The punch line here is... remember what my husband said about the golf cart we saw? GEM makes carts that seat five in addition to the driver, with a higher seating position and open sides or optionally large doors for faster board/deboard. Even with the 25mph stock speed limiter for NEV/LSV regulatory compliance (and believe me, with some adjustments to the motor controller they can go faster), I suspect that switching the Loop entirely to GEMs would increase its total capacity. And the GEMs honestly suck, in the world of light electric vehicles. They just kind of pulled off a regulatory capture move and got the NEV rules written to pretty much require something that sucks as much as they do for street legality.
Subjective Experience
So as I said, this is not a review, just trying to focus on some things of interest to transit, communications, and policy dweebs. Which I assume pretty much describes my core readers. But I do want to point out a couple of oddities that add to the "wow, this is cheap" sensation:
The ride is surprisingly rough, even in a Model Y with highway-grade suspension. I am concerned that they may not be able to do much better when paving in the confined tunnels, given that I don't think standard paving equipment would fit in the loading gauge. The ride experience was not "oooo electric car luxury," it was more on par with the Orlando Airport APM100s with sketchy steering gear.
For the segment that requires tickets (to Resorts World), the ticketing system is based on a QR code. The customer-side implementation is fine enough, but the ticket checking is laughable. It's an iPad where you have to show a QR code to the front-facing camera, meaning you have to present the QR code with your phone facing away from you, looking at the image on the iPad for alignment. It is very awkward and there is no reason for it besides cheapness. Plus there's not really any way for the attendant to see if the ticket is valid without standing awkwardly close to you to look at the same iPad screen you are, and indeed, I accidentally scored a free ride by merit of the attendant's inability to see the actual result of the ticket check.
The stations are not especially well thought out. People walking in and out of the stations have to cross the path of the Loop vehicles in some places. The attendants are supposed to direct people and, for trips to Resorts World, collect fare, but the design of some stations lacks a chokepoint at which to do so. The attendants have to kind of chase people down after they've already walked straight to a vehicle.
The tunnel to Resorts World is one-way. Its portal is connected to the West LVCC station by a tunnel, but the station and the Resorts World portal are actually in the same parking lot. They seem to have adopted a practice of cars one way going through the tunnel, and cars the other way just driving... across the parking lot. This is very funny to experience and contributes a lot to the feeling that the Loop is only marginally an underground system. I doubt the original designers intended for this outcome, it seems like the money spent on the connecting tunnel was completely wasted, but I'm assuming that eliminating one segment of single-track tunnel helped with throughput. Their approach to managing traffic at the Resorts World portal also involves a sort of approach-pattern-esque architecture where every car has to drive in a circle around the portal before entering, which is funny.
This stuff matters in my mind because it gets to the question of what the Loop... is for? The capacity of the Loop is very low. The expansion plan calls for a lot of tunnels, doubled up for capacity in places, but targets only 90k passengers per day. That would put it at around 8x the current daily ridership of the monorail, but with a vastly larger network of stations. Presumably they will expand fare collection, and I would have to think that tickets will actually become fairly expensive. so it's probably not intended to be a high-capacity, low-cost option.
So what else could it be? Well, some press and discussion around the Loop figures it as more of a luxury option: something that casinos can comp for high rollers, that will spare people dealing with the general disaster of getting around the strip. But it also doesn't feel like that. The outdoor stations, need to quickly board and deboard a sedan, and general chaos level of the stations (i.e. attendant chasing you down for ticket) make it feel more "courtesy car" than "black car."
I don't know, they could totally dress it up a bit and make it feel fancier. Some paint here and there, train the attendants better, do more to direct traffic. They could! But right now I think the best way to describe the Las Vegas Loop is... "cheap and amateurish." Surprisingly fitting with the Las Vegas vibe, in a way.