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Your customers – or those of your client -- come for fun and recreation. Their visit to your district should be entertaining and enjoyable. Getting in and about should be easy and comfortable. Your district should be nice to stroll, but the option for fast and easy circulation should be available too. That’s where an APM comes in.
There are many kinds of entertainment districts – casinos, theme parks, zoos and other special places. They are planned and managed to assure adequate parking, preferably kept at a distance and out of view. Even the nicest of parking lots and garages are not places to linger. Entertainment can get underway in earnest on the initial, post-parking segment of their visitor experience. APM stations, vehicles and guideways can be themed to the mood and moment you want to impart. You can in coordinate with buildings and towers.
The bigger the entertainment district, the more problematic is internal circulation. The world’s largest is perhaps the Las Vegas Strip -- an expansive commercial district that erupted onto the world scene in the 1980s and is now a world center not only of casinos, hotels and night life, but also meetings, conventions and retail fun. Some of the earliest Strip attractions leapfrogged south from downtown “classics” and expanded with several internal APM connections. Circus-Circus was first with a cable-drawn shuttle. Another with suspended vehicles then was built between the Mirage and Treasure Island. Others can be found in Reno, along the California-Nevada border, and in far-off Sun City, South Africa.
Those Vegas Strip complexes seemed large at the time. However, the 1990s brought even larger mega-resorts with elaborate parking such as MGM, New York, and the Mandala-Excalibur complex. The Bellagio too had an APM fling. Now CenterCity is a high-rise infill development designed around an internal APM being supplied by Doppelmayr. The publicly-scaled Vegas Monorail supplied by Bombardier showed the world that there is a backside to the Strip and is now waiting to link to the nearby airport.
APMs serve many other leisure and cultural districts. Several zoos have manual monorails for tours and transport. Those at Chester (England), Miami and Minneapolis are smart enough that they can run without drivers. However, attendants give guides and operate at low speeds, often stopping to view animal scenes.
Several museums around the world are designed to be viewed from “dark rides” – a display-viewing passenger conveyance that often qualifies as an APM. There is a doll museum in Helsinki, an historic site in York (England), a maritime museum in Abu Dhabi (UAE), and more recently guided vehicles at the Volcania science park in central France.
Disneyland and Disney World have manually operated monorails as well as rides with APM characteristics. Cultural parks in China, Germany, Indonesia and Korea also have APMs for viewing,
Many Alpine resorts have primary or supplementary access via gondolas and aerial trams. Two use APMs: Serfaus, Austria and Roza, Switzerland. And soon the medieval gem of Venice, Italy.
These APMs deliver transport convenience and a visitor experience at costs that range between $4-20 million per kilometer. APMs can easily and economically satisfy passenger flows of up to 3,000 passengers per hour. Higher volumes are rare in entertainment districts. For flows less than 500 per hour, robotic vehicles may be the best solution.
