This thread on streetcars – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=292562 – got me to thinking. What ever happened to monorails as a mass-transit technology? Weren’t they supposed to be the wave of the future once? (Just like air cars, food pills, and cities under the sea.) And now they’re a stock joke from The Simpsons. Otherwise, we hardly hear about them any more. We never even expect to see them outside Walt Disney World.
But what makes monorails unworkable? Or even inferior to streetcars or light rail systems? Hanging the cars from elevated guiderails gives you a lot more options in placing the lines. I’ve heard, though I’m not sure on this point, that monorail tracks are even cheaper to build. Seattle has a brand-new monorail system. http://www.seattlemonorail.com/ In fact, Pinellas County, Florida (across the bay from Tampa), which has had no local rail transit since the streetcar lines were dismantled in the '50s, is planning to build a new monorail system. See http://www.pinellasmobility.com/index.htm.
You see monorails all over the place in limited applications, such as running people around between terminals in big airports.
I don’t see why a MONOrail, in particular, has an advantage over a rail system with two rails. So it may simply be that two-rail standardization has won out. The question then is why you don’t see more elevated trains in general, either mono- or bi-rail.
My guess would be that
They’re noisy.
They’re kind of an eyesore. They look good at first, I guess, but eventually they get grimy and yecchy.
Even well planned, they take up a significant footprint. Subways, while more difficult and expensive to construct, don’t. And space is a premium in a big city.
Streetcars take up a significant footprint. An elevated monorail line’s footprint is limited to the points where the poles touch the ground; you could run the line over a street, over a sidewalk, over anything but a skyscraper.
I agree, but then I hate streetcars, too. Toronto’s streetcars are an ungodly eyesore and a terrible nuisance, and add maybe 10% of the public transit capacity that just adding some more buses would have accomplished.
However, in a sufficiently large city, an elevated train system isn’t just competing with streetcars, it’s also competing with buses (which take up essentially no footprint, are cheaper, and far more flexible) and subways (very expensive but zero footprint, very efficient, and don’t get in the way of traffic.)
Modern tram systems have no problem with elevated sections that take up the same space as a monorail would. And they can climb surprisingly steep inclines, to cross major road juctions etc. And (as mentioned in the streetcar thread) they can easily make use of old railways with less adjustment than might be necessary for monorails.
The simple problem which rules out most uses of monorails is that, at street level, you can’t have a flat crossing with a road. You’d have to build some complex (i.e. expensive) opening section, which with the frequency of service expected with urban transport, would block the road most of the time. So the only solution is to make the whole thing elevated, which drives up the cost (unless sections of street running were never an option in the first place).
Another thought about the Japanese examples - are there any safety benefits compared to two rails in earthquakes?
Others have mentioned the relatively high expense of the required elevated line, but I’ll throw in a couple of others major limitations:
The difficulty of making a relatively simple turnout (track switch) that would allow branching routes. Switches can be done, but they tend to be large and mechanically complex devices that are very expensive to build and maintain. This means that practical monorails are pretty much limited to unconnected, point-to-point routes, without the capacity of multi-track lines or the efficiencies of using multiple feeder routes that join a main line to a central station, as is done with commuter rail or tram lines.
Fixed train lengths, although this can be a problem for any other passenger rail type as well. Practically speaking, a fixed-length train has to be designed for rush-hour passenger loadings, so during other times of the day, trains tend to run well under their capacity, driving up costs. The only option is to reduce train frequency during non-peak periods, making the transit line less useful and driving away some of the non-peak passengers who would use the line if it timings were more convenient
Why don’t most monorails have separate cars that can be easily coupled or uncoupled, thus varying train capacity? Well, mainly because of the inability to easily switch from track to track, which would be necessary to make up and break down trains.
Neither of these problems is insurmountable, but the general impression in the rail industry seems to be that monorails end up being much higher-cost to operate than more conventional rail lines of the same or greater capacity.
My take is that monorail (and other rail) promoters overpromised (as far as projected ridership/demand) and underdelivered (as far as cost overruns and actual ridership), and it left a bad taste in people’s mouth. The fact is that America in particular still has relatively low population density, and any rail project is going to work best in places with very high population density.
This paper, though it’s in the context of high-speed rail (which is to the current era what the monorail hype was to the '70s and '80s), mentions Miami’s MetroRail, which never hit its ridership targets and which encountered massive cost overruns and delays (and which bizarrely doesn’t go anywhere you would want to go in Miami, e.g., the airport, the Orange Bowl, or the beach). Instead, it goes to a bunch of underpopulated or poor areas whose council members successfully lobbied for stations. And, though originally billed as a sleek monorail, it is just an elevated bi-rail train on tracks.
I analogize it to the boom in building stadiums with public money on the assumption that they would magically pay for themselves. Communities bought into that notion for about 25 years, but now are more skeptical.
In Marge vs. the Monorail, Lisa Simpson makes the observation that Springfield is a centrally planned city where the costs of the monorail would far outway the benefits.
For the record, the link to the Seattle monorail website provided in the OP is not for our new one as described. It’s actually a promotional site for the old short-line system put in for the 1962 World’s Fair.
The site for the new system, which has not yet begun construction, is here. After the initial public vote in favor, we have voted down three separate attempts to kill the project, mostly financed by downtown property owners who think their lots will be devalued by having a transit line located next to them, which makes no sense to me.
It will be interesting to see, in ten years or so, whether all the criticisms leveled by the naysayers in town (many of which are replicated here) are borne out. Me, I’m a big supporter. Sprawl is killing the area; we desperately need to centralize the city and increase density. We won’t know if this is the right solution until it’s actually running, but considering we’ve been completely incapable of getting anything else underway, I’d rather try something and have either a spectacular success or a spectacular failure than continue dying the death of a thousand cuts we’re suffering right now.
I invite you to walk down any street in Toronto used by streetcars and look up at the ugly-ass spiderweb of streetcar cables drooping all over the street, like some sort of Third World laundry drying facility.
And I don’t know exactly what a “tram” is - I assume thatyou mean a streetcar - but explain to me why a streetcar, which is basically a bus that runs on wires, provides more capacity than a bus? And with buses you have the flexibility of having them go wherever you wish and stop wherever you like, without the concern of stringing up more ugly-ass wires.
Sydney, Australia, has a monorail that follows a loop through the central business district. The single uprights take up a pretty small space on the sidewalk. It’s not a very big system, but if it goes where you want to go it’s a great way to get there.
IIRC, it went like this:
LISA: Why would you build a mass transit system in a small town with a centralized population?
LYLE LANLEY: That’s the most intelligent question I’ve heard yet! I could answer it, but nobody in this room would understand the answer except you and me – and that includes your teacher!
LISA: [blushes and giggles]
LYLE LANLEY: Yes, you over there, eating the paste!
But the answer is really very obvious: This “small town with a centralized population” nevertheless seems to have a lot of cars on the roads and streets, doesn’t it? How does Homer get to work (well, all right, get to the nuclear power plant) every morning? By car. How does everybody get to the mall, to the Quiki Mart, to practically anywhere else? By car. That is a bad and unsustainable situation (because of emissions, global warming, declining petroleum reserves, wars in the Middle East, enormous public and social costs of an all–pervasive automobile-dependent transportation system, etc., etc.), which a mass transit system could go some way towards changing. Of course, ordinary electric streetcars might work better for Springfield.
A modern tram has a passenger capacity of several hundred people. To equal that, a five-minute service would require a bus every 45 seconds or so. Which obviously doesn’t exist anywhere, and would have a far greater detrimental effect on the road-space available for other vehicles.
Of course, looking at photos, I realise that the Toronto system doesn’t exactly count as modern. So it’s not fair to compare it to a modern bus system as proof of trams being less capable. On the other hand, I can barely even see the wires
(And I don’t think anybody will claim that trams can replace buses - of course the flexibility to change routes etc is important, but it isn’t nearly as necessary on major routes.)
've always wondered about this too. My thoughts are:
-Monorails LOOK high tech and futuristic, but they are not very good! They work less reliably than standard trolley cars. Take a look at the famous monrial in Disneyland, (Orlando). It is actually pretty slow and bumpy. And the cost of building stations in the sky is pretty high.
The solution is NOT to build more of these disasters…it is to get people to work from home. Don’t commute-communicate!
I’m not familiar with trams in the UK, but the ones I have seen–San Francisco, Melbourne, Amsterdam–appear to carry less than a hundred passengers. Am I mistaken?
The spiderweb of wires above the tram systems I’ve used really are quite ugly, particularly at four-way intersections. They would contrast with modern cities where there’s an effort to place power below ground to improve aesthetics and reduce maintenance costs. In addition, tram rails at street level make life difficult for people with impaired mobility and are a danger for bicycle and scooter users, since they’re slippery and have ruts.
