Walt Disney had visions of The Future. For one thing, he envisioned monorail systems for public transportation. For a more sedate ride, there was the PeopleMover. Good ideas, I think.
As I said in another thread, I rode the Seattle Center Monorail for the first time yesterday. Normally I take the bus into Downtown Seattle and get around Belltown and the Pike Place Market by Shank’s mare. It’s less than 2/3 mile from my office to The Seattle Center. It’s about half a mile to Pike Place Market. There’s no need to ride anywhere. And there are the buses. (I haven’t looked into which buses go where, but they’re there and they’re free in that area.) Still, we’re living in The Future. We should have something other than buses in our cities. When I was in London the Underground was very handy. But not very futuristic.
See, when I was little things were Modern. Better Living Through Technology, and all that. Heck, even dad’s car had rocketship styling. Remember 2001: A Space Odyssey? Everything was sleek and clean. Now, white-and-chrome-and-steel would be pretty boring on a large scale; but the Bladerunner neon jumble seems inefficient. The thing about Downtown Seattle is that there are a lot of great old buildings, and there’s also the trappings of Cyberia. It’s a perfect place for a People Mover. (And yeah, I would like to have seen the monorail go through.)
I think old Walt had some good ideas. How many times had I wished there was a monorail soaring above the 405 in L.A.? How cool would it be to take in the sights from a People Mover from The Seattle Center to Pioneer Square (or the stadium, or whatever)? One of these days I’ll have to ride the Sky Train.
There are monorails in other cities, but to me they just seem like toys for tourists to ride on. (I’ve seen, but never ridden on, both the Seattle and the Sydney monorails). Not every route has the population density to support the heavy capital investment that a rail system requires, and for them buses are likely to be the best solution; and for the heavily used routes, light rail and underground heavy rail seem to work better than monorail systems, even if they’ve both been around for more than 100 years.
It usually boils down to a matter of cost. Monorails are expensive, and cause many of the problems that led to the dismantling of the Els in New York City (though they’re a vast improvement).
More expense means higher fares. You can see the issue in Las Vegas, where the monorail is $9 for a one-day pass; the Deuce, the bus line that runs parallel to the monorail on the strip is $5 for a one-day pass. The monorail is faster, but the bus goes further. A family might take the monorail as a one-time thing, but you also would probably need to go on the Deuce to reach some important tourist areas (like Fremont Street). The LV monorail is losing money badly.
Different cities need to have different solutions to mass transit. Light rail works and probably costs the least to build, but you have the problem of finding a place for the trains to run (it’s better to keep them off the street; otherwise, why not just use buses?). Subways are hideously expensive, so monorails have an advantage over them.
They have a “sky train” in Chicago called The EL (for elevated).
My sister had an apartment that was next to it. The train ran about 40 feet outside her barred window and when the train passed you could see everything roll off the tables.
As I said in the other thread, light rail is being used as an option which can run on simple elevated structures when needed (and without the blight of old-school American elevated railroads), but can also run at ground level, as trams/streetcars, or using disused rail routes.
One of the things I rant about when we take the kids to Disneyland is the sorry state of Tomorrowland. When Walt first built Disneyland, Tomorrowland really was supposed to be a realistic vision of things to come. They had the House of Tomorrow, the Rocketship to the Moon, the Carousel of Progress and other attractions based on the idea of industrial progress for a better future.
Now it’s all just Fantasyland, Part 2: Star Wars, Buzz Lightyear, Space Mountain, Honey I Shrunk the Audience. Meh.
If I were Robert Iger I’d rip it all out and start again from scratch. The monorail can stay – it’s still kind of true to the original vision. But everything else would be replaced with our best guess of what the future, say 2060 or so, will actually look like. Giant windmills and solar panels. Energy-efficient mass transit. Genetic engineering. Robot probes to Alpha Centauri.
Monorails, I’m afraid, are butt ugly and are the work of Satan’s minions. As noted above, we have one in Sydney, and it’s a useless, overpriced tourist’s toy that is a blight on the streetscape.
Monorails are sucky for many reasons:
“Eyesore-ness”: they almost don’t look too bad in the somewhat sympathetic environment of a theme park or a recreational precinct in a downtown area, but to have them seriously used for regulr transportation, they’d need to be extended out into the suburbs, and would you want one down your quiet, leafy street?
Grade separation: Monorails require people to take the time to climb stairs or ride an elscalator/elevator to access them. Sure, subways do too, but subways move a lot more people, and the rides tend to be longer. On the other hand, monorails in practice tend to be for short distance inner city “hops”, and in this they lose out to the street-level light rail/tram systems where people can hop on and off at a whim (with their heavy shopping bags). Also, monorails can operate at street level, but they are incompatible with other traffic, and need to have their own fenced-off right of way (again, ugly and inconvenient).
Capacity: Most monorails only move a fraction of the people a light rail system can move.
Cost: Monorails tend to be orphan technology: whereas a light rail operator can order off-the-shelf cars from a number of international manufacturers who can pass on savings from their economies of scale, monorails are very few in number and operators tend to be locked in to the original manufacturer for spares and replacements. Also, large monorail networks (beyond a simple loop) are very expensive to install because of the complex switching mechanisms required.
Environment: you just can’t beat high passenger volumes on steel-on-steel low rolling resistance. Tried and true technology. (most monorails are rubber tyred).
Tackiness: It’s all a bit 60s, dahhlings. The Simpsons nailed it.
For most cities, I’d support 1435mm gauge, 600-750v DC catenary light rail running on conventional track, with a mix of on-street and dedicated right of way running as fits each city.
/dont get me wrong, I think it’s pretty fabulous too - but it’s got to be in context, and using it as a basis for one of the major forms of transport (and first impressions visitors get) of a 21st Century city is probably not a good idea. I mean, I love huge cars with tailfins too, but you wouldn’t want them as a fleet of cabs.
Yes, but you must take a 10 minute hike through the casinos just to get to the stations. My father, stepmonster*, and I wanted to go from the Monte Carlo to Treasure Island one night. I suggested we take the Deuce, or walk preferably. The stepmonster didn’t want to walk (she walks at the pace of a snail’s bowel movements) and she said we could take the monorail instead of the bus. Ok, so we ended up taking one of the other trains from the M.C. to the Belaggio, across the strip to Bally’s, through the casino, waited 15 minutes for the next monorail to go two stations away, through another casino (Harrahs? I think), then across the street again to TI. Total trip time was over an hour. We could have walked there in 20 minutes (given the monster’s speed).
Needless to say, we took the bus back. Fare for the three of us cost less then one ticket on the monorail, the buses run about every 60 seconds, and the trip from TI to the M.C. took about 10 minutes.
If the monorail ran in front of the casinos, rather then behind them, it would be useful, but in it’s current route, it sucks.
*She lives within a five minute walk to a Tri-Met light rail station in the Portland area, she works at Tri-Met, which has a light rail station at the front door of the building (>10 minute trip), yet she drives to work. Every Day. And she wants to take the train in Vegas. :rolleyes:
Sorry, wolf in second hand clothing, the mob has spoken.
Then you don’t want to see what they did with the “future” portion of Spaceship Earth. It appears that in the future …We’ll all live in Jetsons-esque cartoons with our robotic maids and flying cars. There aren’t enough roll-eyes in the world for that one.
Oh boy, my firstthread hijack!
Where I live, it’s a 20 minute walk to the nearest Metro stop. Which is in…
Yes, I walk to the airport to catch the train. It’s elevated too!
I remember…it was during the Years of Disillusionment (i.e. the 1970s) that this change began. I remember specifically the Carousel of Progress morphing into America Sings, which really doesn’t have anything to do with “Tomorrow” at all, does it? If they’d had a Tribute to Nirvana in 1975, of course, that would have been different.
As far as transportation is concerned, perhaps around 1960 there was this notion that people living in major cities would gladly give up their cars, or at least reduce their day-to-day driving, that smooth and fast transit systems would be developed*, and that urban development would follow the transit in a way that made its use practical for most people. As we’ve seen, what happened is the polar opposite of that, as suburbs sprawled further out and most of us became even more dependent on cars. I attribute that to population growth and to the abiding American cultural meme that children can’t be raised in apartments. There MUST be a yard, presumably so you can give them something to do to earn their allowance, I suppose.
*L.A.s bus agency was renamed the Rapid Transit District in the early 1960s, because there really was some vague plan to put in monorails or subways. It took until 1990 before they got the first rail line built, and much of that was using an existing rail right of way.
