Vegas Sphere to Finally Get Transit Stop — Sort Of
Posted on: April 16, 2025, 03:28h.
Last updated on: April 16, 2025, 04:00h.
- There is currently no way to get close to the Vegas Sphere that doesn’t involve sitting in traffic, walking a mile from a monorail station (or longer from elsewhere on the Strip), or staying at the Venetian
- The Las Vegas Loop claims that a subterranean station it plans to build near the concert venue will solve that problem
- That’s only partially true
In December 2018, Clark County commissioners approved a plan for a Las Vegas Monorail stop at the Sphere. It was set to open in 2020. That never happened, and the closest monorail stop remains Harrah’s/The Linq, a little less than a mile’s walk away.
It’s not the aging elevated rail but the Vegas Loop that plans to usher pedestrians closer to the globular entertainment venue, according to a new report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
To expand the footprint of what locals have nicknamed “the Tesla tunnels,” Elon Musk’s The Boring Co. is in the process of purchasing the 2.57-acre lot that once housed Gordon Biersch, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) president and CEO Steve Hill told the newspaper.
The brewery and restaurant, which permanently closed in July 2020, is located at 3987 Paradise Road in the Howard Hughes Center.
“There will be a station there,” Hill told the newspaper, estimating its distance from the Sphere at 0.4 miles. “Once they get that deal closed, I think they’ll move operations there, which I think will make it a little quicker moving up the rest of Paradise.
“We think it will be a key location.”
Sphere Miss
However, that 0.4 miles is as the crow flies. The shortest walking route, following Paradise Road and Sands Avenue to the Sphere, is actually double that, according to Google.
That’s nearly the same distance as the Harrah’s/Linq monorail station and still an 18-minute hike.
Boring claims to have a solution to that problem. Hill said that its Teslas will be permitted to emerge from some stations and use surface streets to service attractions that lack nearby Vegas Loop stations.
“Just like we plan to pop out of the station at Tropicana and Paradise and drive over the airport, they’ll be able to pop up out of the station at Gordon Biersch and be able to drive close to the Sphere,” Hill told the R-J.
Exactly how that will help alleviate snarled Las Vegas Strip traffic before and after events at the 20K-seat venue was not made clear — probably because it won’t.
The R-J also reported that Musk’s company paid $8.75 million for the 1.29-acre plot at 3824 Paradise Road in January. That was once a location of the local Firefly Tapas Kitchen & Bar chain. The Boring Co. has already leveled the former restaurant (which relocated in 2023 to the Hughes Center) and is digging to install a Vegas Loop station there.
That station will actually be closer to the Sphere than the Gordon Biersch lot — a .06-mile walk, though one that would require pedestrians to cross Paradise Road, where there currently is no traffic light.
No timeline was provided for completion of the two planned Sphere stations, which will be part of the University Center Loop. That line will also include future stations at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas and the Thomas & Mack Center.
Mono Vision
Currently, the Vegas Loop only operates between the Las Vegas Convention Center, Westgate, Resorts World and Encore.
As it continues furiously digging toward its proposed full buildout of 104 stations in 68 miles of tunnels beneath Las Vegas — originally expected by the mid-2020s but now lagging at least a decade behind that goal — the LVCA has announced plans to invest $12 million to keep the 20-year-old Las Vegas Monorail running until at least 2035.
That’s the same monorail that, back in 2020, the LVCVA announced it would dismantle between 2028 and 2030.
The LVCVA already approved a $1.9 million contract to update the monorail’s fare gates with a cashless, ticketless system, according to the R-J, which reports that it will also need to spend between $6-$8 million on a new control system.
However, the LVCVA made no mention of how it plans to replace the parts on its nine Innovia 200 trams that might fail with time — a big problem since the company that manufactured them stopped doing so in 2021.
And those are not the kind of items that get listed on eBay.
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