Las Vegas monorail leaves a lot to be desired

THE MONORAIL connecting major holiday spots here in Las Vegas may have been popular with delegates to last week's Consumer Electronics Show, but, and let's face it, and frankly, it leaves a lot to be desired.

The first problem - and surely the easiest to solve - is that of lines. When we tried it during the CES show, there was a huge line to use the automatic ticket machines. Let me tell you that if people dilly-dallied on the London Tube like they did using these automatic ticket machines, they'd be shredded rapido transito, mate. There are ticket boxes presumably intended for human beings to sit in, and dispense tickets, but we couldn't see anyone in any of them.

There's no shortage of people looking for work here in Las Vegas, despite the fact it appears to be part of the Arctic wastes these days. Go for a buffet and you'll be inundated with any amount of Keno girls, play a loose slot and another gaggle of girls will attempt to ply you with drinks, and usually every craps table has at least three staff looking on as the people get hyped up.

Secondly, and as a senior journalist from the UK told us at the CES press office, it's all a bit Sim City like. Imagine if someone in Ken Livingstone's office suddenly decided to put a monorail between the major London hotels - such as the Ritz and the Savoy - without any attempt to integrate it into the existing infrastructure?

Sure, the traffic here in Vegas is bad. Quite a few cabbies are cheesed off that another 500 taxis were allowed on the road in the hope that Comdex would expand.

Lastly, but not leastly, the monorail doesn't go to the McCarran International Airport. But the rumour here is that may not matter as there are plans to build a new international airport about 20-30 miles away from the Strip, rather than just on it, so to speak. This last point is sure to make the local cabbies happier, we'd speculate.

One thing's for sure. London and Las Vegas share at least one thing in common. When a few flakes of snow fell early on in the CES week, all transport was massively disrupted. This is the case in London too. The Underground often shuts down. Rapido.

*I WOULD like to make it transparently and abundantly clear that I don't care whether Eva Glass is married or not. She always was a convenient fiction, as far as I was concerned. A.R.