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."
Mono...D'oh!
Monorail... Monorail... Guess the good citizens of Seattle checked up on what happened to the monorail in Springfield and all those other poor towns.
Performing sanity checks on your own beliefs is vital in avoiding poisoned koolaid.
I told them already it's more of a Shelbyville idea!
It sucks, but there is very little interest in these projects in the US. Our country is just not layed out in a way that makes various rail projects feasible.
I see 4 out of the first 5 comments are Simpsons references, once again proving that nobody on Slashdot has a sense of humour to call their own.
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"?
Seattle didn't strike me as a place that needs a monorail, unless the outerlying 'burbs don't have a viable link with the other parts of the city?
New York would need one, if it weren't for the subway. I bet the council got the idea for a monorail from watching Batman Begins. They saw Gotham City had one, and wanted one too.
Sorry I don't have a Simpsons joke to share. So my work here is done.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Once the city council backed the mayor to withdraw support, the monoral project was forced to put a measure on the upcoming November ballot so Seattle citizens can vote a fifth time on the monorail project. This time they're being offered the option of a 10-mile long route (as opposed to the original 14-mile route) that would (only) cost $5B. This whole mess started when it was discovered that the original route would wind up costing $11B to build.
The Seattle PI had a good article on the latest developments in the paper yesterday.
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
The taxation never drops because many people in your area must not have the balls to stand up and say, "Motherfuckers, I have had enough of this taxation!" Like your Founding Fathers showed time and time again, the only way for the citizenry to avoid the greed of government is to take a stand and demand that the taxation be reduced.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
1) The Seattle Monorail Project approved a measure to put a shortened monorail line out. I supposed that supports the word "axes".
2) The city council agreed to advocate terminating the project.
It's certainly not dead yet, but it's not looking good. It looks like the shortening was a last ditch effort to keep it alive.
It's really sad too. Seattle badly needs a train system. They have busses, but a good train would help a lot. For myself, that's one reason I prefer to go to Portland if I have the choice (about the same either way for me) despite having friends in Seattle.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
The monorail was a bad idea. I am vigorously supportive of rapid transit. But in this case there are problems. The elevation would block views, it wouldn't be that fast, it was very expensive, and would implicitly divert funds from light rail (a better idea). seattle has a long history of bad urban planning I'm glad that light rail is going forward and this isn't.
-Sean (OutdoorDB) - The Outdoor Wiki
I live in Toronto Canada, but travel to the US alot on business and for pleasure.
As a Toronto resident I can get by without a car, just about anywhere in this city, even most of the outlying regions, can be reached quickly via rail (and sometimes a connecting bus), its not perfect, but most times my transit time is less than 30 minutes. When I visit New York City its even better, a GREAT public transit system.
Yet if I visit Jacksonville, Housten, Atlanta (hell just about anywhere in the south) I HAVE to rent a car, public transit is poor or non-existant. Yet they wonder why they have smog issues, and traffic congestion? Ever wonder what the south would be like if they had rail? They can't build subways (water table issue) but a monorail or just plain old above ground rail system would go a long way to improving their quality of life. Oil prices too high? Take the train, its cheaper.
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."
Train projects (or monorail or subway, same thing) are not about the present, but the future. Once an urban environment is built up enough, it becomes prohibitively expensive to buy the land rights needed for such a project, and so the urban system is then stuck with whatever transportation grid it currently has, which is usually by road. The ability to scale up the number of people who drive along a stretch of road is quite limited, even if you allow room for roadway expansion (see Houston and LA); whereas it is easy to increase the number of people who commute over a given section of track by increasing the number of cars per train, increasing the frequency of trains, etc. So what this does in the long term is inhibit a city's growth.
Which might just be a good thing, depending on your point of view.
The name's Lanley.. Lyle Lanley..
From one of my previous comments:
Firefox Users: If the WMV doesn't work, try going tools, options, downloads, and on the bottom right click plugins, uncheck wmv, and if you don't want pdfs opening in firefox (meaning download first THEN open, I prefer this method, always faster and more stable) then uncheck pdf and anything else you don't want opening in firefox
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
It's my understanding that not every decision is reminiscent of a cloak and dagger-esque thriller between the good people of the City Council and the "evil" oil companies. And actually if you RTFA you'd note that it was just far too expensive to continue with the project. I would venture a guess that they learned this from a cost-benefit analysis rather than pressures and death threats from oil barons with large hats and shiny monocles.
The project isn't exactly dead...but it is on the ropes.
A measure will be on the Nov8th ballot authorizing the project to build a slightly shorter line instead of the original 14mile plan. If the voters approve that measure, things start moving again (hopefully with strong support from the city government).
Note that the regional transit agency (SoundTransit) made a verbal promiss when we approved their tax. They ended up deciding to produce a much shorter line. Hopefully people will remember that.
Seattle has an excellent metro system that already serves downtown. I think it would be far cheaper and more effective to try to boost the ridership of the metro and encourage people to stop driving to downtown. The building a monorail almost sounded as if it should be done for the sake of building one. Yes, voters approved it 4 times... But I don't think many people realize how absurd it is that a project of this magnitude cannot come up with a proper estimate after all these years and studies.
The financing for the Seattle Monorail was interesting. That financing, the lack of transparency in the planning, and the sheer cost of doing it are what killed it. There were several transportation-related measures on the ballot that year, but to the surprise of everyone the monorail was the only one approved. The voters approved a certain tax level, but did not dis-allow or put any constraints on borrowing money. The monorail planners took advantage of this by stretching out the financing to an absurd number of years. The way the financing was done would have soaked up all future tax revenue and forstalled the financing of any other projects. Even the city council couldn't stomach only being able to do one project in the next 100 years.
For those not following along at home, this is at least the third time this has happened (if I'm remembering correctly). The city keeps passing ballot measures, and the city council keeps dissolving the project a year or two later. You'd think, after the third ballot passed, that the city council would understand that this is very much the will of the people. I guess not.
Reading the article, it sounds like more of the same old "it can't possible work here" syndrome that infects every Seattle public work. I've been out of Seattle for a couple years -- has the light rail laid one section of track, yet? Both the monorail and the light rail projects for the region have been in development hell for at least 10 years, with seemingly no progress made. The excuse I remember hearing most often was that the Puget sound region was so different from anywhere else in the world that light rail / monorail works.
Cthulhu loves you.
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.
I worked in the oilfields for 20 years, and I can tell you that the oil and gas companies aren't all evil. This isn't to say that there aren't greedy people at the top in some companies (Enron) who won't screw everybody to get ahead, but to automatically paint any oil company as evil with some kind of hidden agenda to make sure that a project like the monorail in Seatle will fail is just a little too left-wing stupid for my tastes. The simple fact is that everybody drives, and oil companies don't have to engage in conspiracies to make money. I realize that on slashdot it is considered trendy and kewl to be on the left and hate and mistrust any company, but a little intelligence should be applied to any situation like this and not automatically assume there is some kind of conspiracy.
If you give a liberal an enema, he'll turn transparent.
Not exactly. There is, however, serious speculation that the Microsoft/Starbucks/Boeing Triumvate of Evil it behind it. It's common knowledge that car drivers drink more coffee, buy less software and fly on fewer commercial flights than their mass-transit cow-orkers.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
The first sentence of the article:
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.
Another day another story posted with a summary that can only be described as completely wrong.
Reading the summary did make me laugh though, when I left Seattle for a real city (SF) back in 2001, the Monorail project had already been started up and construction had commenced. So if they pull out now, they could very well end up having a several hundred million dollar infrastructure sitting there to rot -- and rotting quite promenently as they situated it through very busy streets.
But it might be possible that by shortening the scope of work, the contractors would pull out. And then the Monorail project could very well be as good as dead.
Personally, while I thought the monorail project was cool, I never really understood why the hell they needed it. They already have a top-notch bus system and the idea of extending the 1962 Worlds Fair Monorail into a city wide service seems rather superflous.
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.
I wouldn't subscribe to the idea that the oil companies sabotaged the Seattle monorail. That's tin-foil-hat land.
However, historically it was the Detroit auto industry which did sabotage many light-rail and metro systems throughout the US, in cities which were growing in the early 20th century, such as Atlanta and Los Angeles. How did they do it?
By donating buses whenever a municipality began planning rail, and thus encouraging those cities to pave more roads (and create a market for cars.)
Evil? Not per se. Blindly self-interested with bad long-term consequences, such as sprawl? I think so.
Perhaps, but I think you are forgetting that in the 1950's, it was the "big thing" to own a car and do the all American Sunday drive outing. Detroit probably did have a hand in urban sprawl and some of the light-rail and metro system's issues, but on the other hand, they only gave Americans what they wanted. That self-absorbtion went all the way from the CEO's to the poorest of Americans. They wanted what they wanted, and somebody was going to sell it to them. It is only recently that people have really started to consider the long-term consequences of different issues, and hopefully that kind of thinking will only grow stronger, but Americans tend to be the instant gratification type, and it may take awhile.
If you give a liberal an enema, he'll turn transparent.
Sound Transit isn't chugging along just fine. It has already been cut in length, and gone over budget. It still hasn't addressed several places where they might have to tunnel, wich will drive the budget even higher. It also runs at street level in places, and that will further compete with existing traffic for space.
Is that really 'just fine'?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Yes, I have an excellent idea that I have been attempting to promote for years. It would solve all of the city's transportation issues. It is, in a word: teleportation. :(
While it may be a bit more expensive than other options, it is faster, cleaner, and takes up much less room (about the size of a telephone-booth, usually) than buses, trains, etc. Truly the 'technology-freak' solution to the traffic problem...
Sadly, no one wants to back the project
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
I'm in Seattle. We voted *yes* on this baby FOUR TIMES.
..we got the stadium, but not the monorail.
We also voted no on a new stadium, twice.
I was in Las Vegas a few months ago and used the monorail to travel up and down the strip.
The monorail is about a half-block away from the strip. To get to a station, you have to navigate through the casinos and shops, which are designed to impede your progress (so you'll gamble or spend money). We stayed at the Venetian, which doesn't have it's own monorail station. It took about 20-25 minutes to walk from our room, out to the strip, and back through Harrah's to the monorail.
If you are on the side of the strip opposite the monorail, you have to cross the street first, which is not always a simple task. There are a couple of privately operated trains on the side opposite the monorail that may be a better choice.
North of Harrah's, the monorail actually diverts AWAY from the strip to the Las Vegas Hilton and the convention center, then goes back to the north end of the strip at the Sahara. The casinos in that "dead zone" are older ones -- it's interesting to see that property is already being acquired for redevelopment around the Sahara and Stratosphere.
The one time that we depended on getting to the MGM Grand to see a show, the monorail has just stopped running. Fortunately, we were able to get into the line for a cab before everyone else discovered the same problem, but we just barely made it in time. If it's not dependable, people will quickly switch to alternatives after making the walk all the way to the monorail station, only to find it isn't running.
I think the plan was to extend the monorail to the airport and to downtown. Given the difficulty of getting from the monorail station to hotels not directly on the line, I think an airport link will not be used much. It would probably help the downtown casinos, though.
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--
I live in Chattanooga, a decent sized city in Tennessee, but no where near the size of Nashville or even Knoxville. I tried to find a job in Atlanta, mainly because I like large cities and I like mass transit.
Don't get me wrong, I love driving and own a 5spd and do most of my own car work, but sometimes it would be nice to be able to get drunk at a bar, stumble onto a train and get off only a block or two from your apartment.
Atlanta has a rail and subway system, Marta, but it doesn't really blanket the city all that well. I have a friend who lives down there and it's a 20 minute drive to work, even in the thick traffic, and 45 minute train ride with two transfers.
I really wish the rail era in this country didn't die the way it did. It would have been nice during the Interstate construction , if they had placed two high speed rail tracks in the median. I realize the Interstates were designed to move troops and also be used as a stage to land airplanes, but I think both could have still been accomplished with an integrated rail system.
I like the way Chicago's rail system is setup. Their rails run in the medians in the Interstate and they even have train stations in the medians with pedestrian bridges above them connecting them to the streets.
A good mass transit system (keyword good; well designed) with a fair ticket price or monthly passes is a really great way to help reduce pollution, unclog traffic ways and it lets you read a book or play with your laptop on the way to work. The trouble is we're a country conditioned to use cars and we like control, so many people will continue to drive those gas hogging SUVs with just themselves and five empty seats on the 20min drive to work every morning.
Sumit
"It is only recently that people have really started to consider the long-term consequences of different issues"
Oh come on. That is just bullshit. You think no one ever thought about the long-term view 50 years ago? Sure they did. However, these people were:
a) frequently ignored (as they are today)
b) frequently wrong (predicting the future is an inexact science)
-a
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.....
AirTrain JFK is elevated light rail, not monorail. AirTrain Newark is a monorail.
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
The only roads free markets will build are toll roads. If not, then the full costs of land, construction and maintenance of road and parking facilites would have to be billed on auto users, simplest perhaps as a gasoline tax, which would be unfair, but encourage fuel efficiency.
It's about 1 mile long and only goes from the north end of down town a short ways south, "mass transit" it isn't. It's a tourist attraction that needs a $100,000,000 woth of repairs and retrofitting.
First off, a monorail or light rail is considered RAPID transit; a bus system is MASS transit.
Deciding to go for a surface train vs tunnel or elevated is purely an economic decision. Surface is always cheapest, and it is generally the best decision where ridership (or population density) for the region cannot overcome the additional cost of a dedicated right-of-way.
Personally, I much prefer elevated systems to tunnels. Not much to see in a tunnel, and it takes additional effort to maintain communications systems. I don't think I have ever seen a subway system that provides as high of a quality user experience over an elevated system (obvious exception is really cold places like Chicago). Surface and elevated systems are easier for tourists and infrequent riders to understand. Subways are only really good at handling rush hour traffic between housing centers and work centers; they generally languish at bringing people into the city nights and weekends.
Lastly, the monorail vs LRT argument... it's best to pick the one that matches the city best. Monorail systems can be narrower, LRT's can get more passengers in a given length train. Hopefully someone actually did a traffic study and decided that the monorail would be better for Seattle.
we're getting an aerial tram http://www.portlandtram.com/thedesign.htm oh and our light rail system works pretty durn good too.
So why do people try to build monorails? What is the goal? Is it just because they have a cool name? Or because they look futuristic? From what I can tell they have nothing but disadvantages over traditional trains. The tracks are much harder to manufacture and maintain, the turning radius is much more limited, they're slow...
I live in Las Vegas at the moment and they put up a monorail last year... nothing but headaches.
BART in the San Francisco area is pretty darn good. It reminds me of the trains in Europe -- both England and France have excellent rail systems. Fast, quiet, smooth and reasonably priced for the most part.
Anyways... I've never heard why people keep building monorails. Is there some theoretical advantage that has yet to be realized?
Light rail is being paid for radically differently. The cost to build the monorail (exclusive of financing) isn't all that bad: IF you had the same financing THEN it would look better. Of course, we live in a world where light rail is getting breaks the monorail can only dream of....and highways get financing rail can only dream of. That monorail junk bond plan really was the pits though, yes.
Unless the airport you are going to is Boeing Field (which currently has exactly 0 major airlines) then, good luck carrying your bags from the (currently planned) light rail terminus to SeaTac airport. Personally I wouldn't want to carry my bags that many miles but then many people are in better shape than I.
BTW: My car tabs, just for the monorail, cost 20x more than the year before. I STILL want to see the darn thing get built.
Finally, I want to see light rail do OK. I am just bitter about not having both...or rather EITHER! Area light rail is extremely late, are we up to a decade late yet?
One overlooked problem with the private car is that you go on owning it while you're not using it. It consumes space and security while you're working, sleeping, or away on vacation. Consequently it's not being used to best efficiency.
And although the point-to-point argument is hard to beat, it's only valid for a specific range of distances. For me personally, that's 10-200 km. Less than that, and I'll walk or cycle. More than that, I'll take the train or fly. When I arrive at my destination it might be handy to have a car again - that's what rental cars are for. But while I'm away, why should I pay for parking my redundant 'home car'? Here in the UK at least, airports and inter-city rail stations are well served by public transport - and expensive car parks. The cost of parking at airports or rail stations makes it worthwhile to take a little extra trouble in order not to leave my car at the interchange.
Luckily I live within cycling distance of several major rail stations and one airport (London City). Well, not luckily really, I choose to live in central London, and public transport is one of the reasons I made that choice.
The light rail/monorail/bus system/etc arguments -- for individual communities -- go on forever, and I'm certainly not sure what the answers are for any given community. Likely this is a decision for those communities to make...
I lived and worked in the Zurich area of Switzerland for almost two years: a city which is rightly credited with having the best public transit system in the world, and I can certainly attest to it. My actual place of employment was changed from one town to another (well, more like suburbs, really) during this time, but it made no difference.
Here's the routine: I got up in the morning, prepared myself, and then walked outside to the tram (electric) stop right outside my apartment. Electric trams run on all routes about every 4 minutes during rush hours, and at least every 15 minutes at all other times, and were specifically designed so that any user could reach any area in the city by walking no more than the equivalent of about 4 blocks. Took the tram two stops to a subsidiary rail station, where I could catch a train to the main Zurich Hauptbahnhof train station: trains every 5 minutes -- just enough to buy a coffee and a newspaper if you wanted. Three minute train ride to main station, then no more than a 5-minute wait for a local train to my work location (let me off no longer than a three-minute walk). If you miss one connection, another is along in between five and ten minutes. In addition, anyone (foreigners included) can buy a 'Half-Price' card at any major rail station, entitling the holder to half-price fares for ALL rail and associated public transit systems in the entire country -- including the municipal tram and bus systems of all major cities. So, despite working more than 20 miles away from where I lived, I had a no-hassle, enjoyable, clean, safe and restful trip every day. I actually looked forward to the commute, it was such a pleasure. And although my 'terms of employment' entitled me to a car provided by my employer, there wasn't any point -- owning a car in a city and country of such wonderful 'public transportation' was actually a downside, whose difficulties far outweighed the benefits.
The downside of the electric tram system (aside from the fact that you can't very well turn back time and install one in the middle of streets not designed for it) is that you have to again get used to the overhead electrical wires that many have come to dislike for esthetic reasons.
I've consulted on rail transit & freight rail noise issues in 26 states, one U.S. territory, and 2 countries. My analyses have withstood scrutiny by college professors (including one nobel prize winner), other consultants, and many lawsuits. I've contributed to national rail noise standards and I've trained state officials in transit noise control on behalf of FTA. I've presented info on noise & vibration analysis at national conferences, and I have two transit noise-related papers that will be published in refereed acoustics journals over the next year.
In short, I know a lot about "how loud steel wheels on steel rails are."
For the 3rd time, the Chicago El is not light rail - the trains are longer, heavier, faster, and more frequent, all of which make them louder than typical light rail systems. I'm also willing to bet that the age and maintenance on the El is a significant contributer to its perceived loudness.
Since you live in Seattle, take a drive down to Portland and have a listen to the Portland Max LRT system. Hopefully you'll see what I'm talking about.
it was just put up for a FIFTH vote this Friday - and most coverage was in the Sunday papers, so it's not a timewarp.
Will in Seattle
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.