Mumbai opened a monorail last week, the first 12 miles of what is planned to be an 84-mile system costing a total of US$2 billion. A high-density city like Mumbai may be one of the few places in the world where rail transit makes sense. But the Mumbai monorail has a design flaw that makes it as stupid as the most idiotic rail lines in the United States (of which there are many candidates).
Not only are the monorail trains small, their average speed is just 20 mph. Wikimedia commons photo.
That flaw is that the trains are no more than six short cars long, and can run only every three minutes. Even at crush capacity, the system can move only 7,400 people per hour. That’s a tiny fraction of what a real high-capacity rail system can move. New York’s Eighth Avenue subway line can move 30 ten-car trains per hour, and each car has a crush capacity of 240 people, making it capable of moving 72,000 people per hour. Americans won’t accept crush-capacity conditions, but even at American levels of crowding, New York subways can move at least six times as many people per hour as the Mumbai monorail.
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If you’re going to spend billions of dollars building a rail line in a dense city, you should at least build one that has the capacity to move large numbers of people. Not surprisingly, the early reports from Mumbai are that the train is overcrowded. “My ride wasn’t as joyful as I had expected it to be,” said one resident who had an hour-long wait before boarding.
The politicians who buy these low-capacity trains–and there are lots of cities around the world buying them–just aren’t thinking things through. Or maybe, like an event planner who chooses a room that is slightly too small rather than one that is too big so the crowd makes the event appear to be more successful than it really is, the politicians are deliberately building low-capacity systems so they can claim success even though taxpayers are out huge amounts of money for projects that provide negligible transportation benefits.
The problem with monorail is capacity factor. They don’t have enough train cars and the cars are narrow and not that long. It’s a novel form of transportation best suited for amusement parks………whoops.
If you really want dedicated elevated transportation, you need a system with huge capacity like the Chicago “L” or the former trains that went over New York before the Subway. Vancouver operates the SkyTrain which has superior capacity than a monorail and carries 400,000 daily riders. Yes it does share a deficit on the Province. According to some reports SkyTrain has had a significant impact on the development of areas near stations, and has helped to shape urban density in Metro Vancouver. Between 1991 and 2001, the population living within 500 m of SkyTrain increased by 37 per cent, compared to the regional average of 24 per cent. Since SkyTrain opened, the total population of the service area rose from 400,000 to 1.3 million people. According to BC Transit’s document SkyTrain: A catalyst for development, more than $5 billion of private money had been invested within a 10–15 minute walking distance of the SkyTrain and SeaBus. The report claimed that the two modes of transportation were the driving force of the investment, though it did not disaggregate the general growth in that area. I’d like to see the Antiplanner debunk the credentials of this system.
“Even at crush capacity, the system can move only 7,400 people per hour.” In Mumbai, 7400 people is a rounding error at the local marketplace.
$2 billion. The guy who sold them this could sell refrigerators to penguins in Antarctica. Salesman of the year!
On the bright side, the monorail is air conditioned.
http://www.forumforthefuture.org/greenfutures/articles/ahmedabads-buses-envy-other-cities
Sleek new buses run at regular intervals down segregated tracks in the middle of the road, with regular ‘stations’ allowing passengers to step on and off on either side of the bus. Known as the Janmarg (‘Peoples Route’), this system also features dedicated lanes for pedestrians and bicycles. Janmarg currently has 45km of corridors criss-crossing the city, plying 83 buses that cater to nearly 135,000 passengers every day. It has resulted in a noticeable reduction in congestion and pollution, and unlike most public transit elsewhere in India, its success in slashing journey times has even attracted some business people out of their (chauffeured) cars. – See more at: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/greenfutures/articles/ahmedabads-buses-envy-other-cities#sthash.ipRGuwfD.dpuf
The guy who sold Mumbai the Monorail also sold it to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook.
These places have obviously never watched ‘The Simpsons’… “monorail, monorail, monorail…”
And the comment by LazyReader…
“The problem with monorail is capacity factor. They don’t have enough train cars and the cars are narrow and not that long. It’s a novel form of transportation best suited for amusement parks………whoops.”
… is a perfect description of Portland’s ‘MAX light rail, which most people refuse to use, that can’t run when the weather’s too cold or too hot (some call “The Goldilocks Train”), yet they keep building more lines at an absurdly expensive cost.
Last year the Minnesota Zoo closed it’s monorail. They built it in 1979 and it had reached the age where it didn’t make sense to keep repairing it. It also didn’t make sense to replace it.
http://www.startribune.com/local/south/227612061.html
Monorail is obsolete as any thing other than tourist attraction, as Seattle’s half-century old clunky system shows. At least that system is operated for tourists at by a private company at a potential (but small) profit.