Slashdot Mirror
Seattle Axes Monorail Project
Sokie writes "This afternoon the Seattle City Council passed a resolution advocating the terminiation of the Seattle Monorail Project. This follows a recent recommendation by the mayor that the project be scrapped. Lacking city support, the project looks to be dead and the city council will request that the state legislature formally terminate the project during their next session. City councilman Richard Conlin noted that the $1 million per week tax collection required by the SMP would be enough to eliminate fares on the city's bus network."
What is with the fixation with monorails? why is one rail supposed to be so much better than two?
For some reason in the mid 50's monorails became equated with high tech, thus EPCOT and the Seattle monorail. All evidence suggests that there is nothing special about monorails. The fastest and most advanced in-use trains in Europe to this date still run on two rails.
Or is this just a case of "my monorail is bigger than yours"?
TFA:
Monorail board approves ballot measure
By Mike Lindblom
Seattle Times staff reporter
The Seattle Monorail Project board has just approved a Nov. 8 ballot measure to shorten the proposed line, and run it from the Alaska Junction in West Seattle to West Dravus Street in Interbay.
The decision to send a ballot measure to voters came hours after the Seattle City Council agreed to advocate for the termination of the financially troubled monorail plan. Last night, monorail board members rejected putting forward a ballot measure or any plan to shorten the line. Mayor Greg Nickels had pushed hard for both.
"It's time for the people to decide whether they want to save the people's train," said Kristina Hill, SMP board chair.
The City Council today, in supporting Nickels' denial of street-use permits for the project, expressed frustration and anger at SMP's handling of the situation and refusal to come up with a ballot measure last night. They said they would ask the Legislature, which created the monorail agency, to dissolve it.
The deadline to submit a ballot measure is 4:30 p.m. today.
The trim to the planned 14-mile line would cut about $250 million from the $1.64 billion construction contract -- if the contracting team sticks with the project.
Pat Flaherty, president of the Cascadia team, said today his team doesn't want to keep working on the Seattle monorail unless the City Council and Nickels reverse course and actively support the ballot measure.
Currently hooked on AMP
I ask this only because 99.9% of all city governments have no grasp of these concepts and would gladly pass problems off to their furture generations in seeking the all mighty vote for next term.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
The project is complete lunacy since the stations have no provision for parking/park and ride, and the route follows an existing bus line and would not be any faster than that bus line. And it would cost more per ride.
I could support it if they actually tried something innovative, like the Skyweb Express, but as the project stands, it's just a solution looking for a problem.
I am part of the small minority of Seattlites whose home and work are in walking distance of the originally proposed line, and I can't see any reason to choose it, since it would cost me more to ride it than driving to work and paying for parking.
As some one who lives in the Atlanta area and who lived downtown a couple of years ago, I whole heartedly agree. When I was downtown, it was so nice to get on the MARTA to go to work. If you live inside the perimeter, and by a train stattion, it's not too bad, but still nowhere near European cities or New York.
I really wish we would put more money into to system and have something like other cities. There's talk of a perimeter train liine. It'll operate on old easeways that the railroads used to use years and years ago. Which is ironic, this city was founded by the railroads.
Why hasn't anything been done about having more rails? Mostly people are pennywise and pound foolish. They don't want to pay the extra taxes but they are more than willing to dump money into their cars. And there's a lot of excuses about their schedules being too different and how mass transportation won't allow them to go where they need to when they need to (Really, that was an excuse that someone used!) Another reason is that there is still some racial issues. Mass Transportation is still seen as something for poor Blacks and some white folks don't want those people coming around - if a sation is built near them.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
Like some cities on the West Coast, Seattle has hills and light rail doesnt work very well with hills. Light rail construction (which is not elevated) has been ongoing for years now, but most of the costs associated with it have to do with tunneling. Its a soft soil, so when you hit bodies of water, you have have to dig even deeper, which costs more money and takes longer to tunnel.
With Monorail, all you need to do is clear a path. Buy out business along the green line, no tunneling is involed. Plus im told that monorail can be converted to handle a maglev type of transportation. It was originally supposed to cost under 2 billion, but people didnt like the tax and decided to register their cars outside of KingCounty. This caused a severe drop in revene and prompted the monorail execs to resort to drastic funding (junk bonds, high intrest loans, etc) to the point where its going to cost over 10 billion.
We need the monorail (or some form of elevated transportation) because there isnt enough room to build more highways. The sucess of the monorail would have helped to extend it to other areas of King County such as Redmond or Tacoma. I used to temp at Microsoft, and getting to Redmond from Seattle wasnt really a problem, but getting home sure was a nightmare. Any minor problem, and your going to see backups.
King County citizens voted in favor for the monorail 5 times! And yet, its never gonna be built. Its beyond surreal.
Monorails are almost always elevated. That means that they do not run in the same space as cars. As such, they can be automated. That means on-time, and it means very low operation costs.
Of course, you can elevate a LRT or put it underground. In both cases, the installation costs are an easy 3-5 x the monorail costs as well as taking 5-10 the space.
In monorail, the train wraps the rail. That means that it can not jump it. In contrast, think about how many of trains that we hear have jumped the track. If you follow the news, it happens every month or so.
Monorail takes up less space in the air as the rail is about the width of a sidewalk. In contrast, the width of a suspended LRT track, is wider than a normal road. So imagine a 2 lane road suspended overhead. Load, noisey, and very expensive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's been pondered elsewhere why cities like Atlanta don't have better mass transit systems then they do. Some suggested higher water tables, others suggested race/cultural issues, but I'm going to suggest a third option.
The reason I suspect is that "old world" cities are far better suited for mass transit in the first place. Cities like New York, Boston and European cities were developed when transportation mostly consisted of walking. As a result, these cities tended to emphasize a "build up, not out" approach to development resulting in more compact cities realtive to their size.
Then came the concept of Suburbia....country living for everyone. Automobiles became affordable and cities started to sprawl. Now you have cities like Atlanta, LA, etc who occupy a far larger land area relative to their population then older cities. This means that building a mass transit network becomes far more expensive to build and maintain. It also means that unless it's a fairly comprehensive network (even more expensive) it's ridership will be relatively low.
This is best evidenced by the New York Metro Area. Mass Transit in manhattan is exceptional...you can get just about everywhere you want to go. Access in brooklyn and queens where building densities are lower isn't quite as good as manhattan, but is still pretty good. Transit access out on long island (which was developed with cars in mind) is good for going to and from Manhattan, but poor going everywhere else.
Now sure, there's no technological reason we couldn't build a comprehensive subway system out on Long Island, but low ridership compared to operating and construction costs would make it economicly unfeasable. All we can do is identify a few major routes along which rail lines would ease congestion on the highways. I imagine it's much the same for an Atlanta or LA.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
They also flat out BRIBED city council members to do this. They infiltrated planning commissions and spent hundreds of thousands of Dollars on propaganda against building such systems all over the country.
Seattle had a wonderful, well managed mass transit system. It was called the Interurban railway. It covered everything from Puyallup and Tacoma to Seattle, the surrounding environs and even went up to Everett. You could hop a train for a dime in West Seattle, and be in Bothell in an hour and a half. It ran well for 25 years or so, then the Automobile manufacturers had several well-financed auto company freindly people elected to the City Council here in Seattle. That Council, along with the Mayor, suddenly decided that the system should be privatized after the market Crash in 1929. The purchaser? General Motors. They promptly stopped maintaining the track, the cars and the whole system altogether. It was shut down within three years after that sale.
This is not tinfoil hat stuff as you Nazis like to say, it was pure government corruption at the City and county levels. Its all pretty well documented. Seattle mass transit is a joke now. Hop a bus in Bothell for two bucks, and it takes three hours to get to West Seattle. Thats three bus changes, at $1.75 each. Its cheaper to drive even at todays gasoline prices. And it only takes a half hour.
I live a ten minuite walk from a freeway bus access station, what we call a Park n ride, and I would still need over two hours to get to my work on Spokane Street. Thats 17 miles. Buses dont run early enough for me to get to work on time, riding that system. I would have to get out of bed at 2 AM and be on a bus by 3:30 to be at work by 7, including walking 2 miles. After work, walk a mile (15 mins) hop a short bus ride to downtown, wait 20 minuites, hop another bus to the Central north side bus terminal at Northgate Mall, wait another 20 minuites, hop another bus to the park n Ride near my house. That gets me home a little after 6 pm. I have other things to do with my life than ride a stinking crappy bus with a bunch of other unhappy tired people all day. It is in fact, cheaper to drive. 20 minuites gets me to work on a good day, if traffic is snarled for whatever reason, that doubles. And its still cheaper.
Blow that smoke up someone elses ass. the so-called "conservatives" in this country have always represented the interests of the wealthiest corporations, actively work against anti-corruption laws and encourage corruption in local governments like the City Council and Mayors office. They do this all over the country.
I supported the Seattle Monorail. Then the monorail commission, stocked with former automobile executives and a couple tolken "liberals" estimated the total cost of the project at $1.1 BILLION a mile. So it was obvious from the start that the system was not ever intended to be built, and the project managers would do anything to prevent it from being built including exaggerating the total cost to the point where all the conservative sheep would start wringing their hands. Then they wouldn't allow anyone (meaning the public) to know how the money was to actually be spent.
We can build an nuclear powered, state of the art aircraft carrier for the price of each mile of that project.
I guess that corruption of the type I described above still exists.
Stupid Humans.....
In those places whose layout make rail-type mass-transit practical, standard-guage rail gives enormously better price-performance than the alternatives.
The technology has been heavily debugged over 1 1/2 centuries. The important components are in mass production. (Even custom rolling stock - if built in the standard way - gets much of the cost and functionality benefit.)
Standard guage also lets the line use heavy rail rights-of-way opportunistically - with no or only minor upgrades if the stock is self-powered, relatively minor upgrades if trolley or third-rail power must be added. Old rights-of-way are the right width and can be reactivated or re-railed. City streets ditto: You can put standard guage down a freeway median, convert a lane or two of an existing street or closed-to-traffic pedestrian mall, or even run rails IN a street and share the lane with vehicular traffic. You can bring intercity passenger lines to the same stations and platforms as your intra-city mass transit. In an industrial area or over bridges you can also do shared projects with freight lines.
Each of these factors can produce savings in the tens-of-millions to multiple billions ranges, both for the mass transit projects and sometimes for heavy rail partners.
Contrast that to non-standard systems:
BART: Deliberately designed with a non-standard guage track (using concrete railbed so it can't be changed later) so it could never be shared with freight. Custom cars designed by aeronautical engineers - whose expertese with aerodynamics and structure relates more to free-space flight than rolling rapidly on a surface within inches of structures, and whose experience with ROLLING involves only rubber-shod landing gear used for only minutes per flight at any speed greater than a crawl. Result: Abysmal ride. Cars with a replacement cost of $6 million EACH, currently only available from a manufacturer in France. No opportunity to share right-of-way with anything: Expansion requires purchase (or siezure) of a string of contiguous lots through the San Francisco Bay Area - perhaps still the most expensive real estate in the US.
Amtrack made the aeronautical-engineer new-design mistake on one generation of their passenger rolling stock, with similar results.
People-mover: A rubber-tired horizontal elevator. A dreadfully expensive toy for inner city entertainment/business districts. Useful mainly for inter-terminal transport in airports. Like Bart, the right-of-way can't be shared with anything.
Monorails also can't share their trackage with other services, or recycle existing structures (other than the space over existing rights-of-way such as freeway medians - and even there the supporting structures consume ground space). So you have to build the entire line and pay for the whole thing out of the project - making the fees you must charge (or the taxes you must steal) prohibitively high. The main advantage over railroads is their relative quiet and their lack of interference with traffic at crossings.
(I could go on with bullet trains and other inter-urban items, and comparison with air and water transit. But this thread is about urban mass transit.) Main point is that, for urban mass transit, standard guage rail for the long hops is a better deal than monorail or the other alternatives.
With one exception: The private automobile is usually a far better price/performance tradeoff than even trains or busses - even if you don't count the costs of lost passenger time from waiting for scheduled runs or transfer connections, or taking a non-optimal route due to lack of availability of a direct run. Even in those cities where the transit system is pervasive enough that it beats cars for some trips, there are always plenty of others where a private car beats the pants off public transportation on a cost/ride basis. A car goes from where you are to where you want to be, with many convenient route options, at a very low cost per mile traveled (even counting the cost of
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Rural areas have fewer transportation needs than cities which means the transportation costs are considerably lower. Fewer roads, fewer streetlights, fewer traffic lights, fewer collisions...
Who needs a larger police force - the 600,000 people in Washington, DC or the 600,000 people in North Dakota? Who has a greater need for firemen and paramedics - 900,000 people in San Jose or 900,000 people in Montana?
That's why farms use wells and propane.
Municipal services? What is the cost per person of salaries of city employees alone in New York City vs the the metric for residents of Wyoming?
Nope... ever see the tax rates of suburban houses spike to pay for the new influx?
Nope... federal.
How many times have you caught the bus in rural Idaho?
Federal again. And local. And rural education is much cheaper than urban because:
a) the land for the schools is much cheaper
b) with fewer students you need smaller buildings - energy efficiency is easier to achieve
c) Not nearly as many administrators or lunchlady Dorris overhead
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
First of all, I don't think bringing up North Dakota helps your argument. It's basically a welfare state which hasn't been completely depopulated only because of federal farm subsidies.
Furthermore, you have to agree that it is certainly more efficient to provide emergency services to a large city, even if it is more expensive. A large city may have one or two police forces, while in rural areas every city and county has their own little fifedoms. Compare the official response to 9/11 versus Katrina (NYC: Mayor's in charge. LA: Noobody's in charge.)
But, if you actually broke out the numbers, it probably boils down to how you define "urban". An urbanite may see the exurban suburbs (usually created with massive transportaion and utility investment) as "rural", while an authentic farmer would probably see them as "urban".
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You might say that subsidies ensure a stable domestic food supply, which is a strategic necessity. I wouldn't argue against that, but I can hardly see how you expect us to believe that farm subsidies help the consumer at the expense of the farmer. Clearly the opposite is true.
As a Seattle resident, let me tell you that the Simpson's episode in question is all too close to the truth. This entire monorail project has been a poorly planned poorly executed mess that has resulted in ridiculous and unfair taxes (I own a car but rarely drive. But because I own a car in the last year I spent more on monorail tax than I did on gas.) that line the pockets of beaurocrats and middlemen. I'm glad to see it canned, but wish they did so a year ago...
Physics is good
I'd be happy to explain how subsidies ensure cheap food to the majority of American consumers. 95% of all tax revenue is payed by the top 50% of all incomes, so subsidies are generally paid by the rich. Subsidies encourage farmers to plant MORE, because they are paid for each acre planted (ironically necessitating the program by which farmers are actually payed to let land fallow).
Farms therefore have incentive to overproduce, as evidenced by commodity prices (especially grains like corn, wheat, and soybeans) frequently selling below cost. Farmers narrow their losses, or even gain a profit, by producing more efficiently. So the motivation to be efficient is intact. Large farms get more subsidy and leverage economies of scale that allow them to produce more effieiently, thus the trend towards farm consolidation.
Because food prices are driven low by overproduction through subsidy, food is economically available to more people. The wealthy are gonna be able to afford food anyway. The "wealth redistribution" to which you refer is not so much from the government to the farmer as it is from the wealthy to the poor.
UI
Diagnosis: you are paranoid. As luck would have it, you're also being followed.