Disney's future: Public transportation

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Damn. Now I have to go to Orlando. I had hoped not to ever have to go anywhere near Florida. Do they still have the huge city diorama as you exit? That thing was more awesome than the ride.

Disney offered to do all the engineering and design work for a citywide system in LA for free, and they were turned down. More recently, Seattle voted to install a monorail system, but were fought tooth and nail, by the usual suspects.

Monorails are cheaper to build, cheaper to operate, can be constructed in a a fraction of the the time, and have more flexible routing than any other form of mass transit, but there is too little digging, not enough concrete involved, etc. This reduces the opportunity to hide graft and political kickbacks.

So, we can be sure of an unbiased analysis from YOU!

Chicken meet egg, egg meet chicken.

The 12 mile system at DW moves 150,000 people a day. The most used light rail in LA is the Blue Line, and only manages 70,000 trips a day, even with almost double the length, and with many more stations. It is also our most used line, with SRO the norm during rush periods.

Well, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To rail geeks like you and me, rails on ties and and a thicket of catenary may be a sight for sore eyes, but I doubt the average citizen would agree. I wouldn’t want light rail down my “quiet leafy street” either. They routed the Gold Line down a few of those. The result? The need to operate at restricted speeds without using warning whistles. Now you have an increased trip time and reduced safety. Lovely!

Ooh, one has to take a 20 second escalator ride to get to the station! Gonna miss that train! :rolleyes: A lot of light rail stations require this as well. The majority of the Gold Line, Blue Line and Green Line stations here require an escalator/elevator ride.

But just keep dissing them. The mafioso contractors that line their pockets on bloated rail projects that drag on for years, if not decades, sincerely thank you! You might not find such gratitude from the hundreds of businesses that are driven into bankruptcy by the ridiculously expensive and highly disruptive “trench and cover” method that is used. I worked in Mid-Wilshire during Red Line construction, and you just haven’t lived until you have had to spend time in an already gridlocked area undergoing this sort of thing. And it gets old, especially after a couple of YEARS. Light rail is often no better, disruption wise. Merchants in east LA where they are constructing the Gold Line extension, are reporting problems similar to that experienced during Red Line construction.

I am also a big rail enthuiast (longstanding member of the Great Northern Railway Historical Society) and a model railroader, but even I can see that in many situations, monorails rule over light rail.

I support the “subway to the sea” that would extend our Red Line to Santa Monica, but don’t expect to live long enough to see it’s completion. They could string a monorail down Wilshire in a couple of year’s time, easy-peasy. I guess if you care what your grandkids are riding…

22

And you talk as though grade separation is a bad thing. In fact, it is highly desirable from a safety and speed point of view. One of the problems with rail is that it often runs at grade level, because it is so damn expensive to elevate. The Blue Line, as it wends it’s way south out of downtown, runs at grade, and six months don’t go by without some idiot motorist turning in front of the train, damaging rolling stock and shutting down the line.

23

And I find it especially interesting how the Seattle monorail plan was so quickly and thoroughly quashed, even though it was the desire of the voters to have it built.

I guess the light-rail barons and politicos really didn’t want any cats to get out of the bag on that one. Construction of the Seattle system would have been the death knell for light rail, and they knew it. That’s why the wishes of the electorate were subverted. :mad:

24

As I think about it, other safety factors come to mind. Because monorails straddle a huge beam, instead of having insubstatial flanges to keep them on the track, this will never happen. I get the heebie jeebies on some of the elevated sections of light rail out here in earthquake country.

Also, since monorails ride on the eeeevil rubber tires, they can stop on a dime compared to traditional rail so something like this is far less likely to happen as well.

25

Hmmm… I can’t remember off-hand. However, I can save you a trip to Florida if you’d rather just look here :smiley:

26

The eternal dilemma in regard to at-grade or elevated rail mass transit is that while it would be ideal to live two blocks from the metro station, few suburbanites want the tracks to run through their neighborhoods.

27

That’s what Park & Ride is for. Run them through the business districts.

28

Disney designed that thing in Detoit?

29

Um, no.

30

Actually, it was the Seattle voters who killed the monorail plan. Once the Seattle Monorail board (who had been happily granting themselves massive ‘job well done!’ raises for no particular reason) annouced the estimated cost of the first line to be built, the voters forced a new approval election and killed the plan and the monorail board.

It was going to cost billions of dollars just to build the first line, and the board naively proposed paying the cost by issuing 50-year bonds, supported by massive tax increases. And that was just to build the first line. More money and more bonds would have to be issued to build the second line, and the third line, etc. The Seattle voters decided that they’d had enough of that scheme.

(I was living there at the time.)

31

So the folks in charge of the plan were incompetent and demonstrably corrupt, and developed a plan that was too expensive, coupled with a financing scheme that wouldn’t pass the laugh test, and WHEN ASKED they didn’t bother to come up with something more reasonable. Did it ever occur to you that the folks on the planning board might have been gotten to? How they came up with such a bloated budged it beyond me:

Average cost/mile:

Subway- 300-500M
Light rail- 100-200M
Monorail- 50-100M

So the original fourteen mile Green Line should have come in at under a billion, if it had been designed with any competence or sincerity, and would have been a fraction of the cost of any other mode. I guess what the Seattle voters were saying was “we don’t want mass transit, even at the lowest cost per mile available.” So be it. Enjoy yer gridlock.

32

And in an area like Seattle, with it’s convoluted topography, a Monorail is pretty much the ONLY mode for mass transit that is feasible.

Another thing that is not often considered is ongoing costs. Monorails require virtually ZERO in terms of maintenance of way expenses. A lot of people don’t realize the incredible expense involved in keeping traditional rights of way in service.

Broken/rotten ties need to be replaced. Herbicide needs to be applied every year to keep down weeds. Track has to be periodically reballasted. The rail itself requires a lot of care. It must be inspected and magnafluxed for hidden flaws, and checked to insure that it remains in gauge. The surface of the rail must be occasionally reground to maintain contour, or friction will start wearing out the wheelsets of trains passing over. After a decade or two, the head has been ground to the minimum safe thickness and the entire rail needs to be scrapped and replaced, an operation that rivals the original construction in cost, and that is highly disruptive to operations.

AFAIK, the original track installed at Disneyland is the one you still see today. That is almost 50 years of service. I lived within a few blocks of Disneyland for many years, and have driven past the track along Harbor Blvd. almost every day, and I never noticed any maintenance going on aside from the inspection car going over it.

Monorail track, being a simple reinforced concrete beam, only requires a simple inspection for cracking and spalling, and virtually no maintenance.

33

I like the “Skytrain,” although I hate the stupid name. (This name was arrived at by selecting from suggestions from Vancouver Province readers. The Vancouver Province is written for readers of grade six English. Stellar.)

It gets better and better - the original “Expo Line” suffers from a uniformity of station design - very 1980s “futuristic.”

The “Millennium Line” stations are less offensive architecturally. (Actually, I think they’re rather nice - and they fit in with their respective neighborhoods a little better.)

I’m looking forward to the completion of the new lines, especially the one that runs south out to the suburb (err, neighbouring municipality) of Richmond. Currently it takes approximately forever to get out there on public transit (and nearly as long by car.) One thing about the Skytrain - it is smoking fast. It quickly accelerates to about 100 clicks (~55mph) and only stops at its widely-spaced stations.

We took the Seattle Monorail last fall. It’s cool just because it’s so freaking 1960s. It totally reminded me of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. :smiley:

34

Message too short? Hope not!

35

All this ignoring the last few decades of light rail? Little things like concrete tracks, and inclines and curves which make things seems more like a 60s monorail? Apart from the use of two pieces of steel rather than one, a lot of the ‘monorail’ concept it being put to work in many places.

36

Like Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook!

37

Happy Wanderer, before I address your multiple posts (and you raise some interesting points), can I get clarification on your definition of “light rail”, please? Some of the things you mention (rotting ties, “maze of catenary” etc) seem to be more in tune with heavy rail traditional railroads. I’m talking here about more-or-less bus-sized streetcars/trams/LRVs. And 21st century technology ones, at that.

38

Yes, that’s what I am talking about. I gave several examples of lines like that in LA, the Blue, Green and Gold lines are typical light rail. Google LACMTA for the wiki page and there will be a link to all those lines.

Now we are building the “Expo” line here (currently the microencephalic politicians are fighting tooth and nail over what color the line will eventually be designated as: “purple” “no, brown!” “PURPLE I SAID!” :rolleyes: ), and it is a prime example of one of the (if not THE) biggest problems with light rail. It is darn hard to route, and usually winds up on abandoned freight right of way, which is almost never the ideal alignment. We will have a multi-million dollar rail line that runs right through a warehouse district. I am sure all those boxes in the warehouse will be riding every day. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

With a monorail, it is happy running above a street, over a hill, around a sharp bend, it can easily dip under or pop over obstructions because it can negotiate grade percentages many times that of rail, again due to those eeeevil rubber tires. For this reason you can put it right where the riders are, instead of the few places that are feasible without massive condemnation of existing property or expensive tunneling.

I guess I just wish that there was a more viable monorail industry. That would do a lot to make it more cost effective. Vancouver seems to have had a good experience with monorails. They are building more at any rate. And in Seattle, a city I have spent a fair amount of time in, I cannot picture any other mode working out, it being so hilly and twisty up there.

Of course, if you listen to the asinine “bus rider’s union” here in LA, the answer is more buses, or as I call them, “rolling roadblocks”. Yeah, that’ll cure the gridlock. Not enough :rolleyes: in the world for that one!

We are desperate for transit here, literally in actual gridlock in many places, and all the easy alignments have already been used or will be soon, and we still will need more.

This ain’t Europe. Street level alignments make traffic worse by removing at least three lanes from service. We use our transit to get to work, not pop down a few stops to get some baguettes at the bakery. That means we need speed and that means grade separation.

At that point, the only two alternatives will be tunneling, and the only alignment that would support that investment is the Red Line down the Wilshire corridor, which I support, or something else. I wonder what that could be. :wink:

39

Incidentally, I think Disney is one of the prime reasons monorails aren’t more prevalent. By putting them in his parks he made them seem more like toys than viable transportation, and given the enemies of monorails the perfect slur:

“Look fella, do you want REAL TRANSIT or something Mickey Mouse? Now sign here!”

40

What’s the (functional) difference between a monorail and conventional light rail systems?