As you well-informed, tasteful and intelligent readers learned late Friday, cell phone company Sprint has told the Las Vegas Monorail it is pulling out of the convention center station at Paradise and Desert Inn roads. After a couple days of wrangling, we got this Official Statement from the monorail:

“Sprint recently notified the Las Vegas Monorail Company of its decision to terminate its lease agreement for space at the Las Vegas Convention Center Monorail Station effective June 30, 2008.  The Sprint Central facility at the Las Vegas Convention Center station has been an asset to the system and our riders, and there is already interest for the multimillion-dollar facility. Ridership at the Convention Center station has shown steady increases over the past year, and we look forward to offering this opportunity to a new partner that will benefit from the exposure to the Monorail’s millions of riders annually.”

That’s their story and they’re sticking to it. But a source told us at Various Things & Stuff that Sprint decided to bail on the convention center station because they never saw enough foot traffic, not because “…ridership at the Convention Center station has shown steady increases over the past year.”

Hmmm, that’s a mystery. We wonder who could be more right? We’re going to go with Sprint, only because if they had the traffic they wanted, they probably wouldn’t be leaving, right?

Oh, and a wag objected Friday to our coverage because we failed to note that the monorail had experienced an uptick in ridership recently. We’re guessing that has something to do with the big concrete expo over at the convention center that saps a bunch of parking spaces and thus forces people to consider alternative means of transportation, but, there you go, Mr. Wag.