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Las Vegas marathon on Las Vegas strip is bad for Las Vegas by Phil Staudt
December 6, 2009 Las Vegas plans to fail; Kills business once a year for sake of marathon.
If you hate Las Vegas, and you want to see the Las Vegas economy take another hit, you will love this! I am pro-marathon, and I would like to see the Las Vegas marathon grow every year, but it does not need to hurt the business in Las Vegas that is the life-blood of the State of Nevada.
The Las Vegas marathon could be a great way to ADD tourists to Las Vegas instead of HURT business on the Las Vegas strip, which is what is doing now. There are over 200,000 tourists in Las Vegas on anaverage wekend, staying in the 140,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas. So when they say that the marathon attracts 27,000, it does not say how many tourists were inconvenienced and are not going to come back to Las Vegas, because of the horrible nightmare that it created for them, and it does not say how many people who did not come to Las Vegas last weekend to spend money because they got caught in that mess in years past.
First of all, I am not against marathons, I am not against having a marathon in Las Vegas, and I am not even against having a marathon that goes down the Las Vegas strip. But I am adamantly opposed to shutting down the money-making part of the State of Nevada during the busiest night of the week, and deciding that Las Vegas and the residents of Nevada have to take a huge financial hit in order to accommodate some runners.
Las Vegas shut down its money-making operation on Saturday night to cater to non-gambling health nuts who have to go bed early to get up and run a marathon. If you own stock in MGM-Mirage or Sands or Wynn, you are out of luck this week. If you are visiting Las Vegas this weekend, and want to get from the Las Vegas strip to the airport on Sunday, sorry about your luck. If you know what it is like on Saturday in Las Vegas, which is the busiest day of the week for businesses on the Las Vegas strip, then you know how much it hurts to have the Las Vegas strip blocked off to traffic on a Saturday night. What a disaster!
The economy is hurtin' for certain in Las Vegas, and instead of boosting the Las Vegas economy by trying to increase Saturday business, which is what pays the bills for all the residents in Nevada, who do not pay State income tax, and rely on tourists to pay the bills for them, the geniuses who run Las Vegas shut down the Las Vegas strip on Saturday night, to cater to Sunday morning non-spenders who want to run a marathon. The media in Las Vegas always promotes the marathon on the Las Vegas strip as a great deal for the City of Las Vegas. How stupid! I say, "The king has no clothes".
No wonder the economy is bad. I am sure that there will be reports about how much money the marathon brings to Las Vegas, and they will be as accurate as a gambler who says they won $1000 in Vegas and doesn't mention that they had to spend $2500 to win it. The huge gaming corporations have been tearing down the good old buildings that gave Las Vegas its unique pro-gambling look, and replacing them with buildings that look like they belong in Paris or London or New York. The cheap buffets, and good deals on hotel rooms, and cheap drinks, and cheap shows, and a friendly atmosphere for average folks who like Las Vegas, (which is what turned Las Vegas from a cow town to the #1 tourist destination in the world) has been replaced by fancy architecture and over-priced rooms and drinks and shows, which attracts the elite social hierarchy and snobs, who are above low-life gambling folks.
I hope I am all wrong, and getting rid of what worked in Las Vegas, and increasing what is not working now for Las Vegas, is what works in the future. Maybe it is just the economy, and not really the stupidity that I see, that is hurting Las Vegas. If Las Vegas was still centered around all that cheap tacky stuff that it used to be famous for, people who are being careful with their money would be flocking here during bad times. But since Las Vegas spent a decade trying to chase them away, they are staying at home saying, "Fool me once...". by Phil Staudt
December 6, 2009
Here is an article I wrote back when I was still driving taxi, regarding the marathon, back when the economy was at it's all-time best in Las Vegas: | | | | Las Vegas Marathon on Las Vegas Strip Is A Bad Idea by Vegas Taxi Driver
December 2, 2007 Marathons are a family thing. Lots of kids show up to watch and participate. The last place parents should be taking their kids is the Las Vegas strip, and unless they plan on eliminating gambling and drinking and sex from Las Vegas (which many of the residents in Las Vegas would like to do, but they like extracting money from the Las Vegas Strip to pay for services and keep taxes low), then parents taking their kids to hang out and be on the Las Vegas Strip is a really sick and stupid idea. There are lots of nice places away from the Las Vegas Strip that are built to be kid friendly.
The Las Vegas Marathon is a prime example of the stupidity of the idiotic people who now run Las Vegas, and their stupidity went on display again on Saturday night at midnight before the Las Vegas Marathon. On the busiest night of the week at the busiest time for traffic in Las Vegas, the dummies who are in charge sent out dozens of trucks full of barricades and workers who began blocking off every major street in the only part of Las Vegas that is busy at that time, with people from all over the world who come to get away from normal home town activities like marathon running.
I would like to apologize to all of the unsuspecting tourists and gamblers and nightclub goers who paid good money to come to Las Vegas to experience what Las Vegas is supposed to be, and what Las Vegas should be, only to be abused and disrespected by Las Vegas. The morons who are supposed to be running Las Vegas allowed some non-gambling, non-clubbing, non-spending, and non-tipping buffoons, who operate this nonsense, to ruin your weekend. I don't blame the real customers who come to Las Vegas, for what Las Vegas is supposed to be, if they boycott Las Vegas in the future on marathon weekend. I think some tourists have already learned not to come here that weekend. That can't be good for the casinos. How much did the casinos make last night from all the marathon runners and fans that went to bed at 7pm so they could be up at the crack of dawn for the Las Vegas Marathon? The reason Las Vegas became one of the most well known and popular cities in the world is not because it allowed its life-blood to be crippled during its prime time.
Tens of thousands of tourists who went downtown on Saturday night were stranded and unable to get back to the Las Vegas strip without their cab driver being blockaded and stuck in miserable traffic jams. Bus drivers were at a loss, with blockades making it impossible for them to run their routes, and I saw buses going in circles from block to block trying to get through (I was too!). Club goers could not get back to their hotels, and many many people missed their flights home on Sunday because the main roads were blockaded. If you are a person who understands Las Vegas and the business at hand, then you can see how ridiculous and inexcusable it is. It is bad for Las Vegas business. It hurts. It is no good. It is stupid.
Wouldn't it be cool if the New York Marathon went right through the trading floors on Wall Street during the middle of the week, and barricades blocked all the traffic all day long in Manhattan on a busy Tuesday or Thursday? That would be so cool! Unfortunately for marathon fans, dummies do not run New York City. Wouldn't it be cool if the marathon surrounded all the trucking hubs in Kansas City and blocked off all the freeways during the busiest traffic time of the week? Wouldn't it be cool if the Atlanta Marathon went down the middle of the busiest freeways on Friday and they blocked off all freeways in Atlanta from Thursday night until Saturday? But, unfortunately for marathon enthusiasts, morons don't run those towns.
Ron Paul would like to have CSPAN let him give campaign speeches for 10 hours every week during the time when they have the most viewers, but the people who run CSPAN are not going to let one candidate have that because they are not idiots. Hillary Clinton would like to be the only guest on the Larry King Show for the next five weeks, but the people who run the Larry King Show are not going to allow one candidate to do that because it would be stupid and detrimental to their ratings. But the people who run Las Vegas are just that stupid.
Marathons are great and having a marathon in Las Vegas is a great thing. I am all for it. Las Vegas encompasses hundreds of square miles from mountain to mountain, full of beautiful roads. The roads on the outskirts that separate hundreds of beautiful gated communities in Las Vegas are bigger and better than the run-down roads close to the Las Vegas strip, because the idiots who now run Las Vegas suck money out of the casinos, that draw 40 million visitors from all over the world, and use the money to make the roads surrounding their voters nice, instead of taking care of business on the streets that are important to tourism traffic. That is because the people who live on the outskirts get to vote and the 40 million tourists do not, and the morons who now rule Las Vegas, let developers build non-Vegas style communities for hundreds of thousands of non-Vegas style people to move into.
For the Las Vegas residents and politicians who want to attract as many non-gambling non-drinking non-smoking events, like marathons, in order to change the image of Las Vegas, having the Las Vegas Marathon go down and around the Las Vegas strip should be repulsive. You know that the Las Vegas Strip is the only part of the Las Vegas Marathon that will be paid attention to, and an opportunity is missed to show the world that there are miles and miles of beautiful areas in Las Vegas that are not even near the Las Vegas Strip. All the attention gets paid to the Las Vegas Strip instead of all the beautiful outlying areas.
Unlike most business areas of most major cities, where Saturday and Sunday are the slow days and the least busy times for hotels and restaurants, weekends are the busiest time on the Las Vegas strip with 133,000 rooms in Las Vegas full at the highest rates. The Las Vegas strip and its businesses do not need a shot in the arm on the weekend. I am sure there will be reports that the Las Vegas Marathon brings money to Las Vegas. The truth is, it hurts Las Vegas, and costs the hotels and casinos and nightclubs millions of dollars in lost revenue, because it is in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Stockholders of MGM-Mirage and Wynn Resorts and Las Vegas Sands should be aware that one of the 52 weekends of the year is seriously hindered by the dummies running Las Vegas. If a tornado swept through Los Angeles or Chicago or New York City there would be analysts calculating how much business was lost and what the negative impact was on the city. They should do the same in this case.
The businesses and hotels on the outskirts of town would benefit from having the added business of the Las Vegas Marathon going through the outlying areas. Do we have a mayor?
Earlier this year these same dummies crippled business at the downtown casinos for about five weeks because of some car race that had a poor turnout. LAS VEGAS is getting more and more undesirable to the big spenders and big players that are the life-blood of the city because of the idiots who run Las Vegas. Maybe they should hire some imprisoned mob bosses to be consultants and tell them how to do it. by Vegas Taxi Driver
December 2, 2007 | | | Roads, including Strip, to be closed for Sunday marathon click here
Las Vegas Sun lasvegassun.com
By Kyle Hansen (contact)
Saturday, Dec. 5, 2009 | 2:05 a.m.
"Runners will be taking over some of the area's busiest streets —
including the entire Strip for much of Sunday — for the Rock ‘n’ Roll
Las Vegas Marathon and Half Marathon. More than 25,000 people are
expected to participate in the race, which will also shut down some
public bus routes." Route Changes due to Rock 'N' Roll Marathon Sunday click here
KTNV Channel 13 News ktnv.com
Posted: Dec 4, 2009 01:18 PM Drivers Brace For Marathon Delays, Detours click here
Closures Begin At 3 A.M. Sunday
Fox 5 News fox5vegas.com
POSTED: 7:57 am PST December 4, 2009
"LAS VEGAS — Getting around southern Nevada will take some planning
ahead for a lot of drivers this weekend...Drivers need to be aware of
more than two dozen closures during the event, with the majority of
delays around the resort corridor...The earliest closure begins at 3
a.m. and several last until Sunday afternoon. Some freeway ramps will
also be closed for the event..."
by Phil Staudt
December 6, 2009
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