Here's a fine article from the Sierra Club transportation chairs' list.
It appears, and I'm understating this, that conventional rail, that is, two
tracks on the ground, is far superior to monorail.
Studies have shown similar results--conventional rail's superiority--in
comparisons to maglev (magnetic levitation) systems, even at very high rail vehicle
speeds.
Tom
===========================================================
Subj: thanks to all those who called in!
Date: 10/10/2005 7:53:51 PM Central Daylight Time
From: [log in to unmask] (irvin dawid)
Sender: [log in to unmask] (Transportation
Chairs Forum)
Reply-to: <A HREF="mailto:[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]</A> (Transportation Chairs
Forum)
To: [log in to unmask]
Hi all you transit (and parking and land use) folks from around the country
(OK, from east and west coasts!)
I must say, the closing conversation about "is BRT a 'clean-coal' approach
to transit?" was certainly the most entertaining!
Here's the article I mentioned in regards to the SEA Monorail:
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/155ruffp.asp?Zoo
mFont=YES
Monorail!
Seattle's great mass transit project becomes a "Simpsons" punchline.
by James Thayer
10/07/2005 12:00:00 AM
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN a Jetsons future for Seattle. A gleaming new
monorail would silently skim along above the rooftops, whisking contented
commuters into the city so smoothly that not a ripple would mar the surfaces
of their $4 Tully's mint mochas. Seattle was so in love with this
vision--sleek, futuristic, anti-car--that voters had approved the proposed
monorail four times, most recently last November by a whopping 64 percent.
Today Seattle's monorail proposal is a smoldering wreck. The mayor, the
unanimous city council, and the newspapers have all done about-faces and
have turned against the proposal. So have the citizens: a recent poll shows
52 percent of Seattleites would now vote to cancel the monorail.
What happened? Events of the past few weeks show that even a tax-and-spend
bastion of social engineering such as Seattle will revolt when faced with a
public works dollar figure so vast that it can only be understood in
dollar-bills-laid-end-to-end-would-reach-Mars metaphors.
SEATTLE ALREADY HAS A MONORAIL, of course--a left-over from the 1962 World's
Fair. The cars travel one mile on an elevated track from the Seattle
Center--home of the Space Needle, another vestige of the fair--to a downtown
shopping complex called Westlake Center. The trip takes two minutes. Even
though it now needs $100 million to repair "an increasing number of cracks,"
as the Seattle Center director puts it, and even though the entire system
was closed for seven months last year to repair damage caused by a fire,
Seattleites love this old monorail, which stands as a reminder of past
glory. After all, the World's Fair monorail even made the cover of Life
Magazine in 1962.
Affection for the World's Fair monorail is what begot the new monorail in
the first place. In 1997 Dick Falkenbury, a Seattle cab driver whom a local
alternative paper has called "an unrepentant eccentric, " and a "giant,
long-torsoed galoot of a man with scraggly hair and an unkempt, almost
haphazard appearance" drew an X on a piece of paper and proclaimed it to
represent Seattle's transportation future: a 40-mile monorail system that
would connect four corners of the city. Falkenbury began holding meetings
and gathering signatures.
City leaders were at first cool to the idea. Perhaps they understood that a
monorail is an inflexible transportation systems, unable to adjust to the
relative growth of neighborhoods by altering its route. Perhaps they had
driven down Fifth Avenue--below the existing World's Fair monorail--and knew
that the rails cast the street in perpetual shadow, and that the massive
concrete supports planted in the middle of the street were traffic hazards,
and ugly to boot.
Perhaps they listened to University of Pennsylvania professor Vukan R.
Vuchic, who wrote in the Seattle Times that comprehensive engineering
studies by Frankfurt, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. revealed that the
advantages of rail and bus systems far outweigh those of a monorail: a
monorail is less comfortable for riders because the interiors are small (the
height of the monorail car is an illusion created by the skirts hanging over
the wheels); a monorail is subject to price gouging because the systems are
proprietary and few suppliers exist; and monorails are more expensive than
light rail lines to build and operate.
Indeed, most monorails are used only for special purposes: as amusement park
rides or airport shuttles. Those few cities that have built monorails for
commuters--mostly in Japan--have learned their lesson: no city has built a
second monorail line after building the first.
BUT SEATTLEITES seized on the idea of a new monorail. In 1997, when monorail
supporters argued that the private sector would pay for much of the cost,
voters approved the concept of the monorail. Three years later they approved
$6 million for planning. Then in 2002 voters turned serious, passing Citizen
Proposition 1, establishing a car tab tax to pay for the first segment of
the monorail, the 14-mile Green Line. If private sector interest had ever
existed, as supporters had claimed, it had vanished. The Green Line was to
be paid solely by automobile owners, an annual tax of 1.4 percent of the
vehicle's value, $140 on a $10,000 vehicle. The initiative set the bonding
cap at $1.5 billion.
Those concerned about street-level aesthetics were calmed by a lovely
drawing of the proposed structure, showing thin rails and narrow (three feet
wide), curving supports resembling swans' necks. Pedestrians would hardly
even see the thing.
It mattered little to Seattleites that the proposed 14-mile Green Line
essentially went nowhere. At the south end was West Seattle, as sleepy a
place as exists in the city. At the north end was Ballard, another quiet
neighborhood. The line didn't go near the area's hot spots: the airport, the
Microsoft campus, the University of Washington, the Boeing plants, the
bustling Eastside. Nor did it closely parallel the perpetually clogged
north-south freeway, Interstate 5. But the Green Line was, after all, only
the first segment. The monorail would eventually reach these busy areas. It
would all work out and, filled with confidence, the Seattle Monorail
Project's board of directors vowed to spend one percent of the budget, up to
$6 million, on public art for the Green Line.
There were still a few doubters, though, and they managed in November 2004
to put before Seattle voters another initiative that would have revoked city
permits required to build the monorail. Seattleites hooted, rejecting the
initiative with 64 percent of the vote. Seattle was going to embrace its
bold future.
BUT THEN the silent rubber wheels began falling off the proposed monorail. A
new drawing--one that portrayed actual engineering--showed that the rail
supports would be six-feet wide, not the slender three-feet which had been
promised. The new monorail's support structure would be as homely as the old
monorail's. The Green Line would consist of fourteen miles of these squat
concrete plugs.
Then the Green Line's finances were revealed to be a fanciful mess. Revenue
projections had been inflated. By terms of the 2002 initiative, the car tax
is the only allowable source of public revenue for the monorail. The
monorail agency had projected a 6.1 percent annual increase in car tab
revenues. A watchdog group convincingly argued that this figure was high by
a third, and that car tax revenue would fall far short. It was also
discovered that some of the projected revenues came from areas outside the
city limits, which could not be taxed by the Seattle commission.
And then the bombshell: the Seattle Monorail Authority announced that the
Green Line would not cost $1.6 billion as initially conceived. Instead,
agency expenses, beautification funds, and other costs had raised the price
to $2.1 billion. Local newspapers showed that some of these funds would have
to be raised by issuing bonds at interest rates of 8 percent, and that the
cost of the Green Line and its debt would be $11 billion by the time the
bonds were retired. Seattleites would be paying off the bonds for 50 years.
The Washington state treasurer, the well-respected Democrat Mike Murphy,
announced that car tax revenues wouldn't even pay for half the Green Line.
Eleven billion dollars over 50 years? This was too big of a cash wad even
for progressive Seattle. A construction cost-to-debt ratio of 1-to-5, when
the normal public works ratio is 1-to-2? Eleven billion was four times the
project's initial cost estimate. Murphy called the financing plan
"ludicrous."
Newspapers and talk radio stations were suddenly filled with angst and
vituperation. Anti-monorail pressure rose. The Monorail Project board
chairman, Tom Weeks, and the project's executive director, Joel Horn,
resigned. Mayor Greg Nickels--once an avid supporter--announced he was
canceling street-use construction permits, saying the board had a "lack of
understanding . . . of the project's financial problems."
Only two of the monorail commission board's nine seats are elected by the
public, and in the September 20 primary election the leading vote-getters
for both seats were monorail skeptics. In fact, more than skeptical:
Successful candidate Jim Nobles had said, "I am running for the Seattle
Popular Monorail Board for the sole purpose of closing down the project and
dissolving the agency." He received 40 percent of the vote, compared to 34
percent for his opponent, a monorail supporter. The other anti-monorail
candidate did even better. On September 21, the city council unanimously
passed a resolution saying the project should be cancelled. Councilman David
Della called it "a nightmare."
Members of the monorail board may be the last residents of Seattle to
understand the new anti-monorail dynamic. Monorail project board member
Cindi Laws was fairly spitting: "The [city] council didn't jerk the permits.
It jerked the voters." Last Friday the monorail board voted to place a
shorter, less expensive monorail on the ballot in November.
Seattleites are now wary of the monorail board and of its rickety financing
schemes. While Seattle's propensity to tax itself and to punish automobile
drivers shouldn't be underestimated, it is probably too late to resuscitate
the monorail project, and unless there is a drastic change in voter
sentiment between now and November the new proposal will fail. Seattle will
have to make do with only one monorail.
James Thayer's twelfth novel, The Gold Swan, has been published by Simon &
Schuster.
Best,
Irv/ Sustainable Land Use (SLU) chair
http://lomaprieta.sierraclub.org/slu/
Cell: 650-283-6534
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