use permitted.
How do the Monorail and the Vegas Loop complement each other? What’s the future of the monorail? Are there plans to get another leg of that going?
What we plan to do is run the Monorail the way it is, until we can’t anymore. What will almost certainly determine that is the trains wearing out. We’ve got nine trains, if we were going to replace them right now it would probably be a $300 million purchase, and we can’t afford to do that. Nobody else could either. Once that stops, our plan is to use the monorail structure, the stanchions, take the track off and put a two-lane road on top of the monorail and tie it into the (underground Vegas Loop) system.
Any guesses of the Monorail lifespan?
We keep saying eight or 10 years.
There were some light rail conversations on and off for maybe the past decade. Would light rail help?
Taking a lane off the Strip for light rail seems counterproductive. The properties have never supported it. And if you don’t take the traffic away, then I don’t know that light rail speeds anything up. I mean, if you’re able to run in the same lane as the train, then I don’t know (if) that does you a whole lot of good. But it’s a very expensive system to put in. One of the real benefits of (the underground system) is it’s free. The Boring Company is paying for all the tunnels, and the properties are paying for all the stations. There’s no public money going into the system.
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