Now that America's car obsession has produced gridlock from sea to shining sea, many cities -- from Dallas to Denver -- are experimenting with improving their public transportation systems. Two major announcements came last week, showing two approaches to public transit. San Francisco has activated a tremendously useful airport link that will make travelers' lives much easier, and Las Vegas announced the latest step in a monorail plan that seems to me to be more hype than thrill.
San Francisco Gets It Right
For decades, San Francisco's airport has been sadly isolated from the rest of the Bay Area; travelers to this high-tech hub have been forced to take costly shuttle vans or cramped local buses to get to their final destinations. (I usually take the SamTrans BX express bus, which is fine if there's no traffic on the highway.)
Now that the BART rail system (www.bart.org) connects to the airport, though, budget travelers have a speedy and pleasant way to zip from SFO all over the Bay Area.
The new BART station is accessible from the airport monorail. Trains depart every 15-20 min
utes seven days a week for downtown San Francisco and the East Bay, whisking you to Powell Street station downtown in a blazing 28 minutes (and stopping at all BART stations in case a different station is closer to your hotel, or if you just need a Mission burrito the moment you step off the plane.) The fare to downtown is a cool $4.70 each way.
Not content merely to connect the airport to downtown, BART has gone ahead and connected the airport to the entire Peninsula region. Every 20 minutes, a train leaves the airport for the $1.50, five-minute ride to the Millbrae CalTrain station (www.caltrain.com), where you can pick up trains to Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and San Jose. Unfortunately, there's no Caltrain service on weekends, although there is an hourly bus from Millbrae down to Peninsula destinations.
Vegas Offers Dazzle, Not Substance
In contrast to the useful, workaday BART extension, Vegas' new monorail (www.lvmonorail.com) is mostly glitz. The city delivered its first train on June 24 in a burst of "dancing showgirls, pyrotechnics, special effects, confetti cannons, and balloon drops," according to the press release, and each of the nine trains will be covered in advertising and full of video screens.
When the system launches in early 2004, trains will run every few minutes from 6 am until 2 am. That's great -- Sin City never sleeps, and neither should the monorail.
The problem is where they're running. The seven stations will connect the Las Vegas Convention Center with seven hotels on the east side of the Strip: the MGM Grand, Bally's, the Paris, the Flamingo, Harrah's, the Sahara and the Las Vegas Hilton.
The monorail won't go to the airport, so you'll still have to take shuttle vans. It won't go to downtown, so the Fremont Street Experience will still be a long bus ride away. And it will run behind the huge hotel complexes, meaning that if you're staying on the west side of the Strip -- somewhere like New York, New York or Caesar's Palace -- you'll have to walk through a casino and cross Las Vegas Boulevard to get to the door of your hotel from the monorail. Even if you're just trying to get out to the street, you'll have to walk through an entire hotel/casino complex, often a 10-15 minute trek.
The Las Vegas monorail will make a fun tourist attraction, the way the Bally's/MGM monorail is today, and it'll be a boon for conventioneers shuttling from the Convention Center to the hotels it serves. But as an answer to the gridlocked traffic on the Strip, it's more glamour than substance.