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As anyone who travels by car in Los Angeles can tell you, traffic can be a real pain in the ass. Just try getting from the Valley to Santa Monica in under an hour or from Santa Monica to Downtown without several tense moments and feelings of complete hopelessness, and you'll know what we mean.
And God forbid if there is ever even a minor fender bender. The whole thing just grinds to a halt on both sides. Why people feel compelled to slow down and see an accident we still don't really understand. In short, the freeway system in Los Angeles is a mess and no one seems to have an idea how to fix it. That is, until now.
Ray Bradbury, noted author of "The Martian Chronicles", "Fahrenheit 451" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes" has the answer in his recent piece for the Los Angeles Times. He wants Los Angeles to build a monorail system.
His comments and observations are very interesting and hopefully will spark debate and lead to action on this type of project. Really, anything that will help with the traffic problem is welcome. Sometimes the more radical idea ends up being the right solution.
Maybe a monorail system is the way to go? But no matter what changes are proposed or how radical they seem, at some point, as Mr. Bradbury points out in his piece, the traffic on the freeways is just going to come to a grinding halt from too many cars and not enough room for them. On that day, it might be too late to fix it. Why not start making plans to fix it now? And maybe those plans should include a monorail.
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I hate to be the killjoy on this subject because I like Ray Bradbury...as a science fiction writer. His transportation solutions, however, are hoplelessly naive.
For starters:
In November 2005, by a 64-34 vote, Seattle voters killed off plans for a modern monorail system due to spiraling costs (projected @ $11 billion after 50 years of interest payments on bonds) for an ever-shrinking coverage area (originally two lines totaling 40 miles, reduced to one, 10 mile route).
http://www.seattlechannel.org/issues/monorail.asp
In July 2005, bonds used to finance construction of Las Vegas' $650 million 4-mile monorail system were dropped to junk status due to poor ridership. The system was also shutdown for 107 days in 2004 due to parts falling off the Bombardier M-VI trainsets.
The Seattle Monorail Project failed due to a poor finance plan, not due to the technology. The $11 billion referred to by hearattackandvine was a result of that poor finance plan. As for Las Vegas, stay tuned. Despite low ridership on the current 4-mile run, plans are under way to triple the length of the system, including a run to the airport. Being privately financed, somebody there believes! And by the way, a few dropped bolts doesn't equate to the horrendous accident rate of light rail (trains in traffic?!!), nor is the price anywhere near the tax dollar sucking beast-subway.
Kim Pedersen; President; The Monorail Society; monorails.org
As they used to say on X Files, "I want to believe!"
It's not some vast bureaucratic conspiracy like Mr. Petersen will have you think. Monorails simply fail the public transportation test because they cannot run the same headways, speed or capacity of elevated light rail (which do not get in traffic accidents either). The idea that a monorail system could be built faster and cheaper in L.A. (or any other major U.S. city for that matter) is pure folly. We need to expand and upgrade what we have with our existing infrastructure by creating branch extensions, more grade seperations, express track, electrification of the 5 county Metrolink commuter rail system, and more transit oriented development (TODs).
i can't help thinking this was just as interesting when i read it on boing boing first this morning. (or last week, when bradbury's piece was published along with yet another tale of metro woe from an la times opinion writer.)
as a transportation planning graduate student i must say - i can't believe ray bradbury is serious - the mta can barely afford to run its buses at more frequent intervals, which is perhaps the best solution. in an area that is sometimes described as polycentric, but more more accurately as dispersed with minimal centers, an overblown rail system makes little sense unless we think 3,000 - 5,000 riders a day is worth $700 million/mile. perhaps we should focus on more realistic solutions:
1. increase bus service
2. more rapid bus lanes with dedicated lanes and full signal priority over traffic intersections
3. price the freeways - allow single occupant vehicles to buy their way on to HOV lanes at prices that allow for free flowing HOV lane traffic.
4. increase employer vanpool and carpool programs
Actually, Josh, as a fellow transportation planning grad student (USC), I can tell you that Los Angeles has very well-defined centers and corridors relative to all but a few urban areas in the United States. Christian Redfearn and Genevieve Giuliano, at USC, have done some excellent work in measuring job concentrations and other determinations of what is a "center." The Wilshire corridor and downtown Los Angeles are incredibly job-rich areas, making a subway eminently feasible. Giuliano--no railfan herself--has said that a Wilshire subway to the sea would be one of the most heavily ridden lines in the world, and easily the most so in the United States.
I can't believe Bradbury and other monorail advocates would think that monorail construction wouldn't be disruptive, though. Building a subway is only disruptive when shoddy contracting leads to ground subsidence, and new immediate-concrete-injection tunneling engines (like the ones MTA bought for the Eastside Gold Line) make this a lot less probable than in years past. Building a monorail, on the other hand, would require planting 6-foot-diameter (anything smaller wouldn't pass seismic codes--they ran into this problem in Seattle) precast concrete pylons every 100 feet or so, along major streets and/or freeways. Where there aren't big medians available (and those are few and far between), there are three options for doing this: 1) narrowing/eliminating sidewalks; 2) narrow/eliminating traffic lanes; 3) taking property. Oh no, that's not at all disruptive, Mr. Bradbury.
I'm stunned that anybody would compare an automated monorail system (or other grade separated system) with at-grade bus or trolley. Automation is wonderful.
Subways are (for the moment) MUCH more expensive to install than monorail. Go google Las Vegas monorail construction pictures. monorails.org has some. Now go look at the Big Dig. Consider how many pipes and footings must be dealt with in order to tunnel.
Monorail seems to be profitable when > 75,000 riders use it (on average by track mile) every day. So wherever the formula can work, put it in. What will Subway cost? Trolley? Bus? All have their place.
I suggest starting with satellite parking garages for daily attractors in the area. Link the garages with the attractor via automated transit.
Later, Use lighter transit to provide feeders to the heavier transit. Give me H-Bahn to my office complex. Link it 2 miles to the monorail and from there to the high speed rail. H-Bahn is like a jumbo elevator that moves sideways, at 40 miles per hour, suspended from a rather thin metal rail. Then at the other end, I'll take a bus from the heavy metal rail to my subdivision (not as much traffic, much more spread out than my office). It might take me 5 vehicles to get home but if there are no more than 5 minutes wait at each station and they move at 45mph at least then driving through the suburbs and on nasty slow highways will no longer look so shiny.
Other formula. The time it takes to use the transit system can't take more time than my worst commuting day ever and shouldn't take more than 50% of the time of my best day.
Cost of operation for ME shouldn't be more than 40cents/mile.
What does that leave you? 100mph heavy metal rail, very short wait time for the feeders. Bus every 5 minutes? Hmm.. Not here where I live yet. H-bahn. Please? H-bahn across the neighborhoods. Hitachi or whatever linking the H-bahn hubs.
I like it. Can we have it please please? I'll pay $250/month to use it.
Did I see somebody say "price the freeways"? How about charging for all roads. This might give rail a fair shake. It is nuts to consider that drivers aren't paying for the roads but train and monorail users should. Even if we don't charge people for the roads, at least tell us how much they are costing. I suspect that my use of the roads costs more than my car ownership. Don't forget to include the cost of the real-estate. Monorail doesn't use much. Neither does H-bahn.
50% MORE time than my best day I meant.
Ah, monorails. Light rail capacity for third rail cost.
Pass.
Third of the cost? Does that factor in lifetime costs? What happens when you need a replacement part, any part, and it has to be custom made?
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we have a rail system, BART, built with a non-standard track gauge, which means everything, even a replacement track tie has to be custom built. Now that the trains are reaching the end of their lifes-span, the projected cost is 2-3 times the market rate of normal rail cars (putting it somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 million per car, multiplied by about 300 cars) and that's just because of the custom gauge, not an entirely different technology.
It looks like SkyTran takes a different approach to the 'standard' type of monorail.