Obsolete Technology Now Also Antique

Monorails have been the transportation of the future for more than two centuries, as a British engineer named Henry Robinson Palmer filed a patent for a monorail in 1821. A monorail was displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

Two forms of obsolete transportation in one photo: the Seattle monorail and Seattle streetcar. Photo by Oran Viriyincy.

The Wuppertal monorail was more than 60 years old when Seattle helds its Century 21 World’s Fair in 1962. But people still thought monorails were the transportation of the future, so one was built to connect downtown Seattle with the fair. Continue reading

A Stagecoach-Age Monorail for Los Angeles

Nearly a year ago, an Antiplanner policy brief made fun of the many science fiction stories that portrayed monorails as the transportation of the future. The Antiplanner pointed out that monorails date back to the nineteenth century and are an ugly, slow, and often noisy form of transit.

An artist’s impression of what a monorail over LA’s I-405 freeway would look like. Note that the image accurately shows that the monorail has failed to relieve congestion on the freeway. Image from LA Skyrail Express.

So naturally Los Angeles is planning a monorail, which Forbes magazine gushes is “space-age” travel. More like stagecoach-age travel, as a monorail was used at the 1876 American centennial celebration in Philadelphia. Continue reading

Throwing Good Money After Bad

Publicly funded transit projects are not the only ones that overestimate ridership and underestimate costs. The casinos that own the Las Vegas Monorail, which started operating in 2004 and went bankrupt in 2010, wants to borrow $110 million to extend the line about 0.8 miles. That’s a lot of money for a system that carries less than 13,000 riders per day.

Flickr photo by James Cridland.

These methods alleviate effects of erection problem by reducing the cheap viagra pfizer stress and anxiety level. This type of order cialis online is cheap because this kind of activation is done? As per the scientists, the telomerase activation can be effectively and successfully done with the help of medical and surgical techniques. The recommended dose is 20 mg taken 30 minutes before love making. cost of cialis Maintain a gap between two drugs intake, do not buying this cialis in india price consume it at a time. Serving the gaudy hotels on the Las Vegas Strip (which isn’t actually in Las Vegas), the existing monorail has been strategically positioned to give its patrons excellent views of parking lots, dumpsters, and service roads, which is one reason why it went bankrupt. It could increase patronage by going to the airport, but taxi and limo companies have lobbied hard against that (and even limos might be less expensive than unsubsidized rides on the monorail). Continue reading

Is There a Monorail in Your Future?

Asian-based writer Adam Minter has taken a hard look at China’s high-speed rail program and found it wanting. The country has built some 12,000 miles of high-speed rail lines, more than the rest of the world combined.

Despite China’s population density and low rate of auto ownership, only one line makes money. The state-owned China Railways Corporation is $600 billion in debt, and that debt is increasing by more than $60 billion per year. It has gotten to the point where the country is building rail mainly to stimulate the economy, not to improve transportation.

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Linking Users and Producers

After last week’s election, the Antiplanner failed to note that Seattle voted strongly against another monorail boondoggle. More than 80 percent of Seattle voters agreed this would be a waste of money.

At the same time, nearly 60 percent of Seattle voters agreed to increase subsidies to bus service by raising sales taxes and imposing a $60 a year fee on auto owners. According to census data, 21 percent of Seattle commuters take transit to work. It seems surprising that many if not most of the people who drive to work would be willing to tax themselves to support transit, especially since what they are really doing is supporting light rail, to which the Puget Sound Regional Council allocates all the big bucks while bus transit gets cut.

Texas voters agreed to dedicate half of oil & gas severance taxes to road construction and maintenance. This is expected to generate about $1.7 billion a year.

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Mono–Doh!

Loyal Antiplanner reader MSetty let me know about a Tennessee proposal to spend $200,000 studying the idea of building a monorail from Nashville to Murfreesboro. The irony is that the proposal comes from a tea party member of the state senate. Senator Bill Ketron is a social conservative, not a libertarian, but he should know better than to think that giving a government agency a bunch of money to do a study recommending whether to give that agency even more more money will lead to a reasonable outcome.

Take, for example, Florida’s Pinellas County transit authority, which has spent $800,000 on “public education” regarding a proposed $1.7 billion (but likely much more) light-rail line that will be on this November’s ballot. Critics question whether it is legal for the transit agency to use “taxpayer money to engage in political advocacy leading up to a referendum vote.” The agency, of course, says it isn’t advocating anything, just educating people.

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Another City Gets Conned into Building a Stupid Rail Line

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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A Lesson for California

Buyers of bonds for the Las Vegas monorail are suing Citibank for fraud. The buyers claim Citibank misled them by not revealing a report by faithful Antiplanner ally Wendell Cox questioning the ridership and cost projections made for the project. The lawsuit charges that Citibank knew that Cox’s report was “much more reliable” but concealed it from potential bond buyers.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority has made similarly rosy projections of rail ridership that it hopes to use to attract private investors. This is the reason for man to be sexually happy. prescription viagra prices This medicine is highly efficacious thus should be taken sildenafil online without prescription strictly as prescribed by a certified health professional. Do you know how detection is done for nephropathy? Detection of kidney diseases due to generic viagra discount unclean sex life, such as “ladies, sexually transmitted diseases, malignant tumors, kidney or liver dysfunctions and cardiovascular issues make administration of this product impossible. So, it is very much effective and completely secure for the human body. cheap cialis soft Those projections have also been criticized in a report co-authored by Cox. In the unlikely event that the authority does manage to attract some private investors in its rail project, it had better make Cox’s report available to them or it is liable to find itself subject to a similar lawsuit.