Train Drain

A Tale of Two Cities

Santa's helper looked lonely standing on what should have been a bustling Times Square subway platform only a few shopping days before Christmas.

But it wasn't the greatest shopping season and "People don't commute when they're unemployed," said New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. His report Thursday found New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority carried 75 million fewer riders in the first 10 months of 2009 as employers cut jobs, costing the agency over $100 million of revenue.

It is still the nation's biggest mass transit agency, responsible for the city's buses, subways, commuter railroads and several major bridges and tunnels. But the city lost 110,000 jobs between October 2008 and October 2009, symptomatic of the national recession.

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In Vegas, there's a privately owned monorail route that connects six hotel-casino stops with the city's public convention center.

It's more of a toy than serious transportation, and although there was no discernable benefit to the general public other than some projected very limited traffic mitigation on the nearby "strip," the state of Nevada allowed the company to organize and sell bonds as a non-profit.

Non-profit? No kidding!

The line has never met a single publicly announced ridership projection, and since 2004, used proceeds from the initial financing and debt service reserves to keep operating, but has now depleted those resources. According to its bankruptcy petition, Las Vegas Monorail has between $10 million and $50 million of assets, and between $500 million and $1 billion of debts... They can't get those figures right, either.

Nor their story, telling the court: "The decline in the monorail's operations is tied directly to the decrease in gaming revenues in Nevada, and particularly along the Las Vegas Strip." While it's true that gambling tourism and convention attendance has sharply declined in recent years, even causing airlines serving the city to reduce flights and available seating capacity by more than 30%, the court shouldn't buy that line, any claim it's related to the collapse of the area's real estate bubble, or the company's request to dismiss Las Vegas Monorail's Chapter 11 petition and re-file its case under Chapter 9, a part of the bankruptcy code that applies to cities.

It was and is a billion dollar boondoggle which has never been honest with anybody, has no legitimate claim to being a government agency, and was built with such limited utility it couldn't fill its cars if the ride was totally free.